(from an article on "renewable energy")

ENERGY WATCH, NOVEMBER 15, 1990, Kenton K. Brubaker

My resident scholar colleague, architect Jacob Schiere, keeps insisting, "There is no such thing as renewable energy." He is even suspect of the term "renewable resources." Perhaps his year in India and his seven years as an MCC health/ agriculture specialist in Guatemala have made him some sort of environmental skeptic. Maybe his iconoclastic personality prompts him to attack our sacred vocabulary. Why should we refrain from referring to trees and other energy crops as renewable resources and sources of renewable energy?

Trees represent a major source of fuel throughout the world, especially for cooking food in poorer countries. Many women and children spend more time searching for fuel to cook their food than they spend in growing their crops. An indication of fuelwood scarcity is the complaint by many of the world's poor that it costs more to heat the pot than to fill it. Lester Brown in his Global Action Plan (State of the World 1989) asked for the planting of 170 million hectares of trees over the next 15 years to supply our fuel, pulp, and timber needs as well as reduce soil erosion and global warming. The Worldwatch Institute estimated this would cost about 80 billion dollars, about the same as the Stealth bomber program.

But Jacob Schiere says this is not renewing our energy supply; it is replacing it, at considerable cost, we might note. What we are trying to say when objecting to the use of the term "renewable" is that energy flows through the biological system. The energy that runs our planet originates with that magnificent solar radiation generator, the sun. These bouncing photons are captured by the photosynthetic machinery of the green leaf as carbon-bond energy of sugars, then burned by living cells to do work and produce heat. The heat then becomes waste and radiates out into space. That energy is never renewed; it has escaped from our system forever. We can only replace it, using new solar energy which arrives daily from the sun. Loren Eiseley had it right when he said, "The human brain, so frail, so perishable, so full of inexhaustible dreams and hungers, burns by the power of the leaf."

At what cost, then, do we replace the trees we consume? When wood is burned for heat, the carbon returns to the atmosphere. Too much carbon dioxide emission leads to the global warming phenomenon, a cost which we have not yet been able to calculate. Global warming demands more cooling, more refrigerators and air-conditioners. This means more chloroflorocarbons or other coolants, which if they escape from the systems, contribute to depletion of the ozone layer, another environmental cost. As we burn the wood, we also turn other component of the plant material into gases or ash. The sulfur escapes into the atmosphere, and returns as acid rain, another environmental cost of great consequence. Other minerals, such as phosphorus and potassium in the ash, may end up in landfills or be leached into waterways and oceans. If these are not returned to the forest land, fertilizers may need to be employed to grow the next crop of trees. This often posts a prohibitive expense in reforestation projects and may for ce the area into becoming a grassy brushland or even lead to desert formation. These are additional costs to the global ecosystem.

A critical analysis of our energy vocabulary can be very revealing. Simply switching from the word renewable to replaceable helps bring into focus the true costs of our human activities. Thanks to some sensitivities developed in the highlands of Guatemala, we can learn to appreciate our use of resources and the costs of their replacement.