Education for the global energy challenge

Energy is the lifeblood of the modern world. According to the Energy Information Administration, global energy consumption is expected to grow by about 70% in the coming 25 years.1 Much of that growth is driven by developing countries, whose inhabitants seek a standard of living that more closely resembles that of the developed world. Petroleum provides about 40% of the worldwide energy,1 and although estimates vary, oil production is expected to peak in the relatively near future. The combination of increased energy demand and declining petroleum supply can be a threat to political stability and is likely to lead to a shift toward coal and nonconventional oil, such as tar sands and oil shale. That shift will further increase carbon dioxide emissions and thus accelerate global warming and lifealtering regional climate changes. The challenges posed by the growth in demand were described in the April 2002 special issue of PHYSICS TODAY in the articles by Stephen Benka (page 38) and by Ernest Moniz and Melanie Kenderdine (page 40). Many actions can be taken now to begin to reduce energy demand, diversify our energy portfolio, lower the costs of energy supplies, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Those actions will not occur, however, without a plan and the willingness to implement it. Public engagement and education in dealing with the pressing challenges and opportunities are the keys to getting started now. A recent study has shown that the public largely believes a number of myths regarding our energy use.2 Those wrongly held notions include the ideas that today’s energy crisis is a hype, that efficiency improvements have reached their potential, that renewable power systems cannot make a significant contribution to our energy supply, that present worldwide power systems are economically and environmentally optimal, and that climate policy will bankrupt the US economy. Those beliefs impede the acceptance of technical and societal changes that could yield a more sustainable energy supply. To help dispel the notion that reducing CO2 emissions will wreck the US economy, we show in the figure the cost versus avoided US CO2 emissions for a variety of different actions.3 Each bar in the graph stands for a set of actions that help reduce CO2 emissions; its width gives the amount of avoided CO2 emissions in units of gigatons per year, and its height depicts the associated cost. The figure shows that about 1.4 gigatons per year of CO2 emissions can be avoided at negative cost, that is, at reduced cost compared with taking no action! Those avoided emissions represent about 20% of the current CO2 emissions of the US. Measures that have a negative cost include efficient lighting systems and electronics, fuel-economy packages for cars and light trucks, improved insulation for new buildings, and combined heat and power industrial systems. The negative cost implies that money and energy resources can be saved by adopting those technologies. Many of the measures proposed to reduce CO2 emissions serve the additional purpose of reducing energy demand by increasing energy efficiency or by switching to renewable energy. Some of the negative-cost actions for avoiding CO2 emissions have impediments to their implementation. Capital investment precedes the financial returns from some actions, such as using combined heat and power systems for commercial buildings or better insulation in new residences. For other steps, such as making more efficient cars and