What will the U.S. look like in ten years, with oil availability declining, unable to pay back its debt, little money to maintain its infrastructure (the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the infrastructure a “D” on its report card) and wave after wave of newly unemployed?
It will look like a third-world country.
In fact, I believe that the human race is at the peak of energy availability, the peak of the economy, the peak of what the atmosphere can tolerate (i.e. global warming), the peak of population and the peak of resource usage.
You and I have had the opportunity to live in one of the most fantastic periods in human history. It was relatively brief — just a few centuries really — and it produced an economy that allowed us to buy almost any product we wanted from any country in the world. We could fly to the other side of the planet in just a few hours (and then complain that it took 12 whole hours to fly to the other side of the world!).
This globalization was possible because of the immense amount of energy we took from underground and put in our factories, our cars, our planes, our tractors and all the other machines that use oil.
IN OCTOBER OF 1993, the New York Times announced that the United States Census Bureau would “no longer count the number of Americans who live on farms ” In explaining the decision, the Times provided some figures as troubling as they were unsurprising. Between 1910 and 1920, we had 32 million farmers living on farms-about a third of our population. By 1950, this population had declined, but our farm population was still 23 million. By 199l, the number was only 4.6 million, less than 2 percent of the national population. That is, our farm population had declined by an average of almost half a million people a year for forty-one years. Also, by 199l, 32 percent of our farm managers and 86 percent of our farmworkers did not live on the land they farmed. Read more…
Inhabitat spotlights the mkLotus prefab house designed by Michelle Kaufmann. Click here to watch a video and learn about the energy, water, and materials technology packed into this compact sustainable home.
People want to use clean and green energy and live easy on earth’s resources. Many are changing to hybrid cars and using solar panels side by side with conventional sources of energy. But they hold a grudge. How to store large amount of energy in batteries? Hybrid cars fit batteries for power storage.
But this power is not enough to last long distances and takes many undesirable hours to recharge. The storage battery is not very helpful during acceleration. Solar and wind also don’t provide us with power at constant rate. They give us energy intermittently. Their storage devices also take lots of space and money as well and yet they don’t seem promising for surge demand.
Gary Rubloff, who is the director of the University of Maryland’s NanoCenter is also voicing a common consumer’s concern: “Renewable energy sources like solar and wind provide time-varying, somewhat unpredictable energy supply, which must be captured and stored as electrical energy until demanded. Conventional devices to store and deliver electrical energy—batteries and capacitors—cannot achieve the needed combination of high energy density, high power, and fast recharge that are essential for our energy future.” See full article here…
The following video depicts research that addresses these issues in some very surprising ways:
People want to use clean and green energy and live easy on earth’s resources. Many are changing to hybrid cars and using solar panels side by side with conventional sources of energy. But they hold a grudge. How to store large amount of energy in batteries? Hybrid cars fit batteries for power storage.
