I think eventually environmentalism will be so fashionable, companies will sell cheap fake solar panels so you can make your neighbors think your house is running off the grid. $100 for that? I think there might be a market.
Also, note that the only reason we're having energy trouble is all the people. Population growth is why we need energy growth. People trot out the figure of "eleven earths" all the time - that is, if everyone on Earth lived at the average American lifestyle, we would use up eleven Earths completely to support them. Test yourself
here.
And of course, while it might be an academic issue right now, Earth is a closed ecology. There is a limited carrying capacity for our environment. And shooting people out into space costs more than letting them live here, giving us a similar problem with different causes as executing a prisoner in America costing more than putting them up in prison until they die of old age.
If we had a world population of a million people, nobody would be worried about oil running out. We just couldn't use it up fast enough unless we worked really hard at it. But right now we're using things up just by living.
We're losing irreplacable topsoil, we're mining unreplaceable water out of aquifers, we're drilling for unreplaceable oil, and digging up unreplaceable minerals. And in return we're filling the spaces with proverbial radioactive styrofoam.
No way am I going to put out any effort trying to fix things. I'm just one guy. Besides, I'm going to die before the crash so it's not like I have any interest in devoting my life to environmentalism.
Right now I'm talking with some friends seriously about me buying a light VW or Volvo and converting it to electric. When I buy a house in 5-6 years, I'll get solar panels installed to the limit that the government is willing to offer me a tax credit. I recycle, I have small energy efficient appliances, I use those wierd swirly bulbs. I don't eat a whole lot of meat, and I buy local and/or organic food when the price isn't a ton higher. I rarely fly. But even then, with my lifestyle, we would need more than three Earths to support everyone present today.
Curious, I punched in 1984-style socialist levels of lifestyle. Apartment dwelling with 7+ people per household, almost no electricity or gas usage, no car but use mass transit, full recycling, no meat, etc. Three earths. Something tells me either right now what I'm doing wrong doesn't have a big impact or the test is funky at the low end of the scale.
Giving reasonably bad choices, that an affluent person might do but not a completely rich person (for example, the equivalent of one transcontinental flight for a vacation once per year) results in just about 20 Earths.
Part of this is an ethical issue. When we talk about high populations in China and India, and about affluence there equaling environmental destruction, the argument becomes "they just need to keep using bicycles, we keep driving Humvees, and it'll all work out fine". There's not really an ethical basis for that argument. They're no different from us. And certainly from their perspective they would argue the inverse, that they should be affluent but everyone else can live like peasants.
I think a good start would be trying to get people to live close to their work, so there was no longer a commute. I live nine blocks from work and I walk there and back every day. Think of the gasoline you'd save if even 1% of Americans stopped commuting. We wouldn't need fake water-powered cars. Things like that just get people's hopes up and make them feel alright about wasting resources. After all, pretty soon we won't have to worry about it because all our cars will run on prayer, right?
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Topic: Water powered car (Read 11484 times)