Alternative Energy: Something EVERYONE knows A LITTLE BIT about.
This inconvenient truth is evident when I speak to most of my friends and to acquaintances about the alternative energies of the future. The truth is, a lot of people think of energy in a way that is not holistic or helpful to society. A lot of people think of it as commodity to be bought and sold on markets where currency is the method of payment. In a holistic approach, the monetary cost of energy is considered alongside the environmental and social cost. THERE IS AN ENVIRONMENTAL COST THAT WE ARE DEFERRING PAYMENT ON! A product that is good for business today is not necessarily good for the world tomorrow. There will come a day when the cost of doing business will include the so called invisible cost that is generated for the future generations. While examples of this nearsightedness are abundant, I will point out one that particularly troubles me. Tar Sands or oil sands have known about and documented since we started drilling for oil only recently has is become "cost effective" to pull this stuff out of the ground. While it may be fiscally responsible to continue this practice, it is irresponsible to society as a whole for the sole reason that producing a barrel of oil from Tar sands produces up to 45% more greenhouse gasses over a conventional barrel from an oil rig. That cost is the one that needs to be addressed. I know that the world is dependent on oil at this very moment, and I know that it is making people money to acquire and sell it, but if the money that went into R&D on the technologies to extract tar sands had gone to studying a way to reduce the environmental cost while keeping profits, think of how far we could be. This is not the fault of the oil companies.... Maybe there are some huge conspiracies going on, but the real problem is that people aren't connected to the world they are polluting and don’t feel a sense of duty to protect it for the next. It is an across the board syndrome that affects almost everyone and affected myself for most of my life. A recognition that what we do today does affect tomorrow is the best way to change this mentality. There is a disconnect between this concept in our daily lives and on the scale of the world. We know that we have to work hard to better ourselves and to prepare ourselves for a successful future. We seem to forget that society as a whole also needs to continually improve itself so that there can be a better future. The only problem it, the inhabitants of that future aren't us. We will not live forever, and we truly don’t know when the human race will end, but it is not a crazy thought to think that there will be those that come after us and we should be preparing for them just as we prepare ourselves for our lives.
Now, back to the topic at hand: alternative energies. Energy is one single thing that takes on many forms. In each form, energy has the power to do work. We have the technology to use certain forms well (electricity, heat) and are working on ways to harness and use others. There is also a distinction between energy and potential energy. For the concept of vehicles, in my mind, there are three ways to think of alternative energies. The first is to consider the combustion engine as the technology of the future. The second is the use of the electric motor. The third is everything else. Things like steam engines, flywheels, and other mechanical based systems all fall into this category.
The idea with the combustion engine is that it can be adapted easily with the current infrastructure to run off of fuels produced in an environmentally friendly way. The problem in my opinion with these fuels is that they still pollute at the source of the car at a rate that is similar to gas and diesel. In this scenario, the vehicles take renewable energy which is good and give back pollution which is bad.
With an electric motor on the other hand, the vehicles do not pollute. All the polluting is done at the power plant (which is run by petroleum right now) Passenger vehicles can run off electricity. We know that already. Electricity is an extremely potent form of energy and it is fairly easy to get it to do work for us. You can step up or down electricity to do the job of any gas or diesel engine (Not at all monetarily cost effective) Also, there is an electric infrastructure the same way there is a petroleum one. Passenger vehicles will simply switch the infrastructure into which they operate and all other things could stay the same. Obviously, electric cars don’t solve the problem, but they do centralize it. If there was a universal form of energy that ran our cities (electricity already runs the lighting and air conditioning a lot of times), the planet could focus on the way if produces electricity and that focused effort would produce vast improvements in technology for the collection of energy and its storage and use in the form of electricity.
There are things in this time that we could never imagine running off of any other source of energy. Take our cell phones. Those are clearly meant to be electric devices. Look at computers and light bulbs. These things could not work without electricity. You could have a gas powered computer, but it would convert the energy from the engine to electricity and you would lose some in transfer losses. Vehicles up to this point have been mechanically powered through the potential energy in petroleum, but I propose a time where it will be common knowledge that running a car off electricity is the best way to make it go. They will know "maybe we could run it on gas, but it costs less for the world to run it on electricity" THE COST OF GAS IS JUST TOO HIGH!
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