Concepts on Energy

I've seen people write that the reason we don't have clean energy is that there's a conspiracy of the fat cats who own the oil companies.

Actually, there's another way of looking at this, from an engineering perspective rather than from a big oil conspiracy perspective. And frankly, I suspect that the engineering perspective is correct. Here it is:

The problem with alternative energy sources is that for the past hundred years or so they've been way more expensive than oil and coal. Billions of dinosaurs and plants died so that we could tool around town in gas guzzling cars and have air conditioning in our houses. All that oil and coal is essentially nature's way of storing up millions of years worth of solar energy in a compact, easily retrievable form. It's quite difficult and hugely expensive to collect enough solar energy to match our current energy usage each year. It might not even be possible.

And collecting renewable energy also has a big environmental impact. Wind turbines cause turbulence in the atmosphere near the ground. That turbulence dries up the ground and the plants. Solar collectors shade the ground. If you put them in the Mojave desert, you'll be messing with a very delicate ecological system.

If you put those same solar collectors in the Sahara desert, there aren't any life forms to bother, but you're still making the Arabs into world energy czars. And you can't transmit electricity from there to here no matter how efficient your transmission lines could become. You'd have to use the energy to form hydrogen from sea water and transport the hydrogen here. Then we're still dependent on foreign energy. Not to mention that with current technology, hydrogen, like matzos and potato chips, doesn't travel well, or cheaply. Using the energy of the tides is nice near the ocean, where fifty percent of people in the US lives, but it doesn't help middle America much, and collecting that energy probably will have a negative effect on tidal wetlands which are vital to the health of the sea life that we depend on for food.

So the big oil and coal companies don't even need a conspiracy. Nature has conspired to help them. The only solution is technology that hasn't been invented yet. Fusion would do it. Even fission, but we'd have to build lots more nuclear power plants with the resultant problems of nuclear waste. In theory, fusion wouldn't create radioactive waste.

We still don't know how to build a controlled fusion power plant. If we did, I'm sure that the energy companies would like to get in on that business since they're running out of oil, and they must feel a little bit bad about all the environmental damage they do with coal mines and oil spills. At least, I hope they feel a little bit bad about that.

So there won't be new energy sources making a huge difference any time soon. What we can do is make fossil fuels so expensive that people will be motivated to conserve energy by insulating their houses, using public transportation and driving energy efficient vehicles. That technology already exists, and conservation can make a huge difference in the next few years. I hate to say it, but I'm a Democrat so I'll say it anyway, we need to greatly increase taxes on any fossil fuel use. That will motivate people to conserve energy. It's the only thing that will get people to conserve energy.

Oh, there's one more thing that I hate to say, but I'm a Democrat so I'll say this too. Population control would be helpful for reducing world wide pollution and global warming. I realize that there are way more cockroaches than there are people, but the roaches are perfectly willing to use public transportation. You hardly ever see a roach driving around town in a Hummer. She might be hitching a ride in one, but it's a human being at the wheel.