As I write this, most varieties of crude oil trade over $110 a barrel. Gas at my local pump approaches $7 a gallon. The grocery stores have learned to spread the handful of unwanted products they have in stock two-deep and half-an-aisle wide to make it look like the shelves are full. Many nations, some in earnest, sign pledges to slash their carbon footprints by such-and-such a decade. A handful have sworn off the black stuff entirely, if you can just give them the benefit of the doubt until 2050 or so.
It seems like we’ve admitted a few things to ourselves. Fossil fuels are a finite source of energy, and whether or not you believe they damage the environment and the climate, nonrenewable resources are destined to…not be renewed. Enough powerful people believe, or want us to think they believe, that an alternative is necessary and forthcoming.
The obvious solution is a renewable source of energy. Things like solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy are expected to replace the dirty stuff just in time to save us, and the biggest obstacle is getting businesses and cantankerous individuals to buy in. The sooner we shingle our roofs with solar panels, buy a Tesla, and drive past monolithic turbines on our way to work, the sooner we can relax and enjoy the clean air and limitless satisfaction of unshackling ourselves from the fossil fuel addiction.
Word Association
The problem with that thesis is a subtle word game that conceals an unfortunate reality. The fact that we use terms like “renewable” and “nonrenewable” serves as a tacit admission that some things belong to a category that will run out at some point, and be absolutely irreplaceable. Any long-term plan predicated on something nonrenewable has a self-destruct date that no human can circumvent.
Alfred Korzybski had a lot to say about words and identification. The sounds and symbols we use to stand for things in the real world are not those things, themselves. The map is not the territory. But we humans have a habit of filing certain kinds of experience under one of those sounds, and acting as if the things are some inseparable reality. Quick, what color is blood? If red came to mind, consider that the letters b-l-o-o-d arranged in that order are drawings without any inherent meaning, as is the noise we make when we say it aloud. There’s something flowing through our veins, sure, but different languages call it different things, and we don’t have to call it anything at all for it to be an experience of our reality. The name is not the thing named. And for that matter, “red” is another vague sound that can refer to a broad range of colors, especially if you don’t traffic in paint samples. The conflation of redness, wetness, stickiness, running, coagulating, nutrient-carrying, and all the other ways that “blood” occurs to us don’t require words. That we group them under the same heading (for example, running and coagulating are opposite actions but both associated with the same word though they can’t happen at the same time) is an identification. It’s a filing cabinet for our convenience, not a truth. An ER nurse and a couch potato probably don’t think of remotely the same things when they hear the same word, for that matter.
These identifications are largely unconscious, and unavoidable. They can also be useful for communicating a lot of things. The problem with unconscious identifications arises when they fail to reflect the world of experience. Sometimes, things get lumped together in ways that not only obscure, but mislead through language.
Renaming Car Engines as “Gasoline”
Solar and wind are renewable energies. What images come to mind when you think of those words? Maybe a beaming sun, or a gusting valley. Did you also think of a solar panel? How about a turbine? If so, you’re beginning to see the issue caused by this clumsy game of word association. When we say we’ll replace oil with solar, do we mean “solar energy from the sun,” or “solar panels”? Same thing, right? Only by identification. Technologies that make use of solar and wind energy, for example, have become identified with those energies by too many people in too many decision-making roles. The product that uses the energy is not the energy. A solar panel isn’t a beaming ball of fire millions of miles away. They have entirely different properties. For starters, one is renewable within a human lifespan. The other isn’t.
We use solar energy all the time in renewable ways. Step into the sun to warm yourself on a chilly morning, and you just used it in a sustainable fashion. There are other ways, too. We pile up stones to trap heat during the day and slowly release it at night, taking the edge off the cold for plants and people. With just a little more technology, we can make solar ovens that fold out to cook a chicken, or solar water heaters that warm our showers without burning natural gas.
Products vs. Energy
There are lots of different products of human labor—from cut stones to intricate panel arrays—that make use of renewable solar energy. These things are not the energy itself. They’re products, and it’s time we made the same distinction for each of them that we apply to our energy sources.
For energy to be called renewable, it must be reproducible on a timeline that outpaces our expenditure. Think of an income. If you’re paycheck is $2,000 per month and you always spend $1,700 per month, that’s a renewable source. If you spend $3,500 per month, it’s nonrenewable. So what makes a product renewable?
A renewable product is a human work, of which the materials that compose it, and the energy used to make it at every stage of the process, are replaced faster than we can use them.
