Ecologic has done the Rensselaer community an important service by thinking of and organizing this celebration of Rensselaer's first solar electricity.  I thank Ecologic for their good work and for giving me an opportunity to speak.

Energy is a complex subject.  Very few people here at Rensselaer, or in any other educated group, know enough, and have thought hard enough about what they know, to even begin to get their brains wrapped around energy as it relates to the human enterprise.  I am certainly not one of the few who truly understand energy. I believe David Borton, the person responsible for this solar facility, is one of the few amongst us who does.  Hats off to David for providing the Rensselaer community with this very tiny step toward a solar powered university.

In the spring of 2000 David Orr of Oberlin College put forth in The Chronicle of Higher Education  a proposal he called, 2020.  Orr wrote:

            The institutions that purport to induct the young into responsible adulthood ought themselves to operate responsibly, which is to say they should not act in ways that might plausibly undermine the world their students will inherit.

            Accordingly, I propose that every school, college, and university stand up and be counted on the issue of climatic change by beginning now to develop plans to reduce and eventually eliminate or offset the emission of heat-trapping gases by the year 2020.

In 1988 James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a prominent atmospheric scientist, announced to the US Congress and the world that climate change was here.  He also noted that human activities like burning fossil fuels are, in large part, responsible for the warming.  So, why has it taken Rensselaer 13 years to have its first 2 kWs of solar electricity?

To answer that question, we must look at the culture Rensselaer and most other institutions of higher education mirror.  US Government research and development spending on renewable energy and conservation peaked in 1980 at about $2.6 billion, then decreased 80% to about $0.5 billion in 1990, rose to about $1.3 billion in 1995, and is now below $1.0 billion and decreasing (in 1999 dollars).  This spring the federal government put forth the National Energy Policy report that advocated major investments in fossil fuels and nuclear power with lip service to renewables and conservation.  This report was accepted by the majority in the US Congress.

Scientists   (e.g., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report Climate Change 2001: Third Assessment Report, the work of over 1,500 climate scientists from all over the world, warns that we appear to be moving toward climatic catastrophe unless release of greenhouse gases are curtailed by 60 to 80%)   and observations   (e.g., rising surface temperatures, migration of land and sea populations of organisms north in northern hemisphere, substantial warming at the poles, melting of glaciers everywhere, lengthening of the frost free season, increasing number and severity of weather extremes, movement of tropical diseases north and south, etc.)   leave little doubt that the climate is changing in a significant way.  The basic physics of carbon dioxide indicates that the huge, human-caused releases of this gas (over 30% increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the last 100 years) are resulting in the retention of more heat by the planet.

So why has the US decided not to curtail greenhouse gas emissions?  Simply put, it is our fundamental, cultural belief in neo-classical economics and the resulting failure to question its undergirding assumptions.  It is a kind of fanaticism where we believe in and trust global capitalism, financial markets, and technological progress to perpetuate the pattern of material wealth they have delivered to us.   Past economic analyses and policies have not seriously considered physical or biological constraints, so these constraints are considered irrelevant when one adheres to an economically centered worldview.

In a world with very few humans, these humans could act without great concern for physical and biological constraints so long as they were not isolated to a small place like an island.  Unfortunately, six billion humans is not a small number of people.  Despite the apparent short-term successes of neo-classical economics, in a world over-filled with us and biologically impoverished by our activities, the laws of nature apply, not the cultural "laws" of human created economics.

Ten thousand years ago about four million humans lived on Earth.  Those four million people used about 0.001% of the energy stored by plants on the land.  This plant stored energy runs essentially all life on the land.  The primary energy source those people had available to manipulate the environment was human power or about one million BTUs per person per year (Think of riding a bicycle to generate electricity to light a 100 watt bulb, 10 hours per day, six days per week, and 50 weeks per year — this is an out put of one million BTUs.). 

 If we lived today like hunter-gatherers did 10,000 years ago in terms of our pattern of habitation, we would use about 1.5% of the plant stored energy.  But we don't because we have harnessed fossil-fuel energy to work for us.  In the US we use 95 Quads (1X10¹⁵ BTUs) of energy per year or 350 million BTUs per person (95 Q/270 million people).   The world uses 380 Quads per year.  This flow of energy primarily from fossil fuels has allowed us to use directly or indirectly another 35% of the plant stored energy.  Thus we are using almost 40% of the energy flowing through terrestrial ecosystems.

What does this mean biologically?  Simply stated, when one species takes more than one third of life's energy pie, lots of others do not survive.  That is, our taking such a huge fraction of life's energy-budget guarantees we are causing a mass extinction of biodiversity: ecosystems and species.

But the situation is even worse, because the scale of activities permitted by this energy flow alters global physical, geological, and biological processes.  Air pollution, water pollution, toxic chemicals, loss of soil fertility, acid rain, photochemical smog, increased types of human diseases, and climate change are some of the major indicators of our profound altering of the planet.  And all of them are connected in one way or another to the mass extinction of biodiversity.    In the past 600 million years the Earth has gone through five mass extinctions, the last one 65 million years ago.  We are in the sixth mass extinction.  It is being caused by us.  This is not good for humans because we are reducing Earth's life-support capacity that makes civilization possible.

As far as energy is concerned, we ought to do two things if we wish to create a pattern of durable habitation on the planet.  One, shift to a solar economy quickly.  Two, reduce our global flow of energy to about 38 Quads or 10% of the current flow.   The first is doable in about 15 years on a crash program or 30 years on a concerted program.   The second will take longer — is doable in about 75 years (crash) or a bit more than a 100 years (concerted) — since we will need to reduce our population to about 2 billion in order to curtail energy flow and to preserve the level of biodiversity needed to maintain the resilient life-support capacity modern human civilization requires.   Of course, they are both impossible under the current economically centered worldview, but might be possible with an ecologically centered worldview.

Over the past month we have all been concerned about the events of September 11th.  Energy is intimately associated with those events.  I again quote David Orr:

[T]he question is whether we can summon the intelligence to create a just, secure, and sustainable prosperity that no terrorist can threaten and that threatens no other nation.  The ecological and security costs of military power are high and growing.  But real security is more complicated.  It has to do with the connections between the health of democratic institutions, the fair distribution of wealth, military power, and the protection of soils, forests, and biological diversity. There would be no better first step to ensure our security and that of others than a resolute announcement by President Bush that we will end our dependence on foreign oil — by taping the technological ingenuity to increase our energy efficiency and to harness solar energy.  Thereafter our engagement in the politics of an unstable region might be by choice not permanent necessity.  In the meantime we would have lowered our balance of payments deficit, reduced air pollution, created many new jobs along with the technological basis for a solar-hydrogen economy, reduced the emission of greenhouse gasses, and dramatically reduced our vulnerability.

The two kilowatts provided by this collector are really nothing.  This collector is merely a gesture that might direct Rensselaer's vision to the nuclear reactor in the sky and toward David Orr's 2020 proposal.  After all, a scientific, technological university would do well by basing its policies and agenda on the fundamental principles of science.

Ayres, Robert U. (2001) How Economists Have Misjudged Global Warming. World Watch 14:12-25.

Borton, David and McDaniel, Carl (2001) Energy Use Is Key to Biological Diversity Loss and Durable Habitation.  USSEE Biennial Meeting, Duluth, MN.

Orr, David W. (2001) The Events of 9-11: A View from the Margins.  In From the Margin: Responses to 9/11/01 ; Wendell Berry, Maurice Telleen, David Orr, Wes Jackson, The Land Institute, Prairie Festival 2001, Salina, KS.

 Orr, David (2000) 2020: a Proposal. Conservation Biology 14:338:341.