Energy and Transportation in the 21st Century
A reader notes: The auto and oil industries created our mobility. Wasn’t that good? It worked, didn’t it?
It’s not that simple. Or maybe I could say that it depends on how you define “worked.”
Observers of the energy and transportation industries should object to the wars, the covert disestablishment of much of our public transportation, the heel-dragging on seat belts, smog control, and numerous other public safety and health issues, the refusal to innovate in terms of fuel-efficiency, the economic enslavement of the U.S. to foreign (and often hostile) interests, and the support of Middle Eastern terrorists. Having said that, as you pointed out, what happened in the 20th Century brought huge advancements as well.
The 21st Century is a different deal, however. Here it actually is simple. We either phase out fossil fuels, or we say goodbye to our civilization. Obviously, no amount of convenience can compensate us for a ruined planet.
It ‘over-worked’ and that was to be expected. If you haven’t industrialized before, you can’t get it right until you’ve made your mistakes and learned from them.
The problem is what do you do at the other side of the learning curve. I have already suggested ‘solarizing’ the building stock and ‘hybridizing’ the vehicle fleet, if only to deal with the numbers. That would be the growing building stock and the growing vehicle fleet, and their growing emissions.
There seems to be a sense of energy entitlement in North America without the ability to connect the dots leading to the extreme climate events which very few will be entirely shielded from. Case in point: Two acquaintances , both whose homes were severely damaged in a recent flood event , the volume of which was more than double the accepted 1in 100 year risk level are going holidays together. Two couples will each travel with 30 foot travel trailers towed by 300 hp crew cab trucks over about 3000 miles round trip, not including 4 ocean ferry crossings at fuel and ferry costs of about $3,000 each. When asked why they simply don’t share one trailer, save the energy ( and climate impact costs), the response was “we need our space”. It;s hard to have hope for humanity.
It seems obvious to me that when you find you are in deep trouble you should quit digging. For me this means to repower human needs with cleaner energy because fossil fuels are the source of our demise.
Here is a notice being posted on Linkedin and elsewhere.
STRATEGIC ALLIANCE OR INVESTMENT NEEDED FOR NEW CONCEPT WORLD REPOWERING TECH ONLY SIX MONTHS TO ONE YEAR FROM MARKET ENTRY.
Advanced Alternative Energy Corp. (AAEC) has developed technology designed to allow towns, cities and counties to go completely to renewable energy. AAEC.com is for those who understand that distributed alternative/renewable energy derived from solar, wind, biomass and waste is a viable pathway to stall global warming and produce a better future for our descendants, and for our communities and for humanity. AAEC offers a viable way for environmental organizations and activists to move beyond talk. Fossil Fuel firms and utilities on the other hand oppose what AAEC offers and want to maintain their monopoly positions as sole energy providers and pass unlimited costs in cleaning up their operations to their customers, even if better options are available.
AAEC has invented, patented, tested and further developed a new concept low-carbon energy technology we’ve designed for serving as the core technology for far cleaner renewable energy production systems and energy efficiency improvements across the North American landscape and around the world. AAEC’s novel new concept technology consists of a biomass, fossil fuel, and municipal waste combustion, gasification and pyrolysis conversion technology that can provide scalable heat and power requirements as well as both biofuel and biochar production for stand-alone use or as backup for alternative energy systems that depend on solar, wind or other intermittent sources of energy, and in this way it will help enable a doubling of the deployment of alternative energy projects around the world in coming decades.
AAEC management believes we will do better and be much safer in the long run if we can deploy a practical way to power human society on extraction of greenhouse gases that have already been emitted into the atmosphere while also reducing ongoing greenhouse emissions and begin protecting our communities and electric power grids. We are claiming to be the inventor of one of the “tools” needed to enable humanity to overhaul the power delivery system, in the USA and elsewhere, and help get us out of the box fossil fuels and governmental inaction have humanity boxed up in. We propose to do this through deployment of advanced alternative energy projects at the village, community and county scale, and because good paying infrastructure jobs are also needed. Thus AAEC is seeking support from all that may care to support this project.
AAEC’s product lines can be manufactured in the US and in most any locality on any continent for the local and regional market. This we believe will create licensing opportunities and many thousands of good paying jobs, and these are among the things we are offering to an alternative energy hungry world.
For further details please contact:
Les Blevins, President Advanced Alternative Energy
1207 N 1800 Rd., Lawrence, KS 66049
Phone 785-842-1943 – Email LBlevins@aaecorp.com
For more info see
http://aaecorp.com/ceo.html
http://advancedalternativeenergycorp.com
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=45587557
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Advanced-Alternative-Energy/277213435730720
http://buildings.ideascale.com/a/dtd/SCALABLE-MIXED-WASTE-TO-ENERGY-CONVERSION-TECHNOLOGY/84117-33602
I focus on energy technology…because life depends on energy! Energy is the currency of nature. Now, how can we develope energy for civilzation. So far, we used wood…then coal, and now oil and natural gas…soon solar. The carbon molecule in energy is hurting nature. What can we do to make carbon expensive to our citizens. Politics will eventually focus on carbon, maybe we should tax carbon based on its going to the atmosphere? At some point the heat will drain the North/South Pole
Hi Folks,
My living depends on the oil business, as well as millions do directely, and billions indirectly, in the world. Another alternative for such a business to live on longer than the next 3 decades is to clean it: instead of selling hydrocarbons, to sell the hydrogen out of all that organic goo. Also, both on the upstream and downstream businesses, to capture and sequester CO2. But again and again, the “bad” guys from the oil and gas business should feel the hardest their clients to consume less and less. Nonetheless, market alone shall not suffice; adequate government regulation too, both for the old and the new energy.
At last, the planet does not depend on us. If any civilization fails to manage its needs and its planet´s, either it should look for other homes or go extinct.