Many have forgotten the early signs of the global recession and blame is generally laid at the feet of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. This column has demonstrated that the collapse of the global financial system was an accelerator to the global recession and will be an impediment to a more rapid reconstruction of the major world economies. Others have pointed to the instability of the US economy juxtaposed to that of the Chinese.

America’s economic existence depended on credit-driven spending by consumers buying more than the country exported, resulting in an escalating and massive trade deficit. China on the other hand, depended on foreign investment for its rapid growth of an infrastructure that exported to the rest of the world. China, with an undervalued currency, then amassed foreign reserves in US dollars that made it a trade surplus economic power.

The fundamental signals of collapse were the rapidly increasing prices of petroleum and its products and the capital-related commodities (steel, copper etc) that the emerging countries required to sustain their economic growth. Though the trade deficit of the US could stretch the elastic band of global economic stability, what contributed considerably was the inability of the petroleum producers to meet the increasing demand for energy.

Many have attempted to refer the rapidly increasing prices of energy to speculation in the futures markets. This column, like the US Congress, has identified the major culprit as the supply and demand mismatch. But global economic development as we knew it needed cheap and abundant energy. Hence the world had to look again for a quick means of supplying energy from other sources. In so doing another damaging result was the corresponding increases in food prices as land was expropriated for ethanol production.

I have gone to this length to demonstrate that the global economy is on its knees today not primarily because of the collapse of the financial system but because of the energy crisis-Peak Oil, the inability of the petroleum producers to meet the growing demand for energy, particularly from the emerging economies.

For the global economy to recover the world has to either address the basic problem of supplying energy to its traditional economies, using alternative sources of energy, or change its perception of economic development.

It is difficult to envisage the US consumer giving up her car, summer air-conditioning and winter heating or the use of electricity in support of the exploding information society. Hence the solution is in finding and utilising alternative energy sources that are fairly cheap, easily available and reliable.

To date there is much talk about wind, solar and even natural gas hydrates. But an important consideration of any of these replacements for petroleum is that it has to be cheap and ’always’’ available. Though we will indeed use wind and solar etc, the major consideration is what engineers call the ’capacity factor’ of the source. For example, you may have a wind turbine rated at 100 kW which can give maximum electric energy output over 30 days of 7,200 kW-hrs. However, the wind does not blow all of the time and the actual output will be much less.

In North America the capacity factor, the ratio of actual to maximum output is nine to 18 per cent, compared to a gas turbine electric plant that can run for months at 80 per cent. The only existing source of energy that is cheap and has the capacity factor of our traditional energy plants is nuclear energy.

Listen to Malcolm Rawlingson of Energy Pulse in his Most Well Kept Secrets About Nuclear Energy: ’Nuclear power can easily meet the energy demands of the entire world; the fuel supply to operate these reactors for hundreds of years is cheap and available in Canada and Australia; it is the safest method of producing electricity in the world; combined with desalination plants it can provide all the fresh water the world requires; combined with hydrogen plants it can provide all the fuels and lubricants required for our present transportation systems; nuclear waste is recyclable and the plants are 100 per cent emission-free and last, nuclear plant employees do not glow in the dark.’’

Why then is the world not using nuclear energy as France is doing? The simple answer is that until now we have allowed the fanatics to fool us into believing that a nuclear power plant is a nuclear bomb waiting to explode

The world will go to nuclear energy, not because there is no more oil and gas but because they would have become economically and environmentally uncompetitive against nuclear energy. For yet another reason our petroleum-based export economy is unsustainable.

maryking@tstt.net.tt