Let them eat official optimism

"Power Hungry" by Robert Bryce is an updated and popularized sequel to his earlier book "Gusher of lies". The book is an extended polemic against alternative energy proposals. I was somewhat shocked reading it. After all, "everyone" claims that fossil fuels (or at least oil and coal) and nuclear power can be swiftly replaced by solar, wind and biofuels. In the author's opinion, this is nothing but a myth.

Bryce points out that fossil fuels in general and oil in particular are more efficient than "alternative" sources of power. He also believes that world reserves of fossil fuels are still relatively abundant, and that consumption of oil, gas and coal will increase no matter whether we like it or not - especially in the developing countries. There's an exact correlation between a high standard of living and high energy use. It's not very likely that China, India and other large, developing nations will give up their attempts to attain a Western standard of living. But even if all nations would suddenly decide to abolish dependency on fossil fuels, it would take between 30 and 50 years to revamp the entire energy infrastructure. "Energy transitions" have always been slow, protracted affairs, and there's no reason to believe that the current one will be any different.

Bryce takes no position on climate change. Even if climate change is real, there simply isn't anything we can do to stop it within the next decades. Instead, the world community should adapt to climate change if and when it happens, for instance by providing funding to the nations hardest hit by it.

The most interesting part of "Power hungry" debunks various "green" fuels. Ethanol and other biofuels may be feasible in a purely technical sense, but their power density is smaller than that of oil, and it takes vast amounts of arable land to grow the corn and other plants from which ethanol is produced. This would lead to a sharp increase in food prices, something which would threaten the poorest people in the Third World with starvation. Solar and wind are hardly even technologically feasible. Since they are intermittent, power grids dependent on solar or wind need back up from other power sources (read: coal, hydro or nuclear) in order to assure a steady, cheap delivery of electricity.

Some facts mentioned by the author are almost fascinating. Thus, it turns out that wind power plants have a special kind of components made of neodymium, a very rare metal. China has a virtual monopoly on neodymium, so even if the United States would replace all of its oil with wind, there would be no "energy independence". The Chinese would control the U.S. energy supplies through their neodymium monopoly. Bryce also points out, somewhat sarcastically, that wind power plants kill a lot of birds, including Golden Eagles and Bald Eagles, and that some environmentalist groups actually *oppose* them for this reason. The idea of "green" wind power plants massacring the U.S. national symbol is, I suppose, richly ironic. Our author has even managed to find an obscure group called Bat Conservation International, which has sued a wind project in West Virginia, fearing that it might endanger the Indiana bat (a federally protected species).

It's obvious that "Power hungry" is to a large extent based on Vaclav Smil's books. In contrast to Smil, however, Bryce actually presents an alternative: N2N, Natural Gas-to-Nuclear. Over the next 30 to 50 years, coal and oil should be gradually phased out, and replaced by natural gas and nuclear power. Bryce claims that the reserves of natural gas are enormous, and that their greenhouse emissions are substantially lower than other fossil fuels.

While claiming to be an independent centrist, the author is at bottom a "conservative" free marketeer. Above all, he is an "official optimist". I'm more pessimistic. Bryce and Smil have convinced me that alternative sources of energy really can't replace oil, gas and nuclear power. However, I'm not convinced that the remaining reserves of fossil fuels (or uranium) are really as large as the author suggests. His agnosticism on climate change is even less convincing. Ironically, "Power Hungry" made me more pessimistic: if fossil fuels have to be phased out (and will become less abundant anyway), while no alternatives exist, the bottom line is global economic decline.

This book does debunk the visions of the more idealist strands of the environmentalist movement, but the author's official optimism is no real solution either. It seems we will stay hungry for a very long time...