Earth Day yesterday highlighted a lot of environmental issues such as global warming and pollution. But if you think things are bad now consider this: by 2050 the world is going to need 30 terrawatts, 30 trillion watts, just to keep pace with our current energy use. We’re using 12 or 13 terrawatts now worldwide. So we’re going to have to come up with 17 more and find some way to do it that doesn’t make the environment worse. How?

Biomass is a popular option, but let’s say we plant crops everywhere they’ll grow, which is only about 5% of the planet (remember 70% is ocean). If we did plant everywhere, and then we burned it all to get the maximum energy possible (without doing anything at all to keep it clean), we’d get maybe 7 terrawatts. We’re still ten short, and there’s smoke everywhere.

How about wind? If you extracted every bit of energy available worldwide in the wind 30 feet above the ground you get 2 terrawatts. More if you can figure out how to tap the fast moving jetstream at 30,000 feet, but we’ll use the 2 terrawatt number until we figure out how to build really tall windmills. Still eight short.

Water? Almost not worth the effort. Dam ever river in the world, and you’d get a lot of backed up silt, a lot less fish, and a mere .7 terrawatts of energy. Call it one terrawatt in round numbers, and now we’re seven short.

Okay, how ’bout nuclear? It’s great for energy efficiency–a nuclear powerplant can generate a gigawatt–and there’s no CO₂ emissions as a by-product. But if we want 7 terrawatts of energy by 2050 from nuclear power, that means we’ll need to build 7,000 powerplants in 45 years. That’s one every 2.3 days!

Okay then, coal? Good news, bad news; it’s cheap and it’s dirty. There’s lots of it too, but so far we haven’t figured out how to convert it to energy without polluting ourselves to death, even to extinction. Not that that has stopped the Chinese. Their coal consumption has doubled since 1990. They’re building the equivalent of two mid-size power plants a week, adding the capacity of the entire UK power grid each year. And they recently passed the US in CO₂ emissions. We’ll skip coal.

So what have we got if we do all this? No more food for us or for cattle because we’ve burned everything that’ll grow, we’ve stopped up every dammed river, and we’ve covered the countryside with nuclear cathedrals to consumption. All just to keep pace with existing energy needs.

But if everyone on the globe wanted to live like an American in 2050 we have to assume that their energy needs (and ours) go up with GDP, so we really need 102 terrawatts, not 30.

See the problem?

Now consider this:

• In spite of America’s growing demand for energy, no new petroleum refineries have been built and no new nuclear power plants have been ordered in the past 30 years. (France now derives 78% of its electric power from nuclear sources; Lithuania, 72%; Belgium, 54%; Armenia, 42%; Japan, 30%; and the United States, 19%.)

• There are now 12 energy companies in the world whose reserves exceed those of the largest US energy firm, ExxonMobil.

• During the past 30 years, 40% of new petroleum production came from industrialized nations. It is estimated that during the next 40 years, 90% will come from developing nations.

We’re promoting the idea of working from home–telecommuting–for work/life balance reasons, among others. But there are also some compelling environmental reasons too. Remember, as we discussed yesterday, if everyone that could work from home did, we could cut petroleum demands by 80%. That’s a start.

So while the work from home idea may seem radical, it looks to us as if it’s inevitable, and some other very extreme changes are going to occur in the next few years that we all need to think about today. The future ain’t what it used to be.

UPDATE: Nice to know I’m not the only one that thinks our nation could use a little adult leadership.