Panel sizes up the future for fossil fuels and renewables.

• Author: Best, Allen
• Position: ENERGY

For giddy-up and go, fossil fuels can't be beat. "Sweet perfume," energy analyst Randy Udall called them at a recent panel discussion hosted by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

But replace them we must, or at least sequester their carbon, if we are to slow or even reverse the accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gases that have doubled in the last 30 years.

By its nature a global story, it's also a very local story. "This state is on the edge like no place else," said Tim Wirth, a former U.S. senator from Colorado who now heads media mogul Ted Turner's U.N. Foundation.

Taking a long, long view, historian Patty Limerick pointed out how recently human civilization has benefited from fossil fuels. "We didn't inherit them from the Egyptians and the Pharaohs," she said.

Yet they have improved our lives immeasurably. She pointed out city streets before cars brimmed with manure and too-often dead animals. Only since World War II have we used fossil fuels frivolously, she said, pointing to leaf blowers and treadmills as the devices she finds most preposterous.

The answer? The Worldwatch Institute's Christopher Flavin warned against expecting that a "single technological solution delivered on a platter will answer all our problems." Nuclear energy, said Udall, will be "staggeringly expensive," although he advocates building a few to "see what they cost." Wirth expects natural gas will do the heavy lifting until at least the mid-century.

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