Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

First let me say that I am among those who think climate change is real and that we need to be doing more about it than we are.

But the more I read about how much needs to be done I wonder if we as a society have the guts to do what might be needed.

We’ve seen the battle over coal over the past decade or two and companies have retired or are planning to retire a number of coal fired generating plants over the years.

I found it very interesting this past year when the power plant that resulted in the controversial powerline that was put through this area in the late 1970s was sold. The power plant was sold for next to nothing, it was too expensive to operate anymore.

The powerline will remain, and it will remain because our power grid cannot handle what will eventually be needed to handle future electrical needs. We may well need more wires, or heavier duty wires.

You see what is expected to replace the gasoline, natural gas, propane and some diesel fuel is electricity.

We’ve all heard about the push for electric cars and pickups and the pros and cons of them as transportation. We’ve heard less about what will be done with farm equipment, construction equipment like scrapers and bulldozers and heavy-duty long-distance trucks and trains. Or what about airplanes?

The car-pickup market will kind of take care of itself, although in some places charging stations may need to be constructed where the market demand wouldn’t normally justify it.

And at some point we will have to figure out how to raise money to maintain our roads and bridges that we currently support with our per-gallon gas tax.

What we don’t hear much talk about is the future of the oil industry. We’re going to need oil for decades since we don’t yet have the capacity to even build enough electric cars and pickups to replace our current fleet in less than 20-30 years. And then there is the financial capacity for consumers to pay for them. So we will need gas stations to serve people and they will need affordable gasoline and diesel fuel.

We have learned that nations we think of as friends, like Saudi Arabia, may not want to supply us with the oil we need and bad actors like Russia can help cause oil shortages. When these happen it is the U.S. consumer who suffers. So what are our plans to keep our oil industry that can provide us affordable fuel while we make this transition to electric cars and trucks? And what are our plans for the heavy duty vehicles for which there is no current electric alternative?

Still another issue is home heating. The eventual concept is that we would all switch our furnaces to electric heating elements or heat pumps. Up to now electricity has been more expensive than fossil fuels although well insulated electric homes can compete. The trouble is most of our homes are not as well insulated as they would need to be to have electricity as an affordable source of heat.

Of course electric home heating would require a more substantial power grid and some method of storage for wind and solar energy that don’t provide much power during our cold and dark winter nights. We could increase our nuclear power use but that would require that we start construction on plants now for use a decade into the future.

Can you imagine one of our leaders standing up and telling us all the things that have to take place over the next decade or two so we can leave our children and grandchildren a nation and world where they can live and thrive?

How would we react to that? Would we laugh that person off the podium? Would we refuse to believe what was being said? Would we vote that person out of office and elect a person with a less aggressive look at the changes needed in the future?

Talking about the positives and negatives of electric cars is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a much larger picture to ponder. It will be interesting to see where the leadership comes from on this issue.