The strip of States from Texas to North Dakota had to be useful for something–beyond nuclear warhead storage, cows, and a rapt audience for Fox News. The middle strip of country blows. Literally. Some of the most consistent winds in the world blow across these States. For wind power, consistency is everything.

A modern windmill is pretty fantastic. Blades half as long as a football field slowly rotate around a hub to generate an astonishing three megawatts of electricity. Over a year, that’s about as potent as twelve-thousand barrels of oil.

All windmills get their energy from slowing down the wind a bit, capturing energy as rotational force. To generate much energy, you need many windmills distributed regularly where the wind blows. Almost all of the investment and cost is upfront–during the manufacturing, placement and wiring up of the mills. This is the opposite of a coal-fired plant, where most of the lifetime costs are buying up fuel to run the plant. Once you’ve built and placed your wind farm, so long as there is wind, you’re basically generating electricity for free.

This actually amplifies the uncertainty of investing in wind power. Building a coal power plant costs less (per megawatt) upfront. And the plant will reliably produce a certain amount of energy, so long as you buy coal. If you can’t count on the wind blowing steadily for decades, the much higher starting costs seem scarier and scarier.

Where you build your wind farm really matters. You want some place close to where people want to buy energy and where the wind is totally consistent, where it blows the same speed every day. Here’s where technological advances are really helping: Climate models and detailed records going back decades help us pinpoint where the winds are the best, along with where we think the wind will be the best in the future.

Wind’s energy comes from differences in pressure. Sunlight hits the atmosphere, heating it. Then its gas molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen) get jittery from that solar energy, bouncing around more and increasing the local pressure. They start to move en masse, seeking lower pressure points in the atmosphere. Gravity from the sun, the moon, and the earth all tug, deflecting their course. The molecules of gas in the atmosphere also feel the planet turning beneath them. All of this together makes up the wind.

The rub is, all of the pollutants we’ve added to the atmosphere are changing how the atmosphere interacts with sunlight in relatively unpredictable ways. (This is global warming or climate change.) So, where the wind blows now might not be where the wind will blow in a few decades. Our continued belching of greenhouse gases makes building a wind farm riskier, and therefore less attractive, than building a fossil fuel plant.

For now, we could use better transmission lines to connect Midwestern wind farms with major American cities. And we can improve our wind prediction tech–including new systems that account for climate change–to take some of the risk out. But boy, talk about your screwy logic. The things prompting our desire for alternative energy–climate change, pollutants–are what make wind power, by itself, an unlikely candidate to replace fossil fuels as our major energy source.

(For more, here’s a comprehensive technical report on wind power.)

Longtime readers know of my aversion to compact fluorescent lightbulbs:

The “mercury vapor” that fluorescent bulbs require is quite toxic. While new compact fluorescent bulbs are voluntarily limited to five milligrams of mercury each, as little as a tenth of a milligram per square yard will make you seriously ill. Shaking hands, drooling, irritability, memory loss, depression, weakness—sounds like fun. And that’s what happens to adults; kids can be permanently injured by mercury exposure. If you break one of these bulbs in your house—and think of all the times a bulb breaks—the current advice is to open a window and run, not to return for at least 15 minutes. Whereas if it’s a traditional bulb, you grab a broom and screw in a new one.

And even if you manage to not accidentally dump hazardous waste in your living room, what do you do with a fluorescent bulb when it just plain wears out? Most places cannot recycle fluorescent tubes.

There is another. LED (light emitting diodes) have a similar energy efficiency to fluorescent bulbs with a far friendlier environmental impact. In the least, they involve no mercury.

Great! Why not use them everywhere? Huge expense. Most LEDs are based upon a substrate of sapphire. Urk. Requiring a precious stone means LED lightbulbs are about twenty times more expensive than traditional lightbulbs.

Enter some clever researchers at Purdue University:

The Purdue researchers have solved this problem by developing a technique to create LEDs on low-cost, metal-coated silicon wafers, said Mark H. Oliver, a graduate student in materials engineering who is working with Sands.

