Creating A Biomess

Environment: Renewable energy has been rammed down our throats for so long that it's now widely accepted as a viable alternative. But a self-identified green scholar believes renewables violate nature.

"Renewables are not green," insists Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University in New York.

"If we want to minimize the rape of nature, the best energy solution is increased efficiency, natural gas with carbon capture and nuclear power," Ausubel writes in the current issue of the International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology.

Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller, is no energy industry shill. It's fair to say that he's an environmentalist. His university biographical summary says he "was one of the main organizers of the first U.N. World Climate Conference (Geneva, 1979), which substantially elevated the global warming issue on scientific and political agendas."

His background as a green is why Ausubel seems to be worried that some in the environmental movement would commit hereticide, the execution of heretics, against him -- in a professional sense, we hope. But the fact he dares to step outside environmentalist orthodoxy does make him a rich target for the greenshirts.

From his research, Ausubel concludes that renewables aren't green because "to reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, water and biomass, cause serious environmental harm."

It would take a wind farm more than 475 square miles in size, for instance, to generate the same amount of electrical power that a single 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant would produce.

Put another way, an area the size of Texas would have to be covered with windmills running 24 hours a day, along with the structures needed to store and transport the energy, to generate enough power to meet the 2005 U.S. electricity demand.

Biomass is even worse -- chewing up three to 10 times as much space as wind power. "Increased use of biomass fuel in any form is criminal," says Ausubel. "Humans must spare land for nature."

Hydro power? Nope. Ausubel figures it would take every drop of the yearly rainfall in Ontario, Canada -- 680,000 billion liters -- sitting behind a dam 200 feet high to provide 80% of the power supplied by that country's 25 nuclear plants.

Then what about solar? Again, no. The entire state of Connecticut would have to be covered in solar cells and associated retrieval and transport structures just to provide power to New York City.

One report by one man won't deter the eco-activists. But it might make things a bit quieter.