Scott Tinker: Can The World Energy Supply Become Fully Sustainable?
As we claim often here at PeakProsperity.com: Energy is everything.
Will our global society be able to transtiton off of its extreme dependence on fossil fuels? And if so, can we do so without too much pain?
Scott Tinker is the Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, and founder of the non-profit Switch Energy Alliance, which is dedicated to helping humanity address these key questions.
Tinker remains confident a much better future energy-wise is possible; but will require a tremendous shift in behavoir, investment and technological innovation.
In his eyes, society can make the transition. But will it? That’s a lot less certain…
The transition I care about is not simply from one kind of energy to another. It’s to where everybody has affordable, available, reliable, and environmentally sustainable, secure energy. That’s a good transition.
That introduces things into the world that allows for the empowerment of women, education, and all the basic things that the modern world enjoys and a third of the world doesn’t. That’s an important transition to me.
The kinds of energy that are put in place to do that are going to vary by what the world has access to. Every place in the world has different energy resources. Some are blessed with great oil and gas. Some have uranium, thorium, and nuclear that they can do. Some have wonderful wind. Some have terrific solar. There are places with wonderful tides and waves if they can capture that energy economically. There’s geothermal in Iceland, Southeast Asia, and other places. We’ll use what we have where we have it to accomplish the transition to a world where everyone has access to secure energy.
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