Once upon a time, there was a caveman who wanted to make energy.
Maybe he wanted to stay warm at night, or he wanted to cook food, but that's not the point. The point is, his first idea to generate energy was to gather up wood, rub some flint and steel together, and make a fire.
Setting things on fire proved out to be a handy way to generate energy. This method was the preferred way to make energy until after millenniums of progress, through the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, into the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution until we finally progressed to…
NOTHING! We still set things on fire.
Our propensity to set things on fire to make power has led us to a problem. We're baking ourselves right off the planet because fire makes heat. Climate Change is the result, a worldwide worrisome story.
Never mind the climate science deniers. That's a tiny group of idiots, literally not worth the wasted breath. No sane, informed person in the world denies that climate change is a problem, an emergency, something we need to do something about right now.
Now, those #dakotaaccess protesters up there in the photo collage may seem like they have the right idea. But we'll come back to them. We have many heads to extract from many butts about this issue first, and I dooooo mean everybody.
We Could Solve Climate Change TODAY!!!
One of the biggest contributors to global warming is fossil fuel burning, accounting for some 75% of greenhouse gas emission.
In other words, setting things on fire. And quite a few people around the world appreciate that, but the loud "thunk" you just heard was readers in the United States and China falling asleep on their desk at the mention of "greenhouse gas." If you want to wake them up again, tell them they can personally save thousands of dollars every year by switching to green energy.
We have the science right now. We have the research right now. We have the capability right now. Not just "gradually phasing out the problem by the 97th century." Not just banning plastic straws. Not just writing protest songs to raise awareness. Not just getting a hashtag trending on Instagram. SOLVED!
In fact, we could have solved it at least a century ago. Alternative energy has been around that long, and even longer. There hasn't been anything new added to the concept, just lighter and more efficient materials.
This is a solar powered car race:
Amazing cutting edge technology? New prototypes in development? A research project from Elon Musk's Willie Wonka laboratory?
No, the Australian World Solar Challenge has been going on since 1987!
The 2017 race top winner was Nuon Solar Team, driving the Nuna9, at speeds of up to 81.2 KMH (50.4 MPH) for a distance of 3021 km (1877 miles). That's more than enough power to use on your daily city commute anywhere in the world.
Before we get the inevitable "BuT whUT If ThE sUn iSN't SHiNinG?" trolls: It's called a BATTERY. Collect sun power when the sun is shining, store it in the battery for when it isn't. The buzz-phrase is "solar plus storage," an idea so ready to roll out that in Hawaii they're implementing it and it costs less than a penny per KW/H. Solar-plus-storage is 50% cheaper than coal per KW/H across the board.
In fact, that's just the tip of the proverbial melting iceberg with the polar bear clinging to it. There are whole nations out there with between 90% and 100% green energy. No, this is not science fiction! This is right now!
- Tajikistan - 100% hydropower
- Paraguay - 100% hydropower, 90% of which they export!
- Norway - 98% renewable with hydropower, geothermal, wind, and solar
- Costa Rica - 99% renewable, hydropower, geothermal, and wind
- Uruguay - 94.5% renewable with hydropower, wind, biomass, and solar
- Iceland - 99% hydropower, geothermal, wind, and solar
Add to that a scattering of major cities and regions around the world, including the Silicon Valley love-nest of Palo Alto, California, running a 100% renewable split between hydro, solar, wind, and biogas. Even if they're not 100% yet, several countries are catching up impressively; Canada is doing 65% renewable mostly with hydro.
So let's remember that electric cars are also a thing. If we aren't getting solar-powered cars, the least we can have is green energy production and an outlet at the parking space to plug our car into.
Now you might be asking, "Why isn't all this everywhere?" Are you not MAD AS HELL that you have to spend money every month to gas up your car when you could be driving on the free power shining down from the sky every day?
Are you not MAD AS HELL that your electricity doesn't cost less than a penny per KWH? The average American household in 2017 burned 867 KW/H per month. That would be an $8.67 monthly utility bill. Mad yet?
Good, could you do me a favor?
Get madder, please?
Just running down the street screaming mad? And keep doing that every day until you get everybody screaming mad with you, and then we hang the oil barons controlling our government and replace everything with free / super-cheap power. But in the meantime, here are some grassroots ways to bypass the oil barons:
Be Your Own Green Energy Country!
