From Starved Kitten to Overstuffed Goose

Implications: A call for a revolution in how we use energy is overdue.  But the "real" revolution will come when we learn as a society how to harvest it, not mine it.  That means going with renewables and efficiency, not traditional nuclear and fossil fuel systems that are just more of the same, and more expensive.

Analysis: The call for $45 trillion dollars of investment for clean energy to combat climate change is reminiscent of the French government's request to President Roosevelt in June, 1940 of "Send us clouds of airplanes!", when the Wehrmacht was rolling toward Paris, and which the US did not have quite at that time.

Going from complacency to panic is never a pretty picture, and this one is not.  I am certainly not doubting the need for a major transition of our energy infrastructure, but $45 trillion is an outlandish figure, even if one tries to build the battleship equivalent of energy, the nuclear power plant.  There is about two million megawatts of power systems in the world, double that for petroleum and natural gas fuel equivalents.  At 4 million megawatts, 45 trillion bucks would be over $11 a watt, which is likely if one goes for necessarily gold-plated nuke plants and other bloated monstrosities, not to mention the large annual amounts of increasingly scarce affordable fuel (yes, I'm including uranium) necessary to keep the behemoths running.

But going with a renewable energy equivalent of solar, wind, biomass, ocean and other green technologies, as well as strategic efficiency, would cost about half, or $5-6/watt, even with the large scale storage systems that would be needed for intermittent systems.  While $20-25 trillion is not a trifling sum, that amount spent on clean energy which won't leave behind radioactive poisons is manageable if phased in over 50 years.

Let's hope that a sense of urgency prevails before panic really sets in that causes good investment money to follow after bad.