Edelman’s Moral Quandaries (Pt. 1)–Sustainable Energy
To start this off I want to link to Edelman’s original post. He presented five moral challenges to humanity: sustainable energy, divorcing morality from religion, balancing personal freedom with division of wealth, drop nuclear options, and getting serious about global human rights. I’ve been thinking about these for a while, some more than others, and so I’m going to write a series of posts addressing the issues.First up is sustainable energy. Edelman wrote the following: As I’ve written before on my post about Global Warming Skepticism, I don’t particularly care about the Earth, except inasmuch as we can’t live without it. Right now, letting the Earth die means letting us die. So it’s imperative for the species’ survival that we either a) learn to conserve the planet’s natural resources, b) figure out how to keep the species going using renewable resources, or c) invest heavily in survivalism science that will let us live without them. (Or, more likely, a combination of a, b, and c.) Personally, I’d be happy living in a funky sci-fi dome city, but making something like that sustainable is much harder than it looks. Ergo: investing heavily in alternative energy is a moral imperative. Now, the issue here isn’t whether global warming is real, but that we’re going to eventually run out of burnable fuel sources like oil, coal, etc. I think no matter how we look at it, option ‘a’ isn’t viable. We will run out of oil. We can’t expect to conserve it when the world is eating it up as fast as it is. How do you conserve a non-renewable fuel source? So our options are pretty much ‘b’ and ‘c’. So what are our options for ‘b’? Well, renewable implies that we don’t really have to think about it. It’s a source that will be there even if we blow ourselves up. The sun and wind are two constants that we know we can use.I mentioned a link to the maglev wind turbine, which has the potential to really improve our energy efficiency. A couple hundred of them taking the space of the big windmill types in the California hills could easily power the entire state and a couple of other states too. The only problem with wind is that it is a source that isn’t 100% reliable. The wind is a constant. It will always exist, but it doesn’t blow the same every day, and sometimes it doesn’t blow at all. The only thing we can rely on is that it ‘will’ blow at some point. However, from what I understand the maglev turbine isn’t exceedingly expensive and if we build them all over the country in places where we already have the big windmills, we are looking at a lot of energy.Perhaps an option with such turbines is to build extras and use large generator facilities, namely the facilities we already have in place for our current power sources, to build up surplus energy supplies that can be used when wind power isn’t giving us what we need. Solar energy, however, is a super constant. The sun doesn’t stop shining. The only thing that keeps us from getting the most from it are the clouds and night. But the great thing about solar energy is that we don’t need to have ground based solar facilities. In the future we could have large space-based facilities and use technology we already have to beam energy down. Yes, we can actually beam electricity (as a laser or as microwaves). It’s been done and in a decade such technology could be perfected. But again, we can use generators to store excess energy produced by ground based facilities. There are already plans being proposed to build solar facilities in California and other states, and I linked in a previous post to a plan in North Africa. A facility covering one square mile could power the entire U.S., at least for electric needs. But solar doesn’t end there. The solutions for solar are nearly endless. Remember, the only time that solar energy doesn’t work is when it’s dark. You can still get energy in an overcast sky, just not as much. Look at the average scientific calculator, almost all of which use a small solar strip, and you’ll be able to see how effective solar energy is, even when the day isn’t bright and sunny. The greatest solution to energy needs is to remove all business policies that don’t allow people to put solar panels on their houses. Anyone who lives in California will no doubt be aware how difficult it is just to put panels on your home. You can’t just put them up and plug in. You have to pay the power company off first, since they’ll likely lose you as a customer. If we get rid of these sorts of policies and make it easier for people to put panels on their houses we’re looking at energy independence. Building facilities in various locations would also do wonders. Household solar panels are actually a lot cheaper than they used to be. We can now produce them for around 30 cents USD per watt. A good solution, then is to combine both. If we were to place maglev turbines and power facilities across the country in places where we already have alternate energy sources in effect and also make it easier for people to put panels on their homes, then we can expect to see our energy problems going away. We won’t need nuclear facilities anymore and we won’t need any other facilities that have the potential to damage the environment (though nuclear facilities do have some environmental benefits). Add in large generator facilities in places where old power facilities existed and we’ll have loads of surplus energy that could, in theory, be sold to other countries or simply saved in case of an emergency. (Other methods for energy are using cold air currents and even energy produced by the ocean currents)Fuel for cars is the next issue.