(Who would think something good could come from Indiana?)

Replacing the sapphire with silicon (made from sand) makes the bulbs fantastically cheaper. Good work people. Expect the cheaper, environmentally sound and energy efficient bulbs in stores in about two years.

Former Vice President Al Gore, seeking to shake up an energy debate that is focused mostly on drilling, challenged the United States to shift its entire electricity sector to carbon-free wind, solar and geothermal power within 10 years, and use that power to fuel a new fleet of electric vehicles.

Can it be done?

To answer that, let’s get to know our fossil fuels by rewinding to the Carboniferous era. Pangaea has just come together, with the fusing of the Northern and Southern super continents. Dropping sea levels have generated many new swampland real estate opportunities. Enter lignin, a chemical compound that has made wood hard for 350 million years.

These swamps were filled with plants held together by this funny, new substance—a substance too new to be eaten by microbes. Rather than degrade, the remains of lignin-baring plants soon filled swamps (much like how we’ve filled the oceans with plastic grocery bags).

Lignin, like most things in life, is made up of long chains of carbon atoms. All of this carbon-containing waste built up, becoming buried over hundreds of millions of years before bacteria evolved to eat lignin. And free oxygen didn’t reach this material, either, so those untouched hydrocarbon chains entombed deep in rock became coal. Similarly, algae buried under the ocean floor, without oxygen, eventually becomes oil and natural gas.

Convert that story to hard numbers: All of the fossil fuel consumed in 1997 represented over 400 years of the total plant and animal growth on the ancient planet Earth.

Almost all living systems eventually come back to energy from the sun. But that fact has its own astounding ratio: It took a half-millennium of solar energy capture by all of the living things to generate the energy we typically consume in a single year.

Those ratios are alarming, but they also make fossil fuels’ case. The upsides are so attractive: density (huge amounts of energy in small volumes/masses), stability (won’t lose much energy during storage or transport), and usability (fossil-fueled machines are far less complex than virtually any other power source).

All of the alternatives available to humanity are, in some way or another (complexity, initial investments, geography, distribution), inferior to fossil fuels. So when we consider ending our use of fossil fuels, the combination of alternatives we settle upon must match or exceed these properties–or we must adjust our lifestyles to reflect the inherent inferiority of the non-carbon fuel sources.

Now, in the twilight of fossil fuels, we have a shot at building such a combination. We can take the last remaining supplies of carbon fuels and build the networks of solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear power plants neccesary. Or we can accept that in the future–the near future–our lives will be far less rich than they are now.

So starts a new series here on Dear Science, where I’ll be reviewing some of the science behind wind, solar, geothermal and biomass energy. I’ve already covered nuclear power, the unwelcome (by some) member of the carbon-free energy club.

“Customer: It’s not much of a cheese shop, is it?

Owner: Finest in the district!

Customer: (annoyed) Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.

Owner: Well, it’s so clean, sir!

Customer: It’s certainly uncontaminated by cheese….”

What happens to biodegradable trash in a landfill?

Entombed deeply in a landfill, your biodegradable trash is forced to degrade without oxygen, creating copious amounts of methane gas. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, far worse than carbon dioxide. If you’re sending something to a landfill, it’s better for the planet if it never degrades.

A landfill is intended to be a place without time, where trash is meant to stay isolated from the surrounding air, water, and soil—somewhat like the Republican plan for America, through immigration reform (a completely sealed USA). Degrading isn’t in the plan; it happens anyway, just in a different way.

When shopping, I’m always astonished to find packaging or products loudly proclaiming their biodegradability. For some products, like anything that goes down the drain, this can really matter. Take detergents and soaps, for example. The better they biodegrade, the happier you make your sewage treatment plant.

But non-recyclable packaging boasting it’s biodegradability? Not so hot. About the only circumstance this really helps is with litter.

In the triad, it’s reduce, reuse and then recycle. Buy less crap. For every bag of garbage you put on the curb, several bags of industrial waste have already been landfilled making the crap you’re now throwing out.