Battlefield and other emergency medics are sometimes confronted with more casualties than they can treat. Survival of the greatest number is their goal. What they have learned to do is to divide their patients into three groups:
- Those who will live even without immediate treatment. These are watched but left for later or evacuated for treatment elsewhere.
- Those who cannot be saved. These are left untreated.
- Those who can be saved, but only with immediate treatment. Attention is focused on these patients.
The concept of triage is useful beyond the medical context; in particular, it can be usefully applied to government policy-making. Energy technologies can be divided into similar groups:
- Technologies which will succeed with little or no assistance. These are best left alone.
- Technologies which are either failures or cannot succeed without permanent subsidies. These should be dropped.
- Technologies which are
The former should receive research; incentives and subsidies can push the latter over the hump.
- long-term or speculative or
- ready for prime time but need to build manufacturing volume to get their costs down.
Examples of technologies in each of these categories:
- No assistance or mild regulatory relief: petroleum, coal, conventional natural gas, coal-bed methane, off-grid solar PV, nuclear.
- Will never work without subsidies: fuel ethanol from grain, biodiesel from virgin oils.
- Speculative or long-term: fusion, hydrogen, OTEC, central solar PV, solar chimneys.
- Almost ready for prime time, but can use a push: wind power, distributed peaking solar PV, plug-in hybrid vehicles.
The energy bill which just headed for the President's desk makes serious mistakes in all of the above categories. For instance:
- Conventional fossil fuel producers, already raking in profits, got big subsidies. This is a complete waste of money.
- Ethanol from corn, which some still claim is energy-negative and even whose advocates admit yields perhaps a quarter of its gross production as actual net energy profit, also kept huge subsidies and received mandates for increased use.
- Technologies such as plug-in hybrids, which have the potential to replace perhaps half of all motor-fuel consumption with electricity, were shoehorned into the bill at the last minute and got token support of a few tens of millions of dollars.
- Measures which would have pushed wind across the experience curve to make it cheaper than coal power (a "renewable portfolio standard") were defeated outright.
I have seen no reports on the amount of money for photovoltaic R&D, biological photosynthetic hydrogen, battery technology, zinc-air battery demonstration projects, artificial photosynthesis, or any of the other possibilities out there; I suspect that they have made no news because they are trivial or even zero. Some of these are almost ready for production, some demand research money because of their potential, all have attracted next to no attention. We're not going to feel the pain from these omissions for a while any more than CARB's refusal to pump GO-HEV's in 1990 was felt before the turn of the century, but feel it we will.
In medical terms, this energy bill throws expert trauma teams at patients in the best of health and cadavers already cold while patients with great prospects for recovery but also great need are left bleeding in the halls. It's especially ironic that the US Senate is currently headed by a surgeon.