I follow what they say about global warming and the way they try to solve it. Sounds to me that in most cases there are motives other than the real issue driving things, lack of knowledge, or just not looking at the whole picture. Saying blindly that things need to be green doesn’t work – as a hypothetical argument, if you use a cup made of corn instead of plastic because it is bio-degradable, but the energy to make it is way more than producing a plastic one, and there’s way more waste, is it better? You win at one end, but lose at the other.
For instance, making fuel from corn. Sure, corn is the most common farming plant in the US, that’s why we see corn syrup in everything, when usually it shouldn’t even be there. So great, why not make fuel from it, Ethanol, E-85 buzz words and names are great marketing.
Well, corn is very inefficient in making fuel, it takes a lot of energy to process it, and you end up with just a little gain compared to not doing it, some say even a loss. Then you get corn shortage and not enough corn to feed Central America. Other crops are way more efficient (they say the process producing Switch grass fuel give over 5 time more energy than what was put into it, Sugar Cane is way more efficient than corn…), and can be a temporary solution, but still not solve the problem.
Of course the main problem started because we have fossil fuel. As long as it’s available and prices are under a certain level (we are getting to a threshold of the price some say), people are too lazy or don’t have enough financing to develop alternative solutions.
So, I’ll opine on that (what did you expect…). I believe the only solution for now is Nuclear Power Plants. NPPs can give us clean energy with little or no environmental side effects (don’t jump and say what about Nuclear Waste, I’ll get into that later), and all energy consumption on the planet can be extracted from them.
Let’s assume we have all the electricity we want without burning any type of fuel, and it is 10 times cheaper than what we pay today for electricity. Wouldn’t you want your car to run on it? Cost per millage will be a fraction of what it is now, no noise or pollution from the car.
Are there issues to be solved? Of course. You want NPPs to be as safe as possible. There are NPPs in the US that supply clean energy for 30 years. With today’s technology, safety can be way better and plants can be more efficient.
Cars – technology of electric cars is improving fast. The issue with electric cars is charging time, the best time with most advanced technologies is 30-60 minutes, not as fast as refueling today. Power and millage per charge is in par or even getting better than internal combustion.
Hydrogen cars are another option. Hydrogen can be produced with electricity and is clean energy. Charging time is fast, safety is an issue, but solutions already are available. And you can drink out of the exhaust pipe…
I’ll probably get back to this subjects in the future, but to summarize for now, once we have a source for clean cheap energy, as we can get from nuclear energy, solutions will pop up from many creative minds.
L.
2 thoughts on “Energy / Green”