’Out of Gas’: They’re Not Making More - NYT 2/8/04

[Guest guest]

Okay folks -- Krsna is giving us a chance to tell people about the important

role of ox power in the years to come.

 

I'm always amazed to read an article like this and see how it fails to deal

with agriculture and shipping -- two things which can be done by oxen.

 

These are also two things that are hard to do without fossil fuel.

 

Nuclear power can create electricity and heat your house. It can even be used

with fuel cells to run light-weight vehicles like passenger cars.

 

But can it be used for heavy vehicles like semi-trucks and tractors? Even if

it can, would it be cheap enough to be feasible economically?

 

There are a lot of important questions about energy in the second half of the

21st century which have not yet been asked by mainstream media.

 

Here's your chance. I encourage everyone who wants to to write a letter to the

New York Times editor on this topic:

 

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publications. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters.

 

Letters for publication should be no longer than 150 words, must refer

to an article that has appeared within the last seven days, and must

include the writer's address and phone numbers. No attachments, please.

 

We regret we cannot return or acknowledge unpublished letters. Writers

of those letters selected for publication will be notified within a

week. Letters may be shortened for space requirements.

 

Send a letter to the editor by e-mailing letters (AT) nytimes (DOT) com

<letters (AT) nytimes (DOT) com> or faxing (212)556-3622.

 

You may also send your letter to:

 

Letters to the Editor

The New York Times

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The Times gets thousands of letters, so there is not much chance of being

published.

 

But possibly if all of us write, from addresses around the world -- they may

choose one letter and publish it.

 

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In addition don't forget your home newsletter.

You can mention this article to call attention to the importance of ox power in

your home temple newsletter.

For your home newsletter you might want to include a link to Gopal prabhu's

article on Chakra or Dipika.

http://www.chakra.org/living/simpFeb02_04.html

 

Anyway -- here's the NYT article about David Goodstein's book "Out of Gas."

 

ys

 

hkdd

 

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’Out of Gas’: They’re Not Making More

 

February 8, 2004

By PAUL RAEBURN

 

 

If all you knew about David Goodstein was the title of his

book, you might imagine him to be one of those insufferably

enthusiastic prophets of doom, the flannel-shirted,

off-the-grid types who take too much pleasure in letting us

know that the environment is crumbling all around us. But

Goodstein, a physicist, vice provost of the California

Institute of Technology and an advocate of nuclear power,

is no muddled idealist. And his argument is based on the

immutable laws of physics.

 

 

The age of oil is ending, he says. The supply will soon

begin to decline, precipitating a global crisis. Even if we

substitute coal and natural gas for some of the oil, we

will start to run out of fossil fuels by the end of the

century. ''And by the time we have burned up all that

fuel,'' he writes, ''we may well have rendered the planet

unfit for human life. Even if human life does go on,

civilization as we know it will not survive.''

 

 

He's talking about 100 years from now, far enough in the

future, you might say, that we needn't worry for

generations. Surely some technological fix will be in place

by then, some new source of energy, some breakthrough. But

with a little luck, many readers of these pages will live

until 2030 or 2040, or longer. Their children may live

until 2070 or 2080, and their grandchildren will easily

survive into the 22nd century. We're talking about a time

in the lives of our grandchildren, not some warp drive,

Star Trek future.

 

 

And what about that technological fix? ''There is no single

magic bullet that will solve all our energy problems,''

Goodstein writes. ''Most likely, progress will lie in

incremental advances on many simultaneous fronts.'' We

might finally learn to harness nuclear fusion, the energy

that powers the sun, or to develop better nuclear reactors,

or to improve the efficiency of the power grid. But those

advances will require a ''massive, focused commitment to

scientific and technological research. That is a commitment

we have not yet made.'' Drilling in the Alaska National

Wildlife Refuge, and scouring the energy resources of

national lands across the West might help the constituents

of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Vice President Dick

Cheney's friends in the energy industry, but it won't solve

the problem.

