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Let’s Get Started on the Road to Renewable Energy

By Steven Strong

Our great country has once again had to beg OPEC to raise crude oil production to meet our needs. Recently, our President went hat-in-hand to ask the oil producing cartel to increase their output. Was this a recognition that the world’s supply of oil is not keeping up with increasing demand, or was it simply that $2.50 a gallon at the gas pump didn’t bode well in public opinion poles?

Whatever the reasoning, the answer from OPEC gave us a very clear understanding of our immediate future prospects for the availability of oil. OPEC agreed to increase extraction but could only pledge about one million barrels a day more oil to the world market. When you consider that the average daily world demand is currently about 83 million barrels a day, the elasticity in the world oil market (oil supply versus demand) is now less than two percent. With conservative projections calling for world oil demand to rise to 85 million barrels a day as early as next year, it should be clear that increasing demand chasing diminishing reserves will continue to push oil prices upward.

The debate over when the last drop of oil will be extracted will never be settled, and it needn’t be. It is largely irrelevant. What matters, of course, is when the world economy -- now completely dependent on cheap oil and gas – will begin to falter due to price escalation and lack of supply. By then, the window of opportunity for a manageable transition will be largely behind us.

As the cover story of the June 2004 National Geographic proclaimed, the era of cheap oil is over. In August 2004, the cover story of Fortune magazine, the bastion of free-market capitalism, featured a drug syringe with oil dripping out and admonished the industrial world that it’s time to kick the oil habit. By August 2005, the president of Chevron was placing two-page ads in TIME and Newsweek proclaiming "one thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over."

The warning signs have been ubiquitous. A fork lies in the road ahead. We have some serious choices to make and precious little time left to make them. We can choose to continue blindly embracing conventional sources of energy – mainly petroleum – ignoring all the warning signs and await the consequences. Or, we can begin in earnest to define and implement the path to a sustainable future in the post-petroleum world. In a fit of despair over U.S. policy he saw as seriously misguided, Winston Churchill mustered the optimism to tell his inner circle, "The Americans can be counted upon to do the right thing – after they have tried everything else."

We know renewable energy works. Wind and solar are now the fastest growing sources of new electricity in the world, growing at 30-plus percent compounded annual growth for five years running. And over past decades, we have indeed tried everything else but renewables.

The transition to the post-petroleum era is already upon us. The heads of some of the world’s major oil companies have acknowledged this while also acknowledging that global warming and climate change are very real, are largely the result of excessive combustion of fossil fuels, and demand immediate attention. This transition will not be an easy one under any circumstances.

The decisions before us will impact the future of humanity. A post-petroleum world powered by renewable energy holds the promise of an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. We need to get started.

Steven Strong is an energy engineer and president of Solar Design Associates, a group of engineers and architects in Harvard, Massachusetts dedicated to the design of environmentally responsive buildings

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