Most scientists are essentially optimistic. We believe in a sort of providence - ie. nature has provided all that we need to survive and flourish here on earth. It's a strong ideological statement - but I think I can back it up in a number of ways. The most recent example can be found at Sapphire Energy's website: where they just announced the production of 91 octane gasoline and jet fuel from a genetically engineered strain of algae.
This is not just another form of alternative biofuel - no - this is actual gasoline that is purified and refined using the existing infrastructure and internal combustion engines. The difference? It is almost completely green in its production. (Almost, because there is some cost for plant manufacture and operation) The company's website claims that the production of their fuel is 10 - 100 times less energy intense than any other biofuel - biodiesel and ethanol.
Sapphire claims that their product does not use food crops, take up arable land, or use significant amounts of potable water. Even better? It uses CO2, water, sunlight, and a genetically engineered algae to produce gasoline in a sustainable and scalable manner. Following a recent infusion of cash from several venture capital firms (including the such heavy hitters as the Wellcome Trust), Sapphire is poised to be in full scale production with their first plant by 2011 with a production target of 10,000 barrels a day! While that may seem like a lot of oil, the US imported over 129 thousand barrels each day in March of 2008. We would need over a dozen of these plants just to ease our current dependence on foreign oil.
This announcement represents one of the first fundamental shifts away from drilled crude oil.
How quickly can the production of this kind of carbon-neutral oil be scaled up? What impact will it have on the global oil market? What impact will it have on US foreign policy? What's the meaning of all this in the larger world?
I would argue that this provides another piece of evidence indicating the absolute dependence of the scientific enterprise on providence. As scientists, we believe that the "answers are out there" all we have to do is discover and then harness their potential. We (humans) have made energy transitions several times in our past. We started with power from wood, moved to vegetable and animal oils (whale fat, etc), transitioned to coal and then to crude oil as well as natural gas. We are now moving back to wind, sun, and plants as solutions to our energy needs. As scientists, we believe that we need to get more creative in our solutions and nature will provide the answers.
As a Christian - who also happens to be a scientist - I would add that this providence is, in fact, God's providence. God created a universe full of things to discover, full of the potential solutions that we might need as we continue to develop. Our job, our responsibility, is to find and implement them. Eventually, someone will get the credit for "changing the world" by producing inexpensive, sustainable energy. It might be Sapphire, or it might be someone else. The thing to remember is this: the answers are out there, the solutions are provided; we just need to find them.
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To give a nod to Wendell Berry, I think the Amish have shown that they've had an energy solution for awhile (not to speak of other issues like community, spirituality). Many of our solutions and conveniences seem to create only more problems, and this algae-oil is still an industrial-scale product with industrial concerns. Cars were going to clean up the city by eliminating horse manure, remember?
That said, I don't live on the farm with my horses... so algae it is!
I'm glad you're optimistic. There is no human (or divine) rule that says we'll beat global warming. Given the scale of the problem and the nature of individuals to consume as much as their paycheck allows, I'm not optimistic... but I'm hopeful (?). Now, off to West Michigan in my car...
The beauty of this approach is that the carbon put into the atmosphere is mostly "new" carbon. That is - the algae capture carbon from the atmosphere in the form of CO2 (remember this is the normal cycle for CO2).
To be sure, there are still refining costs, etc. But if this works as proposed, it will be carbon recycling with little to no cost.
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