Wasabisoft

You read right: I KNOW HOW TO END THE ENERGY CRISIS… FOREVER!  I actually developed this plan in its more-or-less-ready-for-submission form while chatting with the little wife after a decent workout.  It is a testament to the Mensa card in my wallet that such a feat was possible.  (Note to self: pay Mensa dues for the year soon.  Those guys go for the kneecaps!)  To be fair, though… I HAVE been kicking this kind of thing around for a while; both out of genuine interest AND a sense of intellectual responsibility to the whole Presidential Ambition shtick.  Here’s the EXSUM before I do the “Read the rest of this entry>>” thing:  combining a genuine, possibly Socialized move towards not only intracity mass transit but national mass transit with a conversion of our national power grid to renewable sources (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, hydroelectric, algae, etc.) will allow us to decrease our need for all the nonrenewable shit and switch existing production of such to export instead.  The advent of electric-driven personal transportation means will go even further towards this goal, especially in the interregnum of intercity connectivity.  And believe you me, NONE of this is particularly new thinking.

Look, it’s not that we don’t have the technology, even now, to make most of this stuff happen.  The approach I’ll be describing – indeed, the ultimate point of me writing this article in the first place – is designed to lean our society towards whatever future options may emerge with the progress of science.  Hell, we’ve already got a lab out in Germany that’s developed teleportation (admittedly, only a few molecules at a time at present, but now that we’ve DISCOVERED the shit, it’ll just take some scaling, like damn electricity back in the day)… once a viable form of fusion comes along all our earlier harping on landfills could be rendered moot.  There’s also an interesting technology called Blacklight that seems to technically violate the laws of quantum physics and produce energy from water… but we’ll see how that one pans out.  The keynote to this part of the issue – and the reason I feel I might be able to contribute something useful via this blog – is that the usage of electricity as the predominant form of energy exchange (in lieu of, say, fossil fuels) will allow us as a society to depend on energy sources that may be generated completely independent of geographical displacement of resources.

We’re also not particularly lacking in desire; our population (and that of most other countries) is very much in favor of clean, renewable energy sources.  The problem is that our desire and our means to pursue and bring to fruition that desire are too often not collocated.  It is with a noble spirit that people attempt – individually, wherein lies the problem – to “do their part” in helping resolve the problem of energy.  Such efforts are admirable… but futile in a zoomed-out context.  The most reasonable way to reduce a person’s carbon footprint (or insert the Environmental Impact Measurement Term of your choice) is to make the source of consumption clean.  Doing so requires an imposingly large amount of investment to achieve on a meaningful level;  most people who have the desire lack the means to act on a large scale individually… and most people who have the means fail to do so through the primacy of other, means-related considerations, like profit and conservative spirit.

The irony of that last statement is that “conservative spirit” can mean a preference for renewability in an environmental sense, but prevailingly means the opposite in a political sense.  The big reason why I can’t call myself a conservative (political) is because the entire conservative ethos revolves around the ideal of support for the status quo.  There’ll be a much bigger (read: separate) article on why I believe Stephen Colbert (et. al.) is actually RIGHT when he says that reality has a liberal bias: it is sufficient for our purposes today that we note that the world is in a CONSTANT state of change, mostly towards higher technology regardless of who you happen to be on the planet.  More importantly, our communications infrastructure is also adapting and expanding, bringing the world in general closer together and increasing the information available to any person at any given time.  Therefore, doesn’t it seem to make a big more sense/almost be necessary for people to get at least a touch of liberalism in their thinking?  Otherwise, before long conservatism will only be viable to people living in either caves or extremely nationalistic countries… like the conservatives seem to want our own to become.  Huh.  It’s almost like they thought this one through.  Anyways, back to energy.

For any corporation to attempt to fix the energy problem would require some kind of profit margin present, otherwise they won’t even make the effort.  Look, this is a Capitalist society, and I know it’s, like, totally uncool for me to talk bad about a corporation’s motives like that.  But as long as there exist forms of energy generation that require less initial investment to turn a profit (and the producers of fuel for those forms keep hiring lobbyists) it is extremely unlikely that we will see any movement towards renewables from the private sector.  At least, not until all the oil dries up and we have a few world wars over the remaining supply.  In the immediate future, the best place to find a combination of both the means to invest in renewables on a large scale AND the potential desire to do so is government.  Most of the projects I’ve been able to find something about on the Internets have been either commissioned or fully built by a government agency.  Even IF corporations start to expand into this area, it would still behoove us as a society to have government owned and operated power sources that will never run out of fuel.  Ok, look, that “never” part was rhetorical: the Sun WILL go red giant and envelop the Earth in roughly 5 billion years… but by then, I’m sure we’ll have OTHER problems on our minds.

So here’s my idea: right now, at this point in our scientific development, we have a goodly number of viable technologies available that, if implemented on a sufficiently large scale, can completely replace fossil fuels within our power grid.  I like solar, myself, mostly because the idea of grabbing energy directly from the Sun every day appeals to me, but there are lots of other sources from which we can draw with varying degrees of environmental impact.  Some even have a directly positive impact; algae biofuel cells actually decrease the carbon dioxide levels in their vicinity (as the algae uses CO2 for photosynthesis; I always knew that first grade science would come in handy one day).  Now, per the Pickens Plan, which I think is both a pretty good idea and a REALLY good compromise, normal consumer vehicles would be transitioned to electric power (which, if run off a clean grid, are clean themselves) and commercial vehicles would run off natural gas, which is both clean burning AND plenty abundant in the US… and should buy us time to start putting some actual effort into electricity storage (battery) technology.  I propose a further step of switching over our freight train systems to all-electric operation, as running off the grid will become more viable as the grid sources are improved.

The destination is thus: if the government decides to use their resources (i.e., taxpayer monies) to invest in a sufficiently large renewable power generation system, then we could theoretically provide our citizens with electricity and transportation at next to no cost.  Alternately, we could provide the same at half present cost and use the funds thus generated to fund additional governmental programs (such as the one discussed in my last article).  Even discounting the benefits to environment and disassociation from foreign fuel dependancy, the fact that the government has the necessary funds for initial investment AND the ability to expand that investment to the point that the oil and coal guys are undercut means that the government can begin to generate its OWN funds instead of just shaking down its citizens.  I think this is a good (with multiple meanings) way to do so.