If we make doohickeys out of rare adamantium, and we run out of sources of that element, the product can’t be made, even if we have tons of energy with which to make it. Likewise, if we have plenty of adamantium for our doohickeys, but the production process is so energy-intensive that we can’t afford to buy the fuel—or we just plain run out of fuel—the product can’t be made.
Doohickeys are thus nonrenewable products.
Let’s consider the humble solar panel. Supposedly we just need to install enough of these that we can use them instead of coal, oil, and natural gas, which are destined to run out at some point. To perform the function of converting renewable energy into electricity in a post-fossil fuel world, this product needs to be just as renewable as the energy it handles.
First, the energy-side. Whatever energy we use to make solar panels at every stage of the operation has to itself be renewable. To my knowledge, no solar panel has ever been made exclusively with solar energy. First, the materials like silica and aluminum have to be mined using equipment that runs on fossil fuels. Then they’re transported to refineries, probably not in Teslas. The refineries that turn raw silica into electronics-grade silicon ingots, and raw aluminum into usable stock and frames, run on fossil fuels. They’re shipped again and assembled into the final parts by more fossil fuels, then shipped to installation sites and installed by people who probably charge their drills on the grid. Every stage of the process relies on fossil fuels, which as we’ve admitted, will run out at some point.
What about the materials? Silica is supposedly very abundant, but recently there’s been noise of shortages of this nonrenewable (within our lifetimes) resource that we assumed would supply our every want. If it runs out, the product is nonrenewable. But it doesn’t have to run out. Most of the world’s silicon for solar panels is produced in China. They also have huge stocks of nonrenewable battery components like lithium and rare earth minerals. Conceivably, there could be plenty left, but geopolitical shenanigans might prevent the Chinese from wanting to sell them to us. Luckily, we never do anything to offend the Chinese.
The same argument applies to the technologies that turn wind, solar, geothermal, etc. into electricity. The renewable energy is there, but until we can build renewable products that harness it using nothing but human labor and renewable energy captured by other renewable products, there is no possibility of replacing fossil fuels with these energy sources. Even if we have reserves of all the silica, lithium, aluminum, copper, rubber, etc., that we need, the energy required to make them usable outpaces what they produce. And what they produce, where prolific, is pretty stationary. Try to power remote mining equipment with renewable energy.
If oil dries up, everything that depends on it does, too. But it doesn’t have to dry up. As it becomes more rare and expensive, and geopolitically partitioned, the price of everything made using oil will rise, as we’re already seeing in…every place that sells things. Even if we free ourselves from Chinese dependencies, when (not if) the cost of a barrel of oil becomes too high, it will no longer be economically viable to produce a solar panel, or a wind turbine, even if we have all the ability. Would you spend a million dollars to light your house? Do you have enough money to even make the choice?
Yeah, But, They Think of Something!
Given the amount of energy we use, and where and how we use it, replacing fossil fuels is impossible. To the extent that we imagine it is, we’re making errors of identification between renewable energies and nonrenewable products. Nuclear is nonrenewable, and doesn’t pay for itself without government subsidies. Out of a thousand promising schemes, no other alternative is actively bearing that load in the field.
There are, of course, plenty of renewable products that use renewable energy. They just don’t tend to look like the things we think of as high technology, and they operate on a very local scale, under limited circumstances. The sun doesn’t always shine, or the wind blow. I imagine we ignore the obvious because energy per capita is about the best definition of wealth anyone’s come up with, and that number has been diving for some time. No one, least of all me, wants to freeze in Winter, sweat in Summer, and walk half a day to get somewhere I used to drive in a few minutes. But if we’re honest with ourselves, there don’t seem to be any truly viable alternatives to our consumption level, and those that we do have can’t approach our accustomed level of comfort.
I have nothing against nonrenewable products. In fact, I think they can play important transitional roles. That transition is something few people care to consider possible, let alone inevitable: things that can’t be renewed will run out, and we will have to go on living without them. They’ll likely do so a few at a time over a long time scale, but much of it will begin, if not hit hard, within the lifetimes of people who are currently under 40.
Unfortunately, I don’t write this essay to propose a solution. The misunderstanding is elementary, and embarrassing. But without clarity, we can do nothing but skip blindly toward the precipice. It’s still there, but maybe with a little less skipping and a little more thoughtful consideration, we might find a way to live, if not the one we’re used to. Word games have a way of evaporating on the winds of the real world.