Pressing reset: intricacies of the energy problem

I’m in the USA this week. On my arrival to New York’s Kennedy Airport, immediately I was struck by two things.

First was the abundance of green-oriented advertising. It has been nearly a decade since I was last in the area, but the transformation was really pronounced – everywhere from advertising posters in the New York airport to Chevy ads on Chairlift stanchions in a small Southwest Utah ski resort (interestingly, promoting the Chevrolet Fuel Cell vehicle). How much of this market ‘talk’ is greenwash is an interesting question, but the very fact that awareness in the US is sufficient to incite such widespread advertising is already important.

Second was the sheer visibility of the financial crisis. The airport seemed truly like a ghost town, and not at an unusual hour of the day. Disembarking from my 16 hour marathon – thanks to an unexpected diversion en route – my situation reminded me of the advice of a young, clever and highly irresponsible friend, who once explained to me the theory of ‘pressing reset’.

She was referring to a vaguely unorthodox routine for dealing with intercontinental jetlag, involving enough alcohol, administered at the appropriate time, to disable one’s diurnal clock so that it ‘resets’ itself the morning after – effectively exchanging the jetlag problem for a much more temporary, rotten hangover.

I imagine that my altered mental state was responsible for drawing a parallel between this and the situation in which the world, following the lead of the USA, currently finds itself.

In “The Party’s Over”, an excellent book describing the Peak Oil problem, Richard Heinberg convincingly illustrates how the phenomenal, ongoing economic growth in western countries since the industrial revolution, depends ultimately on the availability of abundant, cheap energy – essentially free in fact, relative to earlier times.

Now the resultant buildup of atmospheric carbon since then amounts to a disequilibration of the planetary carbon cycle. Somehow, we need to restore the equilibrium in order to preserve the favourable climate we currently enjoy.

It appears to me as if the USA – Wall St, Main St and all – realizing this disequilibration, decided (I blame the jetlag for the teleology) to head out for an epic night of sub-prime lending and private debt accumulation, and have just awoken, bleary-eyed and hurting, but with the opportunity to readjust much more quickly to their newfound reality.

The Obama administration is thus presented with unprecedented political leverage to truly refocus their economic direction, and even seem to be shaping to do so.

This video shows a lecture given at the National Clean Energy Summit in Nevada last August. One of the lecturer’s most interesting points (see around the 3min 40s mark) is of how, once politicians truly grasp the reality of an issue and enact appropriate legislation, the corporations involved take the problem out of the hands of the lobbyists (who naturally preach all manner of economic ruin in response to the measures their clients would be asked to take) and place them in those of the engineers, at which point real progress can begin to be made.



Perhaps one might think that the presenter above was talking a scientist’s pipe dream, lost in his ivory towers. But that man, Nobel Laureate Prof. Steven Chu of the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, is now Dr Steven Chu, United States Energy Secretary.

Obviously climate change represents a challenge on an unprecedented scale. But be sure that it too can be solved at far less a cost than what the nay-sayers will claim, and far less, I would claim, than the amount lost by a few big financial institutions in a few short months.

There would be few who understand the intricacies of the energy problem better than Dr Chu, and perhaps his government appointment is indication that the reset button was pressed sufficiently firmly. We now look ahead with bleary but clearing eyes, and I’ll take the hangover over the jetlag any day.

Change 2 contributor Dr Miles Page is an Australian scientist who has been working at the international coalface of the emerging Energy Revolution. After receiving his PhD from Sydney University, Dr Page held senior research positions with the Atomic Energy Commission in Paris and the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam. He has spent the past 3 years in Israel researching Thin Film Solar Cells at the Weizmann Institute of Science and developing alternative Fuel Cells.