This is a solar-power backpack:
Again, not science fiction, they're all over Amazon, running as cheap as $40. You wear this, plug in your phone or laptop, and walk around charging it. Here are some Mashable reviews.
The point isn't that we must have these, the point is that solar energy should be cheap, convenient, and practical so we can get even the most apathetic climate change denier on board. One of the ways to do that is to show off gadgets like this. Maybe not everybody cares about green energy. But you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who wouldn't be interested in saving money. Not to mention the cool factor of becoming a walking power plant.
There's a lot more where that came from; portable solar energy storage comes in all shapes and sizes. Here are some larger scale solar generators with reviews, not that we're vouching for them specifically, but just to show what's out there. These are aimed at outdoor recreation and RV use, but there's no reason you can't plop one in your back yard and get some of your power for free every day.
Speaking of backyard power generation, how are wind turbines doing? Again, we've had it for years. The biggest impediment is nothing but city zoning laws. If you can dodge those, there's nothing to stop you from going 100% off-grid, negating your power bill to $0, regardless of what your local utility company does.
If zoning laws are a problem, there are more attractive wind turbine solutions, such as this decorative wind-power tree:
Why Don't We All Have This Cool Stuff???
This tour of alternative energy makes some of us feel like we're living in the Stone Age.
Most of everything we've seen here is progress from the private sector, without government say-so, going right down to the consumer level. Had we gotten more governments on board with heading off climate change from greenhouse gas emissions sooner, we could have been putting research and development into alternative energy and gotten to this point a couple decades sooner.
Carbon Lock-In is the societal inertia that keeps fossil fuel-based energy systems in place. It's something we have to work against, and the way to do that is to keep developing and promoting cheaper and more accessible alternative energy production until we've put it in the hands of every common consumer.
Once we have that - and we've just demonstrated that threshold here - all that remains is marketing. Most of you probably haven't heard of the developments we've detailed here, which means you can help just by spreading the word. Creating demand is an easy sell; tout the convenience and cost savings and let Capitalism do the rest, without even needing to mention the environment at all.
This is how you motivate people to demand real change.
After you get 100% green energy in place, you don't have to do anything to protest all the pipelines in the world. You've simply made them obsolete.
Which Brings Us Back To Those Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters...
For decades, the hippie protest movement has been damaging all the causes it supposedly roots for. Once again, the problem is that they're barking up the wrong tree.
This is the oil that would be traveling through that pipeline already:
Yeah! We ALREADY move that oil ANYWAY!
It transports via railway, at greater expense and burning more fossil fuels to power it. That's right - the pipeline that these Woodstock-wannabes are protesting would make it, so we burn less fossil fuel and do so at less impact on the environment. Some 70% of the Bakken oil used in the United States is transported by rail because of pipeline limitations. And it does not matter how we move it, by rail, by pipeline, whatever, the bottom line is we're still using it when we shouldn't be.
The Dakota Access protest mania is not about the environment, nor native American property rights, nor any other cause.
It's about a viral hysteria that has taken over the Internet for years now. It's about the children of Baby Boomers jealous because they missed out on the Summer of Love. It's about getting your fat sugar-stuffed face on Instagram in your Height-Ashbury cosplay costume so you can be one of the popular kids.
It is, as all hippie protest movements are, for the show. That's why North Dakota residents had to cough up a million-dollar bill to pay for cleaning up 48 million pounds of trash left by the protesters at that site.
That's why people even inside the protest refer to it as another Burning Man while taking advantage of the native American's hospitality and milking off the donations the camp has received. That's why over 140 arrests have been made. Most tellingly of all, that's why this one pipeline went viral, but nobody gives a damn about the other 72,000 miles of oil pipeline in the U.S. alone.
The Present Author has heard every excuse for dragging out a decade-long protest over this one pipeline, from a risk of spills (so far all caused by protester sabotage) to "sacred Injun burial grounds" (invoked only by white people) to funky mojo for the water (trains are bad for water too).
Regardless of these or any other concerns, the fact remains that if we weren't still setting things on fire for power, we wouldn't need any damn pipelines anywhere at all.
If all the time, effort, and money that's been wasted in useless protests and struggling to make society work around them were put into renewable energy research instead, we could have had this problem licked decades ago, and we'd be exploring the galaxy on our starship with Captain Pickard by now.
And instead, we just keep setting things on fire. It worked for cavemen, why change?
