Spencer Schneier
     Staff Writer

Energy is arguably the most important element of modern society.

There is a direct relationship between humanity’s ability to utilize energy and its ability to grow and develop.

If you reject this notion, I would suggest you stop reading here, because you should go read a history textbook instead.

Getting that out of the way, energy is currently at a bit of an odd place. We can harness larger amounts of it today than ever before and we have a plethora of options.

Yet, there are a lot of politicians and engineers making a lot of claims about our energy future, but they have various motives and incentives that bias them from taking informed positions.

This article is going to be an attempt to simplify the discourse to barebones pros and cons about each option and to try and dispel some of the absolute nonsense that has become commonplace.

The first important distinction is the difference between clean energy and sustainable energy and why that matters.

Clean energy, while it does not have a formal definition, is going to be used in this context as energy that is low in greenhouse gas emissions.

Many are proponents of clean energy as they view it as a core element of overcoming climate change. If you do not understand why climate change is widely accepted as a human-caused phenomenon, I would suggest doing a Google search for a good explanation as this column is not going to attempt to explain consensus science — otherwise I would need to waste a lot of time explaining the role gravity plays in preventing us all from floating off into space.

Under this definition, solar, geothermal, wind, hydro and a few others will be classified as clean energy. Because this definition is only including greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear energy will also be included as a clean energy (more on that later).

Sustainable energy is a related but separate notion.

For a resource to be sustainable, it has to be continuously renewable economically, as well as from an engineering standpoint (paying humans to run in a wheel is theoretically sustainable, except for when you consider the cost of paying enough humans to run on hamster wheels to power your home).

Being low in greenhouse gas emissions is another requirement for sustainable energy, because ideally humans will want to be able to continuously use this energy. Of course, if the planet warms up too much, that becomes difficult.

Then you have fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.

Fundamentally these are digging up the fossils of plants from an era in Earth’s history titled the Carboniferous Period, which occurred 360 to 286 million years ago, per energyquest.ca.gov.

During this time, the earth was covered in plants. Through natural processes over hundreds of millions of years, these fossils were converted into the materials that are now burned en masse to fuel the planet. They are high in carbon content (as we know plants to be), which will be notable later.

Now that we have clear working definitions for all the terms, let’s take a specific look at some of the implications.

First of all, climate change and renewability are two entirely separate problems.

Climate Change is caused at a basic level by the widespread emissions of greenhouse gasses (one of which is carbon), and is a near-term problem as humanity is already seeing some effects from climate change. It is important for humanity to reverse climate change as it presents an existential risk, or a risk that will have large negative effects on humanity and can not be undone.

Renewability, on the other hand, is a long-term problem. Even if one rejects climate change, humanity must begin to move away from fossil fuels as the process by which they are created (geological era with lots of plants for 100 million years followed by hundreds of millions of years of natural processes) makes engineering them repeatedly to meet the demands of billions of humans very difficult, if not impossible.

Next, it is important to note that nuclear energy is a safe, zero-emission, relatively affordable energy source that could help humanity cut its emissions at scale in the next decade.

There are relatively few issues with nuclear, with one exception being that it does produce waste, and we have not figured out a sustainable way to dispose of the waste.

One potential solution to this problem was shut down — after decades of work and billions of tax dollars, mind you — by Sen. Harry Reid because he changed his mind, and through corrupt dealings, was able to shut down the project that could have provided an outlet for nuclear energy waste. Suffice it to say, his crusade was not an environmental one at all.

The notion that nuclear energy can lead to governments obtaining nuclear weapons is probably untrue, as the materials needed to make a bomb are quite different and difficult to procure.

There is some debate on this matter, but generally the evidence seems to suggest it would not be easy to go from energy-production to weapons-production — not to mention the challenges with actually deploying a warhead. In terms of civilian and worker risk, nuclear is still clearly safer than natural gas, oil and coal, per Forbes.

Lastly, it is critical to understand that solar energy is a more plausible and sustainable option than any of the energy types discussed above, though it is still a few years away from being a potential primary energy source.

One common (bad) argument that is taken with solar energy is how it only is profitable when the government intervenes to make it so.

Why don’t we compare it to free market-funded cheap energies like fossil fuels. As the Natural Resource Defense Council notes, Internationally, between $775 million and $1 billion dollars are given each year to the fossil fuel industry by governments. Whoops. There goes that narrative.

It was difficult to pin down an exact figure for how much in subsidy solar receives, but it is almost certainly less than $775 million per year internationally.

There are some problems with solar in terms of when it produces energy, as people generally use more energy during the morning and night than they do during the day, which is when solar is at its peak generation levels, but advancements in battery technology are likely going to help fix this problem, like Elon Musk’s Tesla cars.