I had a half-hour phone call recently with a very interesting man, a former oil and nuclear control systems engineer who had gone green not only in his engineering work but in his personal life, even designing and helping to build his own Passive House on a challenging, steeply sloped parcel here in Massachusetts. Like all Passive House buildings, his home puts more electricity into the grid than it uses. And because much of the land is forested, it stores more carbon than his family releases in all their activities. He has a much lower carbon footprint than I do, and mine—heating our house and hot water with recaptured heat from a methane digester, lighting mostly with super-efficient LEDs and a few CFLs (no energy-hogging, carbon-emitting incandescents), returning nutrients to the soil with our organic garden, reusing, recycling or composting everything practical, etc.—is better than most.
Listening to him, I had an insight: I realized that many people see the use of fossil and nuclear as ends, rather than means. With that mindset, many people in the business world are asking “how do we possibly keep our high standard of living (and our profits) if we don’t burn fossil fuels or process uranium?” But when we recognize that those power sources are means to a larger end, those turn out to be the wrong questions.
I’ve talked for years about money not as an end in itself, but as a means to other ends: the things it can be traded for: goods, services, social impact, environmental mitigation…why not view our fuel sources through that lens?
In other words, let’s look at those polluting technologies as merely one route among many to powering our buildings, vehicles, and machines and building/maintaining our infrastructure projects. Once we do, we open ourselves up to a much better question: “What’s the best way to meet the power needs of our society, with both the most bang for the buck and the most positive impacts on job creation, poverty elimination, achievement of equity, and protecting the environment and our health?”
The strengths of coal, oil, and gas derive from energy density: these compact, energy-dense fuels are easy to store, transport, and use. And through a lens of short-term corporate profit, they have the added advantage of being consumable: people, companies, and organizations have to keep buying them over and over again—just as Gillette made its real profits not on the razors themselves, but on the disposable blades. But these come with enormous social and environmental cost, leading to pollution- and workplace-safety related health crises, growing economic disparity, and of course, global catastrophic climate change.
Nuclear does not share the fossil-fuel advantages of compactness and ease of deployment in small quantities; while atoms are tiny, the facilities needed to harness them are not. Its apparent main advantages are elimination of dependence on foreign petroleum reserves and ability to produce large quantities of stable electricity without adding to the carbon footprint—but these turn out to be chimeras when we look closely at the entire fuel cycle, with its eco-destructive mining, milling, refining, fuel rod assembly, and plant construction; its inability to safely store waste; thermal pollution and radioactive discharges from operating plants; and many other issues—including the all-to-real experience of more than 100 catastrophic (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and near-catastrophic (Three Mile Island, Enrico Fermi, Browns Ferry, at least one earlier Fukushima incident, and many more) accidents (Note that this article lists 99 through 2009—before the 2011 disasters in Japan).
By phrasing the question like that, we see clearly that fossil and nuclear are not good answers—but that there’s quite a bit of work to do before green energy technologies can address those needs of storage, transportation, and compact, energy-dense deployment.
But when we take this holistic deep-dive, we also discover the BEST thing we can do to address our dependence on fossil and nuclear: doing more with what we have! Efficiency and conservation, reimagined holistically, can probably save at least 60 and maybe 90 percent of our energy, just by wasting a whole lot less. As one example, consider the Deep Energy Retrofit that saved the Empire State Building $3.4 MM per year with a three-year payback–and that was when fossil energy prices were much lower. It’s probably at least $5 MM per year right now.
Side Note: He called me because I’d left a voicemail inquiring about his upcoming conference, where I thought I might be a fit as a speaker. That turns out not to be a fit, but we’re talking about at least doing a webinar, and possibly even collaborating on some new directions in consulting that could combine our skills. Which proves another of my truisms: new challenges and opportunities can arise from unexpected places.
