Energetics, or test number five in your Principles of Biology class

Energetics is the study of energy under transformation. It is also considered the hardest test in the introductory class, to which I can attest (I thought the class as a whole was easy, but that is neither here nor there). The reason I bring this up is because, in biological energetics, food and the molecules that make it up is broken down to create energy. This process involves a physical flow of the molecules for the energy to be produced. Both of these aspects, transforming something into energy and having that energy moved, are extremely important to modern society, at least as far as those who can read this blog are concerned. And, like everything else I seem to post about, the effects and consequences of this energy movement, even from one small area, can become global in scope. Maybe I should have stopped sleeping in class.

Now, I’m going to be talking about oil and coal and other fossil fuels, but by no means should that be taken that I think alternative energy is without fault. I even hate when people call it “clean energy.” It shows that someone failed their physics class in high school. In fact, I have changed my mind. Alternative energy is on the table for discussion. Grab your seatbelts, this will be a wild ride.

As you can see from my second Ind. Inq., dams are on my mind. I personally find it funny to think that such large constructs draw little attention to how much they can impact the region around them. Unlike building something of that magnitude on land, which really only effects its immediate area, dams constrict the fourth dimension of rivers: flow. Just like the atmosphere, rivers have mass movements as a natural part of their processes, and disturbing or disrupting these normal fluxes can have devastating results. Obviously, dams create large reservoirs behind them from the constricted flow the river suffers; The Three Gorges Dam project in China displaced 1.3 million people. What many people don’t think about, though, is that every location down river from the dam is affected, as well. Shanghai is almost 1,000 miles away, and it suffers the possibility of inundation because a lack of silt deposits to strengthen the city’s foundation. The interconnectedness of features in the world, again, is something that seems to be quickly forgotten about, but is extremely important.

Mitchell, in his essay Carbon Democracy (2008), posits that modern democratic politics is inextensibly tied to coal, and later oil. The control over the flow of energy is an utmost priority for the societies on which it is the bedrock for their current status. The same could be said for the importance of mitochondria in a cell (mitochondria are apparently so important, they actually contain their own independent set of DNA. The same is true for chloroplasts in plant cells. Even nature understands the implications of having a working energy transport system. And you thought the first paragraph had no relevance).  Many workers rights came about during the Industrial Revolution, when coal was the primary fuel, and coal miners the sole producers of it. This gave the workers and miners of coal plants and mines a great amount of political power. When oil gained dominance as a fuel source, policies were changed, and the corporations who extracted and transported the oil had the power, instead of the common worker. This is how the model works in present times.

It is interesting to bring up how alternative forms of energy would fall into these political processes. Would a new group of people gain power and importance, or would those companies already at the top keep their hold on the market? Evidence does not look good for new companies.  In the solar energy market, this can be seen through the life of the company to Solyndra. The new solar panels Solyndra promised were to be a new era of energy collection, with them capturing 12 to 14 percent of incoming sunlight and converting it to energy. The U.S. DOE gave a $536 million loan guarantee, and the company got $25 million dollar tax break from the state of California. Despite these huge benefits, the company went bankrupt in 2011 amid allegations of accounting fraud. A very inauspicious start to what have a great source of “clean energy,” or at least cleaner energy. It is my fear that the Solyndra scandal is only a prime example for the future of alternative energy solutions. It seems that only those already in power could change the source of energy, and they currently have no incentive to. So the DNA of our society remains with the controllers of energy. No wonder this was a hard test.