Imagine

by Thomas Starrs

Imagine the United States a century from now, as a society that produces virtually all of its energy from clean, domestic, renewable energy sources. What does it look like, and how is it different from the one we live in today?

In 2106, there are those who bemoan the loss of cheap oil, who long for the days when a gallon of gasoline cost less than a gallon of milk. But access to cheap oil came at a steep price: the price of dependence on countries that were politically unreliable and economically unstable; the price of climate disruption and its economic and environmental costs; perhaps even the price of our principles, as we spoke of promoting democracy while propping up tyrannical monarchies and other oppressive regimes.

For those of us with no stake in a continued reliance on fossil fuels, however, the 22nd century holds enormous promise for world economies, national security and the personal health and economic well-being of our children and children?s children.

The stark contrast between this new century and the last is apparent in many aspects of our lives.

Exchanging Resource Conflicts for Security, Jobs & Health

It is more economically stable. The incredible volatility associated with the Oil Era – particularly with its waning years – is now a thing of the past. Energy prices are predictable and stable, because energy is derived from the natural flows of the sun, wind and rain. Even transportation – the sector of the economy that found it hardest to wean itself from the petroleum diet – has made the transition. Pedestrian-friendly cities and economies built around locally produced products have drastically reduced reliance on transportation, but what public transportation and shipping fleets remain are powered by liquid fuels derived from dedicated biomass feedstocks and by hydrogen derived from renewable electricity.

It is more secure. The stranglehold that the Middle East and former Soviet states had on the industrial economies of the world during the late 20th and early 21st century is broken. The dramatic growth in energy efficiency and renewable energy that started in the late 20th century was sustained for decades. The countries that had been highly dependent on oil and gas imports – including the United States, the European Union and much of Asia – can promote political ideals without the hypocrisy of having to prop up tyrannical, antidemocratic governments simply because they controlled access to strategic energy resources.

For the world’s military powers, it has meant huge reductions in spending, as the Oil Wars of the early 21st century gave way to the peaceful and profitable transfer of new energy technologies. Progress toward demilitarization was threatened briefly by proposals to increase reliance on nuclear energy, but the inherent risk of nuclear weapons proliferation resulted in the adoption of a global ban on nuclear power by mid-century. In short, conflict has given way to collaboration and competition, and the big winners are the countries that focused on research, innovation and manufacturing to support the new energy paradigm.

It is more democratic and egalitarian. The means of production for this new, sustainable energy era are quite evenly distributed across the world, both in terms of available resources and the technologies used to harness those resources. Of course, some of the world’s renewable resources are geographically concentrated, such as geothermal energy reserves around the Pacific Rim’s Ring of Fire. But others are virtually ubiquitous – particularly solar energy, which is dispersed with cosmological consistency across the earth’s surface.

The universal availability and affordability of renewable energy resources has brought greater economic parity within and among societies, drastically reducing world poverty and hunger. Solar water pumping and solar-powered disinfection alone have added substantially to life expectancies in what had been called the developing world; and universal access to cyberspace – the distributed information and communication networks that superseded the Internet – has eliminated disparities in access to education, research and other knowledge.

The big change in the new century, however, is that the U.S. and other governments have developed trade alliances based on the transfer of energy technologies used to harness local energy resources, rather than the shipment of the resources themselves, as was the nearly universal practice during the Oil Era. Instead of importing oil, countries now import the blueprints for improved photovoltaic manufacturing facilities or design specifications for a wind turbine blade that is optimized for local wind conditions. One implication of this profound shift: The manufacturing of the equipment and the deployment of the products uses much more local labor than the import of energy commodities every did.

It is more affluent. The nations that were largely dependent on oil imports have stopped hemorrhaging money overseas. The U.S. alone was spending about a quarter of a trillion dollars abroad every year to pay for oil imports in the early 21st century. Now those dollars stay at home and get recirculated in the national economy. And because the energy economy is nowtied to locally available renewable resources, jobs in those industries are hard to outsource. The agricultural sector has been rejuvenated, with farming communities busily tending to rows of wind turbines as well as rows of corn.

It is cleaner, healthier and more environmentally benign. In the prior century, electricity generation was the world’s largest source of industrial pollution. Now, most electricity generation is emissions-free. The remainder, based on biofuels, uses advanced catalytic controls to eliminate virtually all pollutants and requires reforestation or replanting to ensure carbon-neutrality. The building sector’s heating and cooling loads have been radically reduced through improvements in design, materials and orientation. Homes use virtually no external energy, since on-site solar energy supplies all necessary daylighting, hot water, space heating and electricity. Even the transportation sector has virtually eliminated air pollution, through the shift to biofuels and hydrogen. The retirement of most hydrocarbon technologies stabilized the level of carbon dioxide, one of the principal greenhouse gases, by mid-century. The level has been dropping slowly in the decades since.

The health benefits of this transition have astonished the medical community, as the incidence of respiratory diseases such as asthma and emphysema has plummeted. The term “smog” has become archaic, since the air quality in most cities rivals that of the surrounding countryside. And speaking of countryside, forest and stream health has improved, and wildlife populations are rebounding from early-century lows.

Transitioning from Ruin to Renaissance

Perhaps this description makes the 22nd century seem idyllic and utopian. But some harsh realities underlie this transition.

First of all, the intervening years – during which the transition was made – were painful, even devastating. Global warming’s early victims included the low-lying Pacific Island nations and the Florida Keys, both of which were inundated by mid-century as rising sea levels took their toll. The Floridians lost their homes; the Pacific Islanders lost their countries. The U.S., last among the industrialized countries to abandon the Oil Era, paid the price for having the most energy-intensive economy among countries in the Organization for Econonic Cooperation and Development: Its economy shudder
ed, and nearly collapsed, as rising energy prices made its products uncompetitive and obsolete, since global markets reward the countries that had made the transition early, squeezing the most out of each unit of energy they used. And then there were the Oil Wars …

Second, although the transition to renewable fuels has been completed and energy is abundant, some fuels are much more expensive. The effect on communities and commerce has been dramatic. Cities have reorganized around their urban centers, with dense communities surrounded by greenbelts used for agricultural production. Suburbs, which lost their attraction as the cost of commuting skyrocketed, have become the new slums. Air travel is expensive and exotic, available only to the most affluent. The result is that families tend to be less mobile, and businesses focus on relationships with materials suppliers and customers closer to home. At the same time, communications networks have expanded, further enabling the flow of information globally, even as the flow of people and materials has slowed.

This communications revolution has reinforced perhaps the most fundamental shift in the global economy, which is that the greater exchange of information and ideas more than offsets the reductions in exchange of resources and materials. No longer is it common for goods manufactured in China to be sold in the U.S., but ideas and technologies developed in China are marketed to the U.S. – and visa versa. The result is a renaissance of ideas, with global affluence rooted in entrepreneurship and innovation, rather than in the ownership and control of natural resources. With this renaissance has come world peace and prosperity, based on equitable resource allocation, abundant supplies of food and water, and record improvements in health and mortality.

This new paradigm has also revitalized the U.S. economy, which lagged behind the rest of the industrialized world in weaning itself from fossil fuel resources, but which rose like the Phoenix from the ashes of the Oil Era and emerged as a leading global innovator and developer of new energy technologies and systems. For 22nd century Americans, life has never been better or more hopeful.

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Tom Starrs is the immediate past chair of the American Solar Energy Society board and is vice president for marketing and sales at the Bonneville Environmental Foundation.
Contact him: tomstarrs@b-e-f.org

FROM Solar Today, a SustainableBusiness.com Content Partner.