Saturday, June 05, 2004
AN "ENERGY MANHATTAN PROJECT" and the CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Back on May 1st, I wrote:
We've got years, perhaps decades, of violent conflict with the Islamic world ahead of us. Sooner or later we'll have to realize that the only thing that is making this necessary is our dependence on oil from the Middle East. The culture that is attempting to destroy us is on artificial life support through the money pumped into the Middle East for oil. If that stopped, our enemy would wither and die, or change.
I'll say it as clearly as I can: If we're at war -- and we are -- where is the "Manhattan Project"? Where are our leaders? Why isn't developing technologies that will free us from dependence on oil our number one priority as a civilization?
Steven Den Beste responded. First, he says:
To begin with, I don't think that this war was caused by our use of Arab petroleum. It would have happened eventually anyway.
I agree that there would have been conflict, but it would not have been so threatening to us in the modern world, because the Islamic fundamentalists would have had far less capability to harm us if we had not been pumping trillions of dollars into their otherwise worthless economies over the last few decades. Other than oil, the Arab world produces nothing of value for the rest of the world. But for oil, it would be poorer than sub-Saharan Africa. If we had realized what the oil embargoes of the 1970s really portended, and had become less dependent on Arab oil in the intervening decades, there would have been no Bin Laden family fortune for Osama to use as the seed money for Al Qaida. There would have been no Saudi royal wealth to finance the spread of Wahabism over the last 25 years. And when the conflict came, we would have been able to act in the ways we needed to without Europe cowering in fear that their lights will go off.
Den Beste then goes on to write about and point to other articles he’s written about why my suggestion of a "Manhattan Project" for energy independence is foolish. First, Den Beste made some assumptions – understandable given the historical analogy of the atomic bomb project I used – about what I meant. To be clear, I don’t think any one revolutionary new technology is likely to provide the solution to dependence on Arab oil in the near term. It’s possible, but not probable. (Here I disagree with Den Beste, who seems to think that revolutionary energy technologies aren’t even possible.)
Second, reading all the links De Beste provides to his previous writing about energy technology makes me think of Clarke’s First Law:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I’m not an engineer, but I play one in the courtroom. Seriously, I’ve spent a lot of time around scientists and engineers (admittedly, many of whom are willing to go out on a limb sometimes), and I find Den Beste’s attitude here to be insupportably conservative.
A couple of specific technical points. Den Beste’s treatment of solar energy deals almost entirely with solar-thermal energy, generated centrally and then stored and transmitted in very traditional ways. I think this is attacking a straw man in a number of ways. First, I have high confidence that photovoltaic technology will continue to advance at a high rate, since it is ultimately based on solid-state electronics and we have every reason to believe that enormous strides will be made in nanometer-scale solid-state electronics in the next twenty years even without a major input of new research funds. Second, Den Beste’s stress on transmission and voltage- and phase-change losses is valid only if we continue to depend entirely on our current architecture of energy generation and distribution. Such criticisms remind me of the kinds of things people said about computers before the PC and Internet revolutions. Finally, a lot of technical improvement in energy storage technology is possible well within the bounds of what we now know in terms of physics, chemistry and engineering. Batteries will get better, and flywheel storage is a frontier that is only now being investigated. When you combine these points, solar power has a much brighter future than Den Beste allows.
Some of Den Beste’s other criticisms smell of the straw man. He’s right that geothermal energy isn’t feasible for much of the world without major advances in drilling technology. But so what? It’s only one possible source. He writes off nuclear energy as politically infeasible. But politics can change; that’s what I’m suggesting that real political leadership should be aiming at. The irrational rejection of fission nuclear energy is a cultural and political problem; just what we’re facing in our conflict with the Islamic world. And yes, the horizon for fusion power seems to recede forever, but then we’ve been pursuing just a few avenues in that direction for 30 years. Real leadership would press the scientific and engineering worlds for new, more creative thinking that just might yield results. Folding our arms and harrumphing that it’s a pipe dream won’t get us anywhere.
Den Beste doesn’t even address the potential of ocean thermal gradient (OTG) electrical generation, something that we know can work but, yes, would require some large capital inputs. The technology is available and doesn’t require any "magic physics." Nothing more than new applications of the kinds of technology used in semi-submersible deep-water oil drilling would suffice to build OTG plants, and most of the human race lives near the ocean, so transmission losses can be tolerated, especially for a generation technology that literally requires no fuel at all.
Beyond this, I think Den Beste dismisses the possibility of fuel cell powered electric cars far too quickly. Yes, this is a technology that still need a lot of work, but it can be adapted without a huge change in infrastructure if the metallic-bound hydrogen storage technologies being developed now pan out. Whether they will or not is something we’ll only know if we try.
Now, I confess that all of this may sound strange coming from a minarchist libertarian such as myself. Den Beste’s best point is that none of the technological alternatives make economic sense under current market conditions. But this is so only because the Arabs don’t play by the rules of the modern, capitalist world. They use their oil as a weapon and the profits from it for criminal enterprises. In such circumstances, I believe state action is justified and, given the scale of the threat to our civilization, justified on a large scale.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:24 AM
