FRANKLIN COUNTY -- “Politicians don’t want to be the bearers of bad news. You’ll hear a lot of nonsense and deception connected to energy in the near future. Quite frankly, both parties don’t get it,” Dr. George Markowsky stated.

The UMO professor went on to say that citizens need to take action, because if you wait for the government, you’ll be freezing in a tent burning the last piece of driftwood you found on the beach.

“It is relatively easy to focus on doom and gloom when looking at Maine’s energy future,” Markowsky said. “In fact, it is necessary to do so to really understand the dilemma we are in and to galvanize the energy and dedication to actually do something about it.”

Markowski, Hill, Eastler and LaBrecque all offer very gloomy forecasts for what’s in the future for Maine both near and in years to come. They also state it’s very much the real forecast that cannot or will not be avoided. They do however, have solutions, which will be presented in future articles.

“This coming century could get very ugly. It could easily become the ugliest century ever, which is saying a lot with the 20th century having two world wars. This is the problem –- population is growing and available energy is shrinking. It’s not a pretty picture,” Markowsky explained.


LOCAL IMPACT

Moving to a local front in terms of magnitude above and beyond our costs for oil and gas this winter, we look at the MSAD #58 school district. At present the district uses 150,000 gallons of fossil fuel each year. Of the 150,000 gallons, 110,000 gallons is used as heating oil and 40,000 gallons is used in transportation.

The recently approved budget for next year was set at fuel prices being forecasted at $3.30 a gallon. Already, district superintendent Quenten Clark has to find a way to find another $100,000 for fuel due to soaring fuel costs. “We had to get rid of teachers this year and I’m afraid we didn’t get rid of enough,” Clark said.

At present, every dollar increase in fuel cost represents $150,000 in district cost –-that’s three teachers, Clark explained.

At what point do you realize that you can’t do education properly due to such reductions in staff and you’re forced to close the Strong school as an example and pack kids into Phillips due to the Strong school’s high energy consumption rate, or combine Stratton and Kingfield schools? Clark asked.


PERSPECTIVE ON OIL

“To understand the magnitude we have to understand that we use nearly 21 million barrels of oil every day in this country. Every two days the U.S. uses enough barrels of oil to circle the globe when placed end to end, or another way to look at it is, if we line these barrels up end to end they will stretch from Maine to California four rows wide with just one day’s usage,” LaBrecque explained.

LaBrecque is a Franklin County inventor born in Farmington and raised in Jay. He graduated form Mt. Blue High school in 1973 and regularly gives public lectures on energy.

Understanding the magnitude of the issue is truly necessary when looking for alternative energy recourses, LaBrecque explained. In this case he refers to the development of ethanol as a gasoline alternative.

“Think about driving from Maine to California day after day and looking as far as the eye can see at four rows of barrels. And at the end of the week you’ll have seen the oil we use in just one day,” LaBrecque said. He chuckled and said, “imagine when you arrived in California a politician is standing there telling you that he just voted on a bill to try and fill these oil barrels with what they can squeeze out of corn taken from our precious food supply.”

“What do you think about a law like this when expressed in these terms?” he asked.

Richard Hill explains that the energy we use in this county comes primarily from oil, natural gas and coal with some contributions from nuclear and small contributions from hydro and biomass.

“We talk about building windmills for example and some say that it will free us from the ties to Saudi Arabian oil. That’s bologna,” Hill said. We don’t use petroleum to make electricity or use wind power to power vehicles, he explained.

Hill explained that less than one-percent of U.S. energy is represented in No. 2 fuel oil used as residential space heat.


SO MUCH FOR SO LITTLE

LaBrecque explained another perspective in understanding energy today.

“On the other end of the spectrum, man’s physical ability to produce work on a consistent basis can be measured at only around 45 watts,” LaBrecque explained. In pre-industrial revolution days man multiplied his power with slaves, hired help and horses.”

Harnessing the work of a horse gave man 746 watts of leverage (hence 1 Horse Power) which produces the power of 15 men.

Today, to put it into perspective, “each of us demands 12 kilowatts of power, the equivalent of having 266 personal slaves working for us 24 hours a day,” LaBrecque explained.
As examples of relationships of energy, LaBrecque explained, that 3,000 slaves are required to push a car down the road. A tractor trailer truck driver controls the equivalent power of 13,000 slaves. We need 10 slaves to crank the compressor in our home refrigerator. About 5,000 slaves are needed to crank the refrigeration compressors at a typical supermarket. The power of three million slaves is needed to lift a 747 off the ground and to reach altitude and four million slaves are needed to push an aircraft carrier along the water.

