Energy for a New Century.

• Author: Flavin, Christopher
• Position: Brief Article

The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil.

Don Huberts, Shell Hydrogen

(Division of Royal Dutch Shell)

The age of oil has so dominated social and economic trends for the last 100 years that most of us have a hard time imagining a world without it. Oil is cheap, abundant, and convenient--easy to carry halfway around the world in a supertanker or across town in the tank of a family sport utility vehicle. From Joe Sixpack to the PhD energy economists employed by governments and corporations, we tend to assume that we will burn fossil fuels until they're gone, and that the eventual transition will be painful and expensive.

But if you turn the problem around, our current energy situation looks rather different: from an ecological perspective, continuing to depend on fossil fuels for even another 50 years--let alone the century or two it might take to use them up--is preposterous. As the new century begins, the world's 6 billion people already live with the dark legacy of the heavily polluting energy system that powered the last century. It is a legacy that includes impoverished lakes and estuaries, degraded forests, and millions of damaged human lungs.

Fossil-fuel combustion is at the same time adding billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, an inexorable escalation that must end soon if we are not to disrupt virtually every ecosystem and economy on the planet.

An energy transition in the new century is therefore ecologically necessary, but it is also economically logical. The same technological revolution that has created the Internet and so many other 21st century wonders can be used to efficiently harness and store the world's vast supplies of wind, biomass, and other forms of solar energy--which is 6,000 times as abundant on an annual basis as the fuels we now use. A series of revolutionary technologies, including solar cells, wind turbines, and fuel cells can turn the enormously abundant but diffuse flows of renewable energy into concentrated electricity and hydrogen that can be used to power factories, homes, automobiles, and aircraft.

These new energy conversion devices occupy about the same position in the economy today that the internal combustion engine and electromagnetic generator held in the 1890s. The key enabling technologies have already been developed and commercialized, but they only occupy small niche markets--and their potential...