Will the green energy dream come to fruition? This week NOW on PBS explores obstacles to the promise of renewables--energy generated from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, and rain.
As America looks to dramatically increase its use of renewable energy, an inconvenient reality stands in the way: the need to upgrade the country's antiquated electricity grid. Part of that overhaul involves the construction of gigantic and expensive long-distance transmission lines to carry clean energy from remote sites to population centers.
NOW travels to California, which has the most ambitious clean energy plan in the nation. But the state's efforts face stiff opposition from property owners and conservationists who prefer renewable energy from "local sources," such as photovoltaic rooftop solar panels. Complicating the matter are claims that the transmission lines are not actually carrying renewable energy at all, but represent a thinly-disguised strategy to stick to old energy practices.
It occurs to me that for the green revolution to work, Obama is going to have to create an oversight entity with the authority cut through these predictable pockets of resistance in order to avoid getting bogged down.
when and if I drop out of my conventional life as a well paid engineer, my hope is to tackle several problems in this space. One is to give people a working example of a satisfying life that does not involve using so much gas and electricity. The culture is too fucked up by advertising to notice its own destructive addictions. Another is to demonstrate that once the idea of the city, however much our inner ape may prefer it, is seen as obsolete, and once our population is seen as too large, then a life lived in balance with local sources of food and energy is not just possible but can provide a healthier kind of abundance than we now import from Chile and China. NPR is right about frayed infrastructure IF YOU POSIT THAT WE MUST GO ON LIVING WITH THE TOYS AND DISTANCES NOW ACCEPTED AS OUR "STANDARD OF LIVING". otherwise, we don't need so much of a grid. Besides we are running low on copper. [its price is down just now, good long term purchase there]
For a long while now I've held the view that we must approach the solutions from a myriad of directions. I've seen the constant drive to centralization (cities, topography of labor, etc) as a culprit in the formation of many problems...too many people chasing too few resources and services.
Are you already working on the schematics of such ideas? Do you have any of it readable form?
from the top, structural changes such as this guy at Redefining Progress describes are needed. From the bottom, different aspirations need to characterize our culture and a different portfolio of occupations shifted toward the agrarian, using less fuel, making more stuff and fewer "derivatives" and "leverage". The internet can keep our minds global but most of our generation, transportation and manufacturing should be more distributed and fewer of us should be using it. What I plan to do is to work from the bottom, farming organically to produce biofuels that need no refinery or even diesel to be harvested and used. If I get the chemistry right, I might even pull a little carbon out of the air and start combing the lead and mercury from our power plants and incinerators out of the soil. The details matter less than the geographic profile of the business. I should be able to handle distribution to my customers with nothing much heavier than a pedicab.
Its all pretty much in the daydream phase except for the purchase of the farmland...which is going dirt cheap these days if you have the nerve to spend money.
[wouldn't CULture have been a great name for a blog? OK, a bit immodest but....]