 

 

Goodstein's predictions are based on a sophisticated

understanding of physics and thermodynamics, and on a

simple observation about natural resources. The supply of

any natural resource follows a bell curve, increasing

rapidly at first, then more slowly, eventually peaking and

beginning to decline. Oil will, too.

 

 

It has already happened in the United States. In 1956,

Marion King Hubbert, a geophysicist with the Shell Oil

Company, predicted that oil production in the United States

would peak sometime around 1970. His superiors at Shell

dismissed the prediction, as did most others in the oil

business. But he was right. Hubbert's peak occurred within

a few years of when he said it would, and American oil

production has been declining ever since. There was no

crisis, because this country tapped the world's reserves,

and the supply increased along with demand.

 

 

Now Goodstein and many others have shown that the same

methods, when applied to global oil production and

resources, predict a Hubbert's peak in world oil supplies

within this decade, or, in the best-case scenarios,

sometime in the next. Once that happens, the world supply

of oil will begin to decline gradually, even though large

quantities of oil will remain in the ground. The world

demand for oil will continue to increase. The gap between

supply and demand will grow. But this time the gap will be

real; there will be no other source of oil (from the moon,

Neptune or Pluto?) to flow into the system.

 

 

When the supply falls and the demand rises, the price will

go up. That's no problem, economists say. With the high

price, companies will go after more costly oil, and the

market will take care of things.

 

 

Maybe not, Goodstein replies. ''In an orderly, rational

world, it might be possible for the gradually increasing

gap between supply and demand for oil to be filled by some

substitute. But anyone who remembers the oil crisis of 1973

knows that we don't live in such a world, especially when

it comes to an irreversible shortage of oil.''

 

 

In the best-case scenario, he writes, we can squeak through

a bumpy transition to a natural-gas economy while nuclear

power plants are built to get us past the oil crisis. In

the worst case, ''runaway inflation and worldwide

depression leave many billions of people with no

alternative but to burn coal in vast quantities for warmth,

cooking and primitive industry.''

 

 

President Bush has pointed to hydrogen as the ultimate

answer to our need for transportation fuels, but Goodstein

correctly points out that hydrogen is not a source of

energy. It is a fuel produced by using energy. We can use

coal to produce it, or solar power, or something else, but

it is only a way of converting energy into a form that can

be used in vehicles; it doesn't do anything to ease the

transition away from oil.

 

 

''Out of Gas'' -- a book that is more powerful for being

brief -- takes a detour to explain some of the basics of

energy budgets, thermodynamics and entropy, and it does so

with the clarity and gentle touch of a master teacher.

 

 

Then Goodstein gets back on message. Even nuclear power is

only a short-term solution. Uranium, too, has a Hubbert's

peak, and the current known reserves can supply the earth's

energy needs for only 25 years at best. There are other

nuclear fuels, and solar and wind power might help at the

fringes. But ''the best, most conservative bet for

ameliorating the coming fuel crisis is the gradual

improvement of existing technologies,'' he writes. We can

improve the efficiency of lights, tap solar power with

cheap photoelectric cells and turn to nuclear power. The

problem is that we have not made a national or global

commitment to do so. ''Unfortunately, our present national

and international leadership is reluctant even to

acknowledge that there is a problem. The crisis will occur,

and it will be painful.''

 

 

I hope Goodstein is wrong. I wish we could dismiss him as

an addled environmentalist, too much in love with his

windmill to know which way the wind is blowing. On the

strength of the evidence, and his argument, however, we

can't. If he's right, I'm sorry for my kids. And I'm

especially sorry for theirs.

 

 

 

 

Paul Raeburn's next book, ''Acquainted With the Night,'' a

memoir of his children's experiences with depression and

bipolar disorder, will be published in May.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/books/review/08RAEBURT.html?ex=1077274708&ei=

1&en=d560fbe9b64b51d7