“Today, the poorest Americans enjoy the services of more slaves than were ever owned by the richest nobles, and lives better than most ancient kings. Never in the history of mankind did we ever have so much for doing so little. The last 70 years might just be considered the standard for the best era in the history of mankind,” LaBrecque said.

About a century and a half ago, 95 percent of the world’s energy was supplied by man and his animals with oil accounting for only five-percent of the mix, but today less than five-percent of our energy comes from man and animal. Our high standard of living is the product of high energy consumption and high technology.

“When man is forced to live with little energy he has to work every day of his life to provide basic food, clothing and shelter. Without energy, man’s security is vulnerable to those of a higher energy society for when man faces opponents with greater energy resources the party with the greater resources always prevails,” says LaBrecque.


WHO'LL SOLVE THE PROBLEM?

Markowsky said in an energy forum last month that he was there to give people the bad news and he can do that because he’s not running for office.

“Business as usual can not happen. The sooner you can accept that and start doing something about it, the less painful the transition will be,” Markowsky explained.
The professor said the transition will be painful and is already is painful with soaring fuel prices. “Either we solve the problem or Mother Nature will solve it for us.

And Mother Nature has no problem solving the problem.”
Markowsky disagreed with the people running around saying they’re going to save the earth. “The earth doesn’t care –-we got to save ourselves,” he explained, stating the earth doesn’t care if its inhabitants are humans or cockroaches.

Hill, as he has in the past, weighs in on the CO2 in the atmosphere and the potential effects of global warming. He provides an analogy on the amount of carbon dioxide that is presently in our atmosphere. Using the University of Maine football stadium which seats 8,700 people, he said that if people wore colored hats representing different molecules in the atmosphere and the CO2 color was brown, then there would be four people in the stadium representing CO2 with brown hats. “The CO2 in the atmosphere is small,” Hill said, but warned that each year man adds six giga-tons of new CO2 through emissions coming from fossil fuels.

Hill explained an alarming number by concluding that there are 6,000 giga-tons of carbon still in the form of oil, coal and natural gas in the earth.

“The further we go on sucking the guts out of the earth in the form of coal, oil and natural gas,” the more we have to be concerned with global warming.

“The idea of running out of fossil fuel is absurd. We’ll first run out of atmosphere to put the carbon dioxide in. There is no question about that,” Hill explained.

The former Dean of Engineering explained that thinking we’re in trouble now is still an open question in terms of global warming emissions. “But there is no question that in the future, we can’t do what we’ve done in the past,” Hill explained.

The former professor and longtime lecturer provided some solutions to be covered in future issues of this series.
Eastler demonstrates that oil is not the only mineral we are in deep trouble with. He brings it to our attention that we now import most all precious minerals such as copper, aluminum, titanium, cobalt, lead, etc.

“Not having these strategic minerals in the U.S. inventory will make it very difficult to carry out the changes we need to make to become more energy efficient,” said Eastler.


MAGNITUTE

LaBrecque has said that the idea of his presentations is to allow people to become better informed by explaining things in terms they can better understand. To understand the magnitude he uses different perspectives.

“If we were to replace a Seabrook-size nuclear power plant with wind turbines we would need six Mars Hill-size projects in each of all 16 Maine counties. How many counties have six large mountains?

If we were to follow through with the proposed coal-fired plant in Wiscasset and successfully sequester the CO2 emissions as discussed, we would have to compress 10 barrels of CO2 to 5,000 pounds pressure every second of the day. The practicality of such a feat would be ridiculous.” And the energy consumed in the sequestration process would be enormous.

Hill and LaBrecque disagree with the governor saying that Maine is the Saudi Arabia of wood fiber. “Clear cutting every standing stick of wood in Maine would provide the nation with 2.5 days of energy. How long would it take for the woods to grow back again?”

LaBrecque explained that converting the Veazie Maine natural gas power plant to wood fiber requires 400, 96,000 pound truckloads of wood every day supported by a 1.4 million acre sustainable wood lot which is about 10 percent of our total wood production acreages. “Who wants 800 trucks a day to pass by their house?”

LaBrecque explained that the United States uses about seven times more energy per capita than China, 24 times more than India and 42 more then Africa. As these countries demand a higher standard of living, they will use more oil forcing the price to go higher.

“The world dynamics has changed and nobody likes the fat cat who gets 7, 24 or 42 times more cookies than anyone else. What do we tell these other countries who want to increase their share of world oil?” LaBrecque asked.

Markowsky said that starting this summer we have to start doing more with less. “How do we come in for a soft landing? How do we do this without massive disruption, without people starving and freezing to death? That’s a challenge.”