Relevant Reading from the Book:

• Pages 187-196

The Two Principle Problems with Energy Management:

• Failure for policy makers to understand the concept of exponential growth.
• Failure for legislature to be formulated and passed to give us a long term energy strategy that is sensible

The result of these failures is to create an escalating energy crises as time continues to run out. Unfortunately, most people are either oblivious to this or believe that some new source of energy will magically appear.

If we look at the 20 year period 1970--1990 we see both good and bad trends:

Resource	1970	1990	Comments
Lead Emission	204,000 tons	5,000 tons	Factor 40 reduction
Aluminum Cans Recycled	1.2 billion	47 billion	Factor 40 increase
Passive Solar Houses	35,000	2 million	Factor of 75 increase
Tons of Garbage	121 million	160 million	marginal increase
Percentage of Oil Imported	23%	51%	Stupid
World CO2 Emissions	14 billion tons/yr	21 billion tons/yr	Climate Change

Other trends:

• 1970 --> 1995: 35% decline in automobile air pollution
• 1995 new car has 1% the pollution of a 1970 car (which runs on leaded gas)
• Pollution abatement costs have gone up by factor of 7 since 1970
• Americans on average generate 4 pounds of garbage per person per day; landfill space has shrunk by a factor of 2.5 since 1970 (15,000 --> 6,000 landfills)

Overview of The Fossil Fuel Problem

The World mirrors the US:

1992 Energy Consumption by Source

Resource	The US	The World
Oil	41%	38%
Coal	23%	26%
Natural Gas	24%	22%
Hydro	4%	7%
Nuclear	8%	6%

When does the Oil Run Out

Resource	US	World	US Lifetime
Oil	24 billion bbl	990 billion bbl	8 years
Natural Gas	0.16 tcf	4.9 tcf	9 years
Coal	265 gigatons	1140 gigatons	300 years

Note on Units:

• bbl = barrel of oil = 42 gallons
• tcf = trillion cubic feet
• gigaton = one billion tons

The US has:

• 2.5% of the world's remaining oil
• 3.5% of the world's remaining natural gas
• 19% of the world's remaining coal

Hence, it becomes clear that the major challenge which faces us is the large scale conversion of fossil fuel based energies to renewables ("green") on a time scale of 50 years