Commented on “Triple Pundit”

Posted: January 3rd, 2010 | Author: Steve | Filed under: Sustainability | | View Comments

pmain: I don’t know if it is as much an issue of “will we have enough time?” as an issue of “are we willing to commit enough money and resources right now?” We could not have developed the atomic bomb in only a couple of years if we hadn’t been willing to throw a massive no-holds-barred effort behind it. The only reason we were willing to do that was because we were, quite literally, “under the gun.”

I believe that there is more than enough that we can do RIGHT NOW, with today’s technology, to make a big enough dent to get the fossil fuel monkey off of our back. But we have to be willing to make huge investments, and make them right now.

The first step, of course, is hyper-efficiency for almost everything that uses energy. In the book Natural Capitalism, Lovins, Lovins & Hawken showed that a whole-systems approach can bring enough energy savings to buy us he time we need to redesign everything else for the long term.

Solar panels are already net-energy-positive, i.e., they produce more energy over their lifetimes than it takes to produce/maintain them (much more). The same goes for concentrated solar (a 70s technology, by the way.) If you take a close look at what EVIN is proposing, you can actually convert almost any vehicle to run on electricity, using current battery tech, and you don’t need to worry about range, IF you have enough places where you can swap out battery packs.

Originally posted as a comment
by spuma
on Triple Pundit using DISQUS.