With the intensifying energy worries of the last few years, I keep seeing a remarkable, recurrent opinion on the Internet: when push comes to shove, human ingenuity and technology will save us. It always has before.
In other words, don't worry. Energy companies, perhaps prodded by government(s), and certainly driven by profit and consumer demand, will find the fix we all need.
But wait. Unpacking the argument exposes a number of assumptions - perhaps more than you were expecting.
1. There is at least one alternative energy source that will replace oil. (OK, we know this one holds.)
2. That energy source, or sources, will be sufficient to meet current - and future - demand.
3. Humans, or at least particular countries (the one you live in), will be able to access that energy either directly or on world or regional markets, without market collapse or conflict disrupting said markets.
4. The technology needed to extract the cheaper energy exists. At all.
5. Developing the extraction technology needed is not cost prohibitive.
6. Researching such technology will produce actionable results "in time." Ideally, before mass starvation, disease, or major conflict break out in a theater near you.
7. Humanity possesses, and will continue to possess, enough organizational capacity to exploit the energy source, conduct the R&D, and distribute it in a timely fashion.
8. Distribution of such energy (a) is not prohibitively expensive, (b) does not consume more energy than it delivers, and (c) does not result in excessive decay or reduced quality of the energy provided.
9. Consumers possess additional technology to consume such energy sources.
10. Research of all the foregoing technologies does not take wrong turns past costly thresholds (whether in thinking, methods, or physical plant), let alone path dependent turns, where other economic actors place fruitless bets on extraction, storage, and delivery systems in reliance on the state of current research.
For the technological ingenuity argument to be plausible, all of those pieces have to fall into place, with no or only minor interruption, once oil or any other finite source of energy is unreachably expensive.
Otherwise, we risk major contractions in world GDP and major environmental externalities with devastating social and political consequences.
So how much faith do we really have in human technological ingenuity? How much faith should we have?
Or should we just go ahead and pre-empt ourselves, moving our religious rituals and beliefs back to caves?
After all, caves tend to be relatively climate-controlled. It's just a little hard to fit more than 6 billion people into them.
energy technology human ingenuity
