Engineer-Poet - I had similar goals for "Sustainability", except that I was trying to pull old interest groups away from the current dysfunctional system rather than create new ones.
Another possibility. The scientists themselves are human and are themselves in denial and are unable to admit in print the fix we are in. It is kind of like going to a doctor and having him tell you that you have 4-6 months to live - how easy would it be to go out and tell others this grim news?
Right now, it is a crisis only in the minds of the doomers.
Engineer-Poet - True. However, a failure to act to head off a crisis practically guarantees we'll sleepwalk into one. In that sense, the doomers are not wrong so much as premature.
Some of this obstruction is more or less direct set to deliver product in the 2007 timeframe and also suitable for PHEV modification, and replacing it with a program of dubious feasibility and a very long time horizon), but some of it is more subtle, taking the form of misdirection.
This misdirection is evident in the shameless promotion of unready and perhaps impossible fixes, such as:
- Cellulosic ethanol.
- Oil from ANWR (at best, a fraction of what we could save with better CAFE or just plain price-driven demand destruction), and last but not least,
- Hy(pe)drogen.
In this climate of disinformation comes a paper from Purdue, titled Sustainable fuel for the transportation sector. The premise is rather simple: US production of biomass contains sufficient carbon to replace all our transportation fuel...
In the H2CAR paper, figures such as 239 billion kg/year of hydrogen from 58,000 km2 of solar PV panels are tossed off rather casually.... cost would be closer to $40 trillion. Clearly we're not going to do this. Another example of the disconnect between the researchers and reality is their proposed quantity and method of hydrogen production. Their most optimistic (smallest) quantity of hydrogen required is 239 billion kg/year, which they propose to produce from renewable electricity via electrolysis. The quantity of electricity required (at 100% efficiency, no less) is a staggering 9810 billion kWh/year2; this is nearly 2.5 times current annual US electric production.
Maybe, just maybe, this will help slay one more of the non-options so we can get on with the things that might actually work.