President Obama has repeatedly offered a vision for the future of America’s economy. He talks a lot about “green energy”, i.e. non-fossil fuel energy (or renewable carbon sources) that will take the place of the dirty fossil fuels on which our economy depends (and which cause global warming). He tells us that green energy is the economic sparkplug for the future; in creating a green energy infrastructure, we will create a vast number of new jobs and economic opportunities for American businesses. We can thus avert the crisis envisioned once “peak oil” is reached (perhaps in 20 to 40 years), and save the planet from climate catastrophe to boot. Sounds great!

Unfortunately, it may not work. Most green energy sources have BIG problems and drawbacks attached to them. There was a good article recently in the Washington Post (of all places) about this. It turns out that both wind and solar power will require vast expanses of land and the construction of thousands of miles of transmission lines (since the places where the sun shines the most and the wind blows the most are very far from the population centers where power is needed.) There will be plenty of environmental consequences from that alone. Next, because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, we will still need back-up power sources that can run anytime; most likely, good old fossil fuel plants.

Furthermore, both solar and wind power need rare earth elements that are mined in one place – China. And guess what – China wants to build the wind turbines and solar panels themselves and then sell them to us. And they can probably do it a lot cheaper, given all the low-cost (but talented and reliable) labor they have available. So much for domestic job creation.

Then there’s nuclear power, but that has lots of problems too. Such as what to do with the spent radioactive fuel; we still haven’t solved that problem after 40 or 50 years of nuclear power use. And there may be another problem coming over the hill – there may not be enough high-grade raw uranium available. (Right now, US nuclear plants get 50% of their uranium from Russia, from former Soviet nuclear weapons! And yet, uranium prices are about 5 times higher than they were in 2001, and may soon shoot up further).

There is still a lot of uranium ore out there, but it could become so expensive to process that nuclear power would not be as economically beneficial as fossil fuels have been. Ditto for corn ethanol; without government subsidies, it would be quite expensive, hardly returning more energy than used to produce it and get it to the right place. There may be other biomass fuel technologies coming over the horizon that may be more efficient (e.g., switchgrass), but they will only be able to assume a small percentage of the role now played by oil, gas and coal.

What about energy conservation and efficiency? They are happening, and they do help. BUT, they won’t be enough, especially when the population of the planet is growing quickly (6.8 billion today, could hit 8 billion by 2025), and billions of people in developing nations long to achieve the life-style of the west.

The bottom line, I believe, is that the world and its economy will have a growing energy shortage over the coming decades; and right now we don’t have any “magic bullets” to deal with it, despite Mr. Obama’s visions for a “green energy economy”. As our highly-accessible fossil fuel sources become more and more scarce, and as oil, gas and coal thus become more expensive, the standards of living that we became accustomed to in America and Western Europe (and which China and India are struggling hard to achieve), may not be sustainable. And that’s even before we throw in the costs of climate change, either in terms of actual damage (e.g. crop and water shortages), or in terms of taxes and credit trade arrangements meant to limit carbon emissions. (Or both, actually).

Unless another energy revolution comes along, akin to the adoption of coal in the 18th and 19th centuries and of oil in the 20th, then there will be a lot of unhappy people forced to accept lower living standards than their parents and grandparents experienced. Unhappy people do not make for good national governance and international relations. Wind and solar and nuclear and biomass energy sources are useful, but they just can’t do what petroleum did for us; they just don’t pack the energy punch and versatility and portability and low-cost that oil has (or had, speaking of cost).

We will need an energy miracle (I’m still praying for cold fusion) to keep 8 or 9 billion people on our planet even remotely happy. Without it, there are going to be some big changes in the future; and many of them won’t be pretty.