Photo Illustration by Tia Magallon

Editor's note: Any hope that the Deepwater Horizon would mark a turning point in the fight for a climate bill quickly evaporated. But the spill still offers us a "teachable moment" on many critical issues. In a series of essays in our magazine and online, some of the nation's leading environmental writers and thinkers reflect on our two national disaster areas: the one in the Gulf and the other in Congress. Today, a leading technology writer wonders if the high-tech, high-profile failures in the Gulf might steer us onto a smoother path away from oil and toward "peak renewables."

Giving one of the short, provocative, often wonderfully entertaining lectures known as TED Talks, Richard Sears -- a former geophysicist at Royal Dutch Shell and currently a visiting scientist at MIT -- describes the past 200 years of history in terms of three energy peaks. He starts with oil. "There was one kind of peak in 1985, when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply," he says. "Now it’s about 35 percent. It’s been declining, and I believe it will continue to decline." Similarly, in the 1920s there was "peak coal" and, a century before that, "peak wood."

The transition of the global energy system from one peak to the next occurred, Sears points out, not because world supplies of wood or coal or oil ran out. In fact, he says, oil will never run out -- and not because we have a lot of it, or because we’re going to replace it by building "a bajillion" wind generators. "It’s ideas, it’s innovation, it’s technology that will end the age of oil long before we run out of oil."

Sears’s optimism about new, innovative energy technology is infectious. And yet, in the wake of 4/20 (the day the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded), it seems reasonable to wonder if the pace and direction of that innovation can possibly bring an end to the fossil-fuel age before it effectively ends us, or the planet as we know it. Currently, far more capital and brainpower, worldwide, are invested in technologies designed to prolong the oil age than in those that will take us to the next energy peak, which Sears calls "peak renewables." That peak, though far in the future, cannot come soon enough.

Deepwater oil production is a prime example of where the lion’s share of current investments in energy technologies has been taking us. Ten or 15 years ago, an oil deposit lying more than a mile below the ocean’s surface, plus an additional 30,000 feet beneath the seabed, would have been dismissed as too remote to exploit. Today, ultra-deepwater semi-submersible rigs like Deepwater Horizon have made such feats possible, thus opening large new offshore fields to potential development, in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere in the world’s oceans.

These mega-rigs, worthy of a Jules Verne novel, are supposed to be fail-safe. A week after the Deepwater Horizon platform sank, David Burnett of the Global Petroleum Research Institute, an industry-sponsored cooperative, told the New York Times: "That rig was on the cutting edge of technology, with triple-redundant systems to detect and intervene to avoid such blowouts."

But high-tech, triple-redundant systems are no match for human operators who set safety alarms on "bypass" to avoid waking crew members at night. This was the situation on the rig on 4/20, as a surviving platform worker later described it to federal investigators. Like the Exxon Valdez disaster, this one appears to be attributable, in no small measure, to old-fashioned, low-tech human error -- as well as to the timeworn tendency of corporations to place return on investment above safety and sound environmental risk assessment, and the failure of government oversight and regulation.

All new energy technologies come with risks and trade-offs, even the relatively green ones. For instance, as a fuel for generating electricity, natural gas has a far cleaner carbon profile than coal. Plus, large domestic reserves of natural gas exist near major U.S. population centers (the largest of all is the Marcellus Shale formation, which stretches from West Virginia to southern New York State). So replacing old coal-burning power plants with new ones that burn natural gas would appear to be a smart choice. But hold on: the latest technology for extracting natural gas -- called hydraulic fracturing, or frac’ing -- is widely suspected of contaminating groundwater with chemicals whose makeup is a proprietary secret. This is the kind of deal with the devil that new energy technologies so often force us to make.

Renewable-energy technologies are inherently preferable to those that prolong our dependence on fossil fuels. But even the newest, greenest alternatives require some trade-offs and risks. Some, such as utility-scale solar projects, turn vast amounts of land into industrial zones, demanding a careful assessment of environmental impacts. Other new energy technologies require rare minerals, including lithium for rechargeable batteries, and rare earths (such as europium, lanthanum, and neodymium) for the motors in electric vehicles, the generators in wind turbines, and the white LEDs in efficient lighting products. The rub? These staples of the approaching "age of renewables" come mainly from South America and China, where they are mined in an almost totally unregulated environment, producing large amounts of toxic waste and consuming and contaminating scarce water supplies.

Moving ahead after 4/20, our first challenge is to divert capital investment away from technologies that prolong the oil age and toward innovation that will usher in the post–fossil fuel age. Second, we need to make sure that our shiny new post-oil technologies really are leading us toward greater sustainability. That means taking a rigorously hard look at, for example, the pros and cons of various biofuel options. Third, we must develop and exercise smarter ways of assessing risk, as an antidote to our historical disease of letting our knowledge of technology outstrip our ability to use it wisely.

"All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology," writes Jared Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. This is a good reason to cultivate a little more humility about the limitations of our cleverness. Because technology alone cannot pull us out of the six-mile-deep holes we have dug for ourselves.

Next: Chris Mooney on the oil industry and partisanship.