Quote:
Originally Posted by PBzeer
A little thought exercise.
I'm all for clean this or that, just don't try to wrap it up in some purity of devotion to Mother Earth. "Cause it ain't.
|
I certainly don't.
Everything we do is inherently selfish....or at least most of it.
The question, IMHO, is simply one of waste. Do you feel good eating only 1/4 of the food on your plate and throwing away the rest? I don't.
Would I feel right driving a Hummer 15,000 miles each year? No way. With 6 billion people on the planet, I think it is important that we reduce our resource footprint whenever possible. In most cases, that does not mean a vast change in our lifestyle. It simply means designing things right and using them right.
There are lots of points of view on this stuff, and they probably all have some relevance, but having been in the energy field my entire life I have developed a liking for large scale solutions. That is, YOU might save a lot of energy by living on a sailboat or eating from your garden, but since everyone is not going to do that, it won't make a dent in the problem.
On the other hand....
If an engineer makes a tiny tweak in the performance of a car engine - or larger changes (such as fuel injection, aerodynamic bodies), then the savings are multiplied by 100's of millions.
Same with other things. While it might make you feel good to throw a PV panel on the roof and run your computer on solar juice, the net effect on the energy problem of the world is about zero. The big changes are coming from solar thermal plants with megawatts of capacity. One wind turbine located offshore does more good than hundreds of ugly smaller ones in our backyards.
Not to say there is no room for individual action. It's just that big problems require big solutions.
Not to worry. As we speak the revolution is underway. Google engineers, along with many other brilliant companies and venture money, are working on something which will instantly take us to the next level. They project solar (mostly thermal) energy at a price LESS than coal. It will be very hard for people to argue FOR cutting off the top of mountains, polluting streams, poisoning the air and the other problems of coal once pure economics rules it out.
I like people who put their money and brains where their mouths are. Talk is cheap. We live in exciting times where the possibilities are almost endless...all we need is the WILL to succeed.
Which gets me back to my beef with those who think we can't.