An Inconvenient Truthiness

For those of us who chortled at the credits of Al Gore's documentary, a book like David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - without the hot air is welcome reading. Gore undermines his urgency with all those pithy suggestions during the credits such as turning down your thermostat and replacing your light bulbs with CFL's. (Let me get this straight: I put on a sweater around the house, and New York City doesn't get submerged in water?) But the problem with mocking Gore's alarmist film, which won an Oscar and helped him win a Nobel Peace Prize, is that you can't help but get lumped in with the reactionaries who think global warming is a hoax. It's difficult to hold Gore to account (which he richly deserves) without being counterproductive. For stoic centrists, the problem isn't with the notion that the environment is imperiled, it's with the essential truthiness of Gore's pitch. It just rings false that the terrible danger of the world's oceans 'dying' could be averted by buying carbon offsets. What MacKay does is approach the problem with common sense and a calculator. For instance, while wind energy is a fantastic alternative to CO2-emitting power plants, he calculates that there simply isn't enough landmass in a country like the UK to make even a dent in consumption through a switch to wind power. His typical approach is to take the surface area available for offshore wind turbines, calculate the maximum number of turbines that could be squeezed into that area, and total the amount of power those turbines would generate: 120 GW, or 48 kWh/d. That's not even half of the 125 kWh/d consumed by the average European. McKay continues to eviscerate by subtracting from that total area the space you'd need for fishing and shipping lanes, whittling the figure down to 16 kWh/d. Not a very impressive number, considering that you'd still have to cover an area twice the size of Wales with wind turbines to achieve it.As the title implies, McKay's goal is not merely to poke holes in conventional wisdom, but to offer practical solutions. He settles on the following:First, we electrify transport. Electrification both gets transport off fossil fuels, and makes transport more energy-efficient. Second, to supplement solar-thermal heating, we electrify most heating of air and water in buildings using heat pumps, which are four times more efficient than ordinary electrical heaters. Third, we get all the green electricity from a mix of four sources: from our own renewables; perhaps from “clean coal;” perhaps from nuclear; and finally, and with great politeness, from other countries’ renewables.If you like to look at charts and tables and have always found the prevailing eco-math somewhat fuzzy, this book is for you, and in a truly sustainable vein, it's available for free as a pdf. Maybe the ardor of the radicals and the reason of centrists like MacKay will marry, and we'll end up with some genuinely practical solutions for our environmental problems.