Find appropriate standards for energy and materials

In the past, when crude oil cost less than $20 per barrel, engineers and industrialists considered energy costs trivial in their calculations. They gave not a second thought to trucking raw materials hundreds of miles to a central processing plant and shipping products hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to customers. If a process required heat, no one questioned burning coal, natural gas, or petroleum products to provide the heat at a reasonable cost. Fossil fuels provided a universal feedstock to the petrochemical industry. With oil or gas they could produce a synthetic substitute for practically any compound found in nature – and quite a few not found in nature.

With the advent of crude oil over $100 per barrel, natural gas over $10 per million Btu, and a world wide shortage of drilling equipment, the era of cheap energy has ended. Every industrial process that requires energy inputs will require a net energy cost-benefit analysis. If it takes a barrel of oil equivalent to produce a barrel of oil equivalent, it makes no sense to proceed with that process. Our mainstream media have finally begun to sensitize the public to the dangers of climate change. The media have not so conscientiously educated the public about the specter of peak oil, peak gas, and the market failures of the energy sector in general. The carbon cycle has begun to impinge on our planetary climate system. The diminishing supplies of fossil fuels have consequently begun to impinge on the global economy.

If the production of a solar panel consumes more kWh of energy equivalent than one can reasonably expect that solar panel to produce in its useful life, it might not make sense to produce it in the first place. I say “might not” because the solar panel might fulfill an important role in a larger process. If the solar panel can produce a temporary benefit, it might serve as a bridge to a beneficial future circumstance. Today’s technology will probably seem crude in 50 years, but we cannot achieve tomorrow’s technological sophistication without today’s trials, errors, and scientific analyses. Today’s engineers, analyzing today’s processes will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s engineers and their breakthrough discoveries.

In the meantime, we must devote significant resources to analyzing the costs and benefits of myriad numbers of processes and products. We must learn to mimic nature, eliminate waste, and close the loops on material cycling. William McDonough & Michael Braungart feature this concept in their work, “Cradle to Cradle/ remaking the way we make things.” If urban life produces sewage sludge, it makes sense to transform that waste stream into agricultural nutrients and irrigation water that can fertilize crops to feed the people in the city that produced the sewage.

If a stream of materials – say wood chips – can become any of several things: paper, wafer board, fuel, mulch, etc., we need to know which of those uses makes the most economic sense. In a resource-constrained world, the margins for error grow ever narrower. The analysis might need to consider the time interval those wood chips would remain tied up in the next product before they could become something else. If a power plant burns the wood chips to boil water to generate electricity, what happens to the ash? Will the efficiency of the power plant guarantee that it extracts every possible calorie from those wood chips? If a paper mill uses those chips to make newspaper, books, or pasteboard boxes, can the black liquor, effluent, and other waste products supply a valuable input for some other enterprise?

As a society that wants to ensure a sustainable world for future generations, we must decide what kinds of standards we want our industries to live up to. If compost fertilizer may come from a paper mill, a lumber mill, a sewage treatment plant, a livestock feedlot, or ranch, consumers need to know that the contents will provide appropriate nutrients for their food, feed, fiber, or fuel crops. Serious chemical analysis of the products and process analysis of the steps involved to make the fertilizer will ascertain the quality and content of these products. We will need a tremendous amount of scientific expertise devoted to the research necessary to create protocols for cycling of energy and materials. Instead of relying on oil and gas for thousands of industrial and commercial processes and products, we will need to find thousands of natural processes from which to derive our sustenance without destroying the natural processes that sustain them.

Many organizations already promote the creation of sustainable lifestyles or “permaculture.” The Apollo Alliance promotes jobs for clean energy for the future. I would add that we cannot afford to waste anyone here today. The thousands of factory workers laid off in the auto industry, airline industry workers, financial services sector professionals, all the way down to disadvantaged inner-city youth – all of these people represent the human capital that we must put to work finding solutions. Not every one can perform chemical analyses or engineering calculus. Not everyone needs to. Low-energy pathways may very well require more labor than the energy-intensive pathways of the past century.

Just look at the natural world. Genetic diversity gives us millions of different organisms to fill millions of ecological niches. As we scour the planet, re-examining every thing that we do, we will need all manner of people with all manner of skills and interests to find the millions of processes necessary to make human civilization on Earth a sustainable enterprise for the coming centuries.

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