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A post by Lloyd Alter, the sage of Toronto, caught my eye this morning. Alter, who was the face of Treehugger for over a decade, paid tribute to the late economist and physicist Robert Ayers by reposting a section of Alter’s book The Story Of Carbon Upfront, which puts a spotlight on fossil fuels. Citing Ayers, Alter wrote,

“The economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services,” Ayers said. Alter built on that by saying in his book, “the purpose of the economy is to turn energy into stuff.”

Ayres doesn’t have much time for traditional economics, Alter said today, but he teaches us that economics is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, which is very convenient when thinking of energy and carbon. Ayers wrote, “The first law of thermodynamics, conservation of mass/energy, says (among other things that all industrial processes — extraction, reduction, synthesis, shaping and forming — generate waste residuals. The mass of residuals from industrial activity far exceeds the mass of materials.”

“Those economic processes consume energy and turn it into goods and services, waste heat, upfront carbon emissions, and eventually landfill. So those of us who call for fixing things instead of buying new, of buying less, of using less stuff on our buildings and our lives, are not doing our main economic function: consuming energy in the form of goods and services,” Alter writes. “Investment in renewable energy creates jobs, but then those solar panels just sit there generating power, whereas with fossil fuels, you always have to dig up more stuff.”

“Burning stuff creates wealth, and not just for the oil companies. We all play a role in this in our building, buying, or selling everything made with energy. The waste, the CO2, it is part of the deal,” Alter said. He cites Allison Bailes, who said, “As it turns out, we’ve known this limitation for nearly 200 years. A French kid named Sadi Carnot figured out that there’s a limit on the efficiency of heat engines.”

In his graphic novel Energy Slaves about Buckminster Fuller, Stuart MacMillan said, “Bucky saw that coal, oil, and gas were batteries for ancient sunshine that allowed civilization to, for the first time, live beyond its solar income.” That’s a very interesting insight. All fossil fuels are noting more than stored sunlight. By necessity, extracting and burning them adds to the amount of solar energy the Earth receives every day. Is it any wonder the Earth’s environment is destabilized by the addition of that extra energy?

Wasting Energy Is Big Business

Using data from 2023, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory created a graphic that shows how the US uses energy. The numbers are in quads, defined as one quadrillion British Thermal Units. The US used about 94 quads of energy in 2023. 28 quads were consumed by the transportation sector, but of those, only 5.87 quads — about 21% — were converted into forward progress. That means 79% was wasted as heat, carbon dioxide, and other exhaust emissions like oxides of nitrogen or sulfur, and fine particulate matter.

Alter adds that fully 15% of all the energy consumed for industrial purposes — 4 quads using the Livermore numbers — is used for refining petroleum products. Add it all up, and as Stanford University estimates, we are getting at most 10 to 12% efficiency out of the fuel input that moves our cars forward.

“The ICE-powered automobile is the world’s most effective tool for converting energy into money for oil companies, governments, road builders and developers. The fact that it is only 10% efficient is a feature, not a bug; the more oil burned, the more money made. This is why the energy transition is so difficult and takes so long,” Alter said.

This week in the Financial Times, Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at Oxford University, commented on the increase in the use of coal lately, largely to feed the voracious appetite of data centers. “Coal is evil stuff, from an environmental point of view,” he wrote. “But from an economic perspective, it is fantastically cheap, it is widely available, it can be stockpiled really easily, and it produces really intense heat.”

He said the mad rush for more electrical power means the world simply needs more of everything — more renewables, more nuclear, and more oil, gas, and coal. “Very sadly, there isn’t a transition” away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy, he said. Instead, it is an increase, in all directions.

That last sentence is what prompted Bill McKibben to write recently, “So the goal for the rest of us, as we resist Trump and resist climate change, is pretty clear — do everything we can to speed up this transition to clean energy, here and everywhere. Solar works, solar is cheap, and solar is liberating.”

He added, “Occam’s Razor … would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy.” McKibben was not the first to make that observation. George Carlin told us they same thing many years ago when he said, “The USA is an oil company with guns.”

Oil & Gas Subsidies

This week, Oil Change International released a report in which it claims “the federal government currently hands the fossil fuel industry an estimated $34.8 billion each year in direct subsidies, a figure that is most likely conservative due to a lack of accessible, reliable data. It excludes tens of billions of annual state, county, and municipal subsidies for fossil fuel production as well as federal support in the form of international public finance, military expenditures to protect fossil fuel supply or markets, or environmental and health costs of fossil fuel pollution.”

“Fossil fuel companies, which spend millions every year to rig our political system in their favor, receive a 30,000 percent return on investment in the forms of tax breaks, direct appropriations, cheap access to public lands, and other handouts from the federal government,” OCI says.

Readers may know that the International Monetary Fund puts the cost of direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies at around $6 trillion dollars, and all to protect an industry that wastes as much as 90% of the energy it provides. This is insanity on a global scale. Robert Reich today has his own take on this madness.

APS Ditches Clean Energy Pledges

Readers often ask, What does any of this have to do with clean tech? The answer is, in today’s hyper-partisan world, politics infects every aspect of daily life. Last month, during the second quarter earnings call, Arizona Public Service announced it would rescind its previous clean energy commitments, eliminate its 2030 targets of 65% clean and 45% renewable energy, and abandon its previous commitment to achieve a zero-carbon system by 2050. APS also stated that it is eliminating all previous “interim” clean energy targets it had planned to achieve before 2050.

This announcement leaves Arizona’s largest utility with no commitment to eliminate carbon emissions and only about 21% of its current energy portfolio coming from renewable energy. Today’s announcement is a reversal from years of public commitments to a clean energy transition that APS previously made in its Integrated Resource Plans and in other public statements.

The move prompted the Sierra Club to say in a blog post, “This announcement leaves Arizona’s largest utility with no commitment to eliminate carbon emissions and only about 21 percent of its current energy portfolio coming from renewable energy. Today’s announcement is a reversal from years of public commitments to a clean energy transition that APS previously made in its Integrated Resource Plans and in other public statements.”

So why would APS do this? Because the Energy Department under the control of Chris Wright is pounding the drum for more coal, more gas, more nuclear — anything but solar and wind. But that makes no sense. We all know renewables are the cheapest source of new energy, and we assume, based on what we all know about Adam Smith’s unseen hand, that being the least expensive alternative should make them the first choice for all.

But that analysis omits the point Lloyd Alter made, which is that wasting energy is precisely what the energy companies want us to do. It’s the basis of their enormous profits and they will do anything to prevent an interruption of their revenue stream.

There is very little we as individuals can do other than vote the crazies out of office. But we can choose to spend our money on solar and battery storage, we can choose to drive on electrons instead of molecules, we can convert to heat pumps to heat and cool our homes and heat our water, and we can participate in demand response programs if our local utility offers them.

We can make a difference, no matter how small our contribution to a more sustainable world. Chris Wright can browbeat APS into backing away from its clean energy promises but he can’t prevent us from making individual choices that align with our values. Our voices can influence others, if we let them be heard.