8 - Energy, Emissions, and Action

Summary

Setting the Stage

This chapter moves our discussion to how to reduce the effect of the energy we use on our environment. The amount of energy we use is so large that it is hard to get a feel for its size. I start with comparing the total primary energy supply (TPES) to natural phenomena that we could possibly use to supply the world’s energy needs. The TPES from all sources amounted to a yearly average power of 14 terawatts in 2006 [15] (a terawatt is one billion kilowatts), a number that is too big to mean much to most people. It is the energy used to light all the world’s light bulbs; run all the world’s cars, trucks, buses, trains, airplanes, and ships; produce all the steel, cement, aluminum, and other metals; run our farms; produce all our computers; and everything else that we make or use. It also keeps going up and was 17.5 terawatts in 2011.

In my time as a working physicist I did experiments involving subnuclear processes and processes that were related to the scale of our cosmos; from a billionth of a billionth of a meter to 14 billion light years. Those numbers mean something to me mathematically, but are not easy to visualize. So it is with the TPES. It is hard to understand what 25 trillion barrels of oil per year really is (it would cover the entire United States with oil one foot deep), or what many billion tons of coal is (six billion tons would give every man, woman, and child on Earth 2000 pounds of it), or what trillions of cubic meters of natural gas is (6 trillion cubic meters of gas would give each person 100 000 party balloons full of gas). Table 8.1 above is a comparison of what we use now to all the world’s natural phenomena that can be used to generate energy. The table is for today, but the projection for increased energy demand is that the TPES demand will increase by four times by the end of this century while, of course, the natural sources remain the same. As our demand goes up, the natural sources available seem to get smaller relative to what we will need.