I’m all for alternative energy. But not all energy is the same. Gasoline is easily portable, storable, and immensely powerful for its mass. Electricity can’t be stored (in significant quantities), takes expensive infrastructure to store, and isn’t as powerful as gasoline. 1
Electricity can’t be stored. When you turn on a light switch, the electricity that powers your light is being generated somewhere on the grid at this exact moment. Wind and solar, while wonderful, are not always available, so they cannot replace fossil sources. 2
What’s more, peak electrical usage is around dinnertime, just about the time when solar’s contribution is dropping to zero. 3
Hydroelectric sources turn out to have horrendously deleterious effects on ecosystems. So, yes, they generate “clean” electricity, but at what cost? Our forests? Deforestation is the leading cause of civilization collapse. So dams are damned, so to speak. 4
Nuclear power is the acme of utterly ridiculous externalization. This horrible lump of risk and toxic byproducts created by nuclear electric generation are just kicked down the road for our children to live with. How wrong. How selfish. How self-delusional. 5
I’m so used to driving that I don’t *FEEL* the awesome power of gasoline, but when I fire up my chainsaw and rip through a log that would take me forever to saw by hand, I can really sense the awesome latent power in gas. That’s gonna go away, and nothing is gonna replace it. 6
Battery technology, you ask? I’m certainly no expert, but batteries use lots of extremely rare elements that consume vast quantities of energy to extract. That is, batteries consume dwindling energy and dwindling resources. Not a long term solution. 7
Sure, batteries store electricity, and you can store enough for your utensils and even your car, but the quantities of electricity needed to do things like make steel or run cities isn’t storable, and even coming close would cause traumatic harm to the environment. 8
Hydrogen fuel cells? Where do you get the hydrogen? How much electricity does that take? 9
I don’t like the answer any more than you do. We have lots of technology, but we are running out of energy. Get over it. 10
The good news is that natural systems are really good at capturing, storing, and packaging lots of energy. Photosynthesis. 11
We still don’t know how photosynthesis works, but it solves all of those problems. Ironic that our quest to extract and consume fossil fuel is destroying our photosynthetic resources. 12
People responding to this thread keep posing technology advances as though they were energy advances. They are not. Maybe I can run my whole house on batteries, for a while, but I cannot run a civilization on them. 13
It’s very likely that in the not-too-distant future, we will live in a state very similar to the way we lived before industrialization. It will be a shock to get there, but it will be a healthy place to live. 14
The future will look a lot more like 1750 than it will look like 1950. We will have better knowledge of healthcare and computers, but there’s gonna be a lot less desk work and a lot more field work in our future; a lot less machine driving and a lot more muscle power. 15
All you folks in my TL telling me about new tech that’s gonna generate/store/transport energy. I sure as shit hope you are correct. You gonna bet your life on it? 16
