David's Blague

Fossil fuels are not so bad. I know, it's a heretical thing for a liberal liberal to say, but has the benefit of being true: there are far worse ways to store and transport energy.

For instance, killing whales and rendering the whale blubber into whale oil, subsequently burning the whale oil for heat and light... Not only is it worse in terms of efficiency, it's more distasteful than even strip mining or oil burning or nuclear power. Besides, there aren't that many whales left. Firewood isn't that far ahead of whale blubber. One need look no further than Haiti for an example of what it does to a place to use up all the trees as charcoal. Of course, there are more trees than there are whales.

Oil and coal are just two ways of storing and transporting energy. An upside of petroleum is that the infrastructure required to convert the petroleum into electricity and motion and heat can fit into a car. Hence, we don't need high voltage power lines running under the roads, we just carry a little power plant in the car, and fill up on gas when we run out. A downside is that it spills out carbon at a rate that exceeds the planet's ability to metabolize it.

I can imagine better ways to store and transport energy than fossil fuels. After all, petroleum takes millions of years to make, is generally messy, is being used up faster than it's being made.

For example, there's the sun, and all the things the sun heats up (e.g. air, making wind). There's gravity, and all the things that gravity makes move (e.g. water, making rivers and tides). There's the making and breaking of atomic bonds (e.g. fusion and fission). Metabolic processes also give off energy or stored energy, some of which isn't used by the organism doing the metabolizing (e.g. the methane given off by sewage).

Harvesting, storing, and transporting all of these shares problems of fossil fuels: negative externalities, fixed supply, inefficiencies in conversion, irregular production. Each has a different footprint than fossil fuels, though none of them solve the basic problems of storage and transport of energy much better. Some are considerably worse.

The city of a billion will solve these problems by:

1. requiring less energy
2. converting energy more efficiently
3. storing energy more cleanly

Requiring less energy is a win for everybody, as far as I can tell, with the possible exception of energy companies. This means better insulation, lower power consumption, less transportation. These are trends we can see starting today, and they are easier in cities than anywhere else. The city of a billion will make efficient use of energy, not for reasons of conscience, but for reasons of economics.

Same goes for conversion. This means, specifically, that we will be able to effectively make light, heat, and motion with less power. This also looks a lot like efficiency. So-called "fuel-efficient cars" give more motion per unit of fuel, and this is a trend we are likely to see continued. Even in a city of a billion.

But neither of these can compare to the scale of better energy storage. What this means, is the city of a billion will have a good way of compactly storing electricty that doesn't require expensive transmission mechanisms or fuel conversion plants. Energy will be purchased when (and where) it is cheapest and used when (and where) it is most valuable.

This last change will affect most people much more than either of the prior changes. It will also drive the other two changes. Smaller devices from cars to cell phones, less tethering from high voltage powerlines to phone chargers, and use of new power sources from lightning to rainfall.

In the city of a billion, even energy produced by humans will be captured, and it will not be stored only as fat- some of it will be stored as electricity in the city of a billion batteries.