Climate and energy offer job opportunities

Climate and energy offer job opportunities

Energy, how we get and how much we use, is, and will remain, the most important issue of our time. The U.N. Climate Change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, focused on energy supplies and climate change, important subjects that we must make realistic global efforts to resolve. Certainly, people much smarter and more well-informed than I are attempting to unravel the complexities of these global issues. The conference hoped to reach agreement on four essential topics including how much industrialized countries are willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases; how much India and China will limit growth of emission; how we will finance the reduction of emissions for developing countries; and how is the money going to be managed. These are very significant issues that require insight at the ground level, help from you and me.

At the country and local levels, we need the help of technology to help us find local answers to our energy and carbon emission challenges. In the U.S. we need a concerted effort by the Obama administration to challenge our industries to develop products for every aspect of life, that use less energy and produces less or no carbon emissions. Again, that would be you and I observing things and finding ways to design a more efficient power design, or even one that uses an alternative energy to power something we already use.

President Obama made a tremendous number of promises to get this country out of the tar pits of recession including $30 billion to transform the nation’s energy transmission distribution and production systems (Smart Grid), $15 billion for science facilities, research and instrumentation; $7 billion to expand broadband Internet access; $2.5 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy research to foster energy independence, and reduce carbon emissions; and $2 billion for advanced battery grants for US manufacturers of vehicle batteries and systems. These huge sums of money are being earmarked for developing and improving the U.S. infrastructure, especially how we get our energy. But, according to a study “Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society” (http://www.ifg.org
), we may be oversimplifying what it will take to supply for our future energy needs. The report analyzes 18 of the most viable power production alternatives, from traditional fossil fuels and nuclear, through wind, solar, wave, geothermal, biomass, and others, to identify their net energy ratios—the amount of energy that must be invested in them vs. the amount of energy they will be able to produce – as well as their environmental, social and geopolitical impacts. It concludes that no combination of alternative energy sources is likely to be sufficient to sustain industrial society at its present scale. According to the report, the best prospects so far for large-scale production and net-energy performance remain wind energy and certain forms of solar, but these still face important limitations due to intermittency of supply, remoteness of the best resources, materials needed for large-scale deployment, and scale potential.

I look at this as an opportunity to put our collective engineering minds together to come up with the best alternative for our dwindling fossil fuel supplies. We are the best hope for the future, so let’s do it.

Paul O’Shea