Energy is the Answer

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway personal transporter as well as other, more important creations, has been trying to tackle one of the world's most pressing problems - a shortage of fresh, potable water. After 10 years of work, he has created the Slingshot, a vacuum compression distillation engine that uses only 2% of the usual electrical energy. The prototype costs $100,000 and Kamen hopes to get the price down to less than $2,000, which in his opinion would spark rural usage worldwide.

The process of vacuum compression distillation is not new; however, a decade of work was required to get the power consumption down to 500 watts, and that brings me to my point - the most pressing issue facing the planet isn't about clean water, arable land, pollution, or global warming; the most pressing issue is energy. With enough clean, renewable energy, every other problem becomes moot.

The energy consumption of the planet Earth is now increasing at a remarkable rate, largely due to the rapidly increasing standards of living in developing countries. For example, in 1985 the average person in China consumed 44 pounds of meat per year; by 2000 that figure had topped 110 pounds. High quality protein, such as meat, requires massive amounts of energy to produce, and with China showing such a dramatic change, you can only imagine the global impact to our energy picture.

A fews years ago, I had the good fortune to speak with Dr. Richard Smalley, winner of the 1996 Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on a new type of carbon, and it was he who convinced me that the solution for practically all human problems lay in energy. The entire economic notion of scarcity, which is responsible for both good and evil in the world (from entrepreneurship & innovation to wars, crime, and poverty), has its roots in a lack of energy.

The total worldwide demand for energy reached 14.5 terawatts per day in 2004, which is the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil, and in fact, oil provides the largest share of our energy needs. But we all know that oil is finite, the very definition of scarcity. Not only is it becoming more difficult to find, extract, and provide, the process of making new oil is far too slow to compensate for our thirst (plankton + seabed + perfect rock formation + 150 million years). Coal has been proposed as a viable alternative, but there is no such thing as "clean coal," and even if carbon dioxide emissions could be stored in large underground reservoirs, coal mining still poses a serious health threat (graphs courtesy of Dr. Richard Smalley).

By 2050, we will consume 60 terawatts per day, or the equivalent of 900 million barrels of oil - oil that won't exist by mid-century. Nuclear power does play an important role, both today and into the future, but the problem of storing spent fuel rods is persistent and nagging. What happens when Yucca Mountain is filled to the brim? Fission and fusion are stopgaps, for the simple reason that they are not sustainable over the long-term. When it comes to energy, the picture isn't pretty, but are we truly condemned to a dystopian landscape? Not necessarily - the answer is hovering above us.

Amaterasu, Apollo, Freyr, Helios, Huitzilopochtli, Inti, Liza, Lugh, Ra, Sol Invictus, Surya, Tonatiuh, Utu - whatever you call it, the sun beams down to Earth 165,000 terawatts of energy each day. That is more than enough energy to provide health, wealth, and happiness for every person on the planet, and we don't even have to efficiently extract power from sunlight. All we have to do is efficiently transport the electricity from massive solar farms, which would be located in the ever-expanding desert regions of the world. Here's some food for thought - the future of our species is hinged upon developing a better copper wire.