Between a Rock and a Green Place
The economist Robert Heilbroner once said that, at first, a 21st century environmental crisis would be kind of fun, as people would be getting excited about cleaner lifestyles. And then it would start to get very hard.
We may already be reaching that turning point. For all the people who claim that “It’s easy being green,” and all the media out there focused on how fashionable green living is, we have some tough choices ahead us. Record oil prices, for example, were supposed to nudge us into alternative energies. What we didn’t count on were the complex and thorny issues surrounding those new energies — in particular how expensive they would be.
Corn ethanol has been sideswiped by surging corn prices — a big culprit is the strain that corn ethanol itself has put on supplies. Cellulosic ethanol is more promising, but we won’t know for years whether large-scale production will prove any less complicated. Researchers now consider current solar panels a waste of money. Meanwhile, the price of “dirtier” alternatives like coal are rising as well. Even in Europe, the early excitement surrounding legislation to fight climate change is wilting as lawmakers get down to the nitty-gritty.
The answer to overcoming these hurdles lies in innovation — not just in science and technologies, but in markets and business models. But it’s going to take years to work out, and with no cheap and easy choices until then, it’s going to get harder and more expensive, whether we’re living green or not. But will we still love being green when it’s not as fashionable, or as much fun?
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Plug-in hybrids, renewable methane (from anaerobic digestion of biomass and electrolyzed hydrogen), and solar thermal systems.
It is noteworthy that none of these concepts has received significant funding from DOE or other government agencies, except perhaps for PHEVs in the last year or so. And even then, the funds are narrowly targeted and often not directed at the needed areas of innovation (in my opinion).
Green energy is definitely the best solution in most cases. Technology like solar energy, wind power, fuel cells, zaps electric vehicles, EV hybrids, etc have come so far recently. Green energy even costs way less than oil and gas in many cases.
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