Welcome to TogetherWeCanFixThis!
So what needs to be fixed? Take your pick. Browse just about any website, blog, newspaper or watch a news program and you could spend all day listing what people think is the greatest problem we now face. Global warming and climate disasters, oil spills and mining, foreign oil and ethanol subsidies, air, water and land pollution, melting glaciers and islands submerging to name just a few.
All of these sources will suggest ways to solve each of these problems. Some make sense, others do not. The problem is getting people to adopt the solutions. Most people will resist any kind of change. Getting people’s attention has lately given us the “carbon footprint” gauge. Good slogan, but the average person on the street could care less about his “footprint” if it means changing the way he or she lives. As long as the lights come on when a switch is flipped, water comes out of the faucet when a valve is opened and the air conditioner puts out cold air when needed, most people never think twice about where these resources come from. What is needed is a “lifestyle neutral-zero carbon footprint” solution.
Lifestyle neutral? What is that?
A lifestyle neutral solution does not require thought about where or how the individual gets his or her power, water or fuel from. As creatures of habit most people are used to filling their gas tanks and then griping about the cost. Asking them to change into plugging their cars up to a charger and waiting until it is full is out of the question. Buying, installing and maintaining a solar installation is also too much hassle to bother with. The same could be said of wind power. So a lifestyle neutral solution requires no thought or change in daily usage.
What lifestyle neutral-zero carbon resources are available?
None yet! Solar and wind power utilities are just beginning to break ground but are many decades from providing adequate output to offset fossil fuel power plants. Too little too late, we cannot afford to wait for that to happen. Nuclear? yes it can be considered carbon neutral, but replaces one problem for another. Bio-mass? you are still burning something and at the same time driving up food costs. Geo thermal? not enough resources to really make a difference. Natural gas and fuel cells? putting something even more explosive than gasoline in my car? No thanks. Electric cars? you still connect to the dirty grid. Plus you have to lug around a ton of batteries and eventually replace them. Hybrid cars? still burn fuel and deal with batteries.
On top of all that you have the NIMBY principal. Not In My Back Yard! Any solution has the need to be acceptable to almost everyone. Indeed people must WANT it in their back yard. Literally as well as figuratively. Call it YIMBY!!!
Where do we find this lifestyle neutral power?
I said above that we don’t have it yet. That is about to change. Before we get into what it is, let’s cover what it cannot be. No perpetual motion, radiant aether, zero point extraction or any of the other mumbo jumbo ideas that have been foisted on us by crackpots and charlatans.
So what IS lifestyle neutral power?
Lifestyle neutral-zero carbon footprint power should have been discovered around a hundred years ago. Wind and hydro power have been around for centuries. Solar is much newer. Our existing power supplies after a hundred and fifty years still depends on heating water into steam. The steam age never really ended, we just convert it to electricity instead of using steam directly. Even nuclear energy and solar are used to make steam.
Electro-magnetism is what displaced steam as the direct motive force. So for a little better than a hundred years we have moved the steam plant further away and used electricity to do the work needed. Lifestyle neutral power still uses electro-magnetism, but in a way that doesn’t rely on steam generation to provide power.
TogetherWeCanFixThis 