Monuments to Unsustainability -- An ENN Commentary

Typography
My 13-year old son is fascinated with muscle cars. He subscribes to one of those magazines that give him all he wants to know about horsepower-to-weight ratio and how fast the model in question can get from zero to 60.

My 13-year old son is fascinated with muscle cars. He subscribes to one of those magazines that give him all he wants to know about horsepower-to-weight ratio and how fast the model in question can get from zero to 60. At his request, I took him to the auto show in New York City. The Javits Center and its displays were dazzling. The biggest crowds gathered shoulder to shoulder and five deep around the Corvettes, Ferraris, Vipers and Maybachs hyped by glamour girls and smooth talking pitch men beneath the spotlights. What interested me most were the hybrids, a Honda Civic powered by compressed natural gas, and the only hydrogen powered car -- a Honda-- out of the hundreds of vehicles displayed. Around these were just a few people like myself who were just plain curious, or saw them for the future that they will be if individualized transportation on four wheels is to remain a part of the technosphere we hope to sustain.


The auto show was a testament to state of the art automotive engineering and design, in effect, a marvel of applied science. The latest safety features, styling, navigational and communications systems were all there. All I could think of as I meandered amongst the ever expanding array of gas guzzlers was where on earth will the fuel come from to propel the vast fleets represented there. I wondered about the fate of air and water quality from the additional loading of oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, or the consequences of global climate change from the added carbon dioxide. I wondered what future battles would be waged over petroleum reserves in the fast approaching age of a declining peak of world supply. I wondered about the logic of such an enterprise as the car show and whether most of the people assembled there and at other such car shows around the nation were merely inhabitants in one collective state of denial.


I tried to reason with my son. Maybe he could still have his muscle car and propel it with hydrogen. After all, except for the minute emissions from lubricants, an internal (infernal?) combustion engine powered by hydrogen would expel only water vapor in its exhausts. I told my son that with existing, off-the-shelf technologies operating at only 10% efficiency covering only 5% of the land mass of Arizona, enough electricity could be generated to provide for the country’s entire grid-connected electrical demand. “Can you imagine what we could do,” I asked, “if we covered every roof top and parking lot in the country with existing photovoltaic arrays?” He asked, “what about the night time, Dad?” I explained that that’s where the tens of thousands of wind farms across the land would come into play. We would have a surplus of power that could be used for generating hydrogen to power our cars. We would clean up the environment and with all the money we’d save from avoided oil imports we could put our own people to work in sustainable jobs in a more equitable economy.


As I watched my son looking off in the distance contemplating the scenario I had just described, I held back on all the forces that would move heaven and earth to prevent this. The lords of big oil, coal and nuclear power will not sit idly by and let renewable energy dominate if they can help it, even though renewables would ultimately dominate if we were to let market forces truly determine the outcome. Still, I wanted my son to be busy building a future he could live in while disenthralling him of the monument to unsustainability we had just spent twelve bucks each to glimpse.


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James Quigley, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Sustainable Energy.


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Source: An ENN Commentary