The New York Times proposes “economic growth has been ecologically costly, and so a movement in favor of “degrowth” is growing”.
The American Association For The Advancement of Science however, in the article Using the ocean to run a heat engine by: Steven A. Edwards, argues the opposite. It references a 1976 article “How Long until Doomsday?” by, science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle published in Galaxy magazine that was a rebuttal to the Club of Rome's book called The Limits to Growth that proposed economies going forward would be severely resource-limited.
One way out of the global energy dilemma, according to Pournelle, was to harness the heat accumulating in the oceans, which he pointed out, from the Gulf Stream alone, was 75 times more times than the energy being used in the United States at that time.
Kevin Trenberth, in his book “The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System” estimates the Earth’s Energy Imbalance due to global warming is about 500 terawatts, or about 25 times the global energy consumption. And UNESCO reports the rate of ocean warming has doubled in the past 20 years and the rate of sea level rise has doubled over the course of the past 30 years.
Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, but global warming is precisely the opposite. It is too much heat chasing virtually no consumption which it is claimed would be too expensive using the ocean thermal energy conversion Pournelle and the American Association For The Advancement of Science advocate. But the fact is this is a fallacy.
Nukes are being offered as an alternative, but as the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis pointed out recently, small modular reactors are still too expensive, too slow and too risky as was the larger cousin, the Voglte 3 and 4 plants which cost about $20,000/kwh. Whereas OTEC plants of similar capacity would cost about $1500/kwh.
The current cost of the NuScale and X-Energy SMRs are similar to the Voglte plants and the GE-Hitachi version is about half that but still 5 times OTEC.
The fossil fuel industry hopes that carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere will save their bacon, but as Wired asked and answered the question How Much Energy Would It Take to Pull Carbon Dioxide out of the Air? If we wanted to remove enough CO2 to get back to the preindustrial level of 280 ppm, it would take 2.39 x 1020 joules of energy every year about the world's total annual energy consumption. And to just keep even with the total 37 billion metric tons of emissions that are currently being adding to the atmosphere every year, it would take about 1,000 Vogtle’s worth of energy.
As wired points out, this tech, CDR, won't save us from climate catastrophe.
But as Paul Curto, former chief technologist with NASA has noted, OTEC is by far the most balanced means to face the challenge of global warming. It is also the one that requires the greatest investment to meet its potential. It is a most intriguing answer that can save us from Armageddon. It is a true triple threat against global warming. It is the only technology that acts to directly reduce the temperature of the ocean, eliminates carbon emissions, and increases carbon dioxide absorption at the same time as it generates portable fuel that is portable and efficient. It can create millions of jobs and is a serious contender for the future multi-trillion-dollar energy economy.
An investment in OTEC’s potential pays off economically, societally as well as ecologically.