Energy Crazy August 8, 2008

For those of you who have not yet visited the highly amusing and energy obsessed site Unscrew America I highly recommend it. The site design and programing alone make it worth visiting. The message is pretty simple; Change your bulbs! I found the videos to be not only a waste of time but totally disappointing. The hidden treasure on the site comes when you go turn off the catchy music that plays without break while on the site.

Unscrew America is brought to you by the Gore group who’s hearts are in the right place. They are not here to push the envelope or convince us to make serious changes in the way we live. They know that we can at least slow down the rapidly deteriorating state of things.

I heard it said best at a conference I attended a while back; You are driving along at night and you hear on the radio that the bridge is out ahead. Concerned, you slow from 65mph to 30 mph.

The problem folks is that the bridge is still out. Slowing down just means that you end up in the same place a little later. What we need to do is either turn this bus around, stop and help re-build the bridge, or find a new direction to travel.

Obssessed with Energy August 1, 2008

I was having dinner with a friend of mine the other day and we were discussing the amount of energy that we need to consume as a society. Evidently we are a Type 0 society; using chemical process to convert energy and are limited in both the efficiency of conversion and the quantity of energy available through that process. To become a Type 1 society we would need to consume energy in an entirely different scale. A planetary scale. Yup, the evolution of our society requires that we start consuming planets.

As you may have already guessed, the successive levels of society consume exponentially larger sources of power, Universes, Galaxies, etc. I don’t know why a picture of the Death Star instantly popped into my mind, but perhaps the idea wasn’t so far off. Except rather than blowing up planets for political reasons the device converts the planet directly into energy which then powers society (the destruction of the planet is just a necessary step to ensure our survival).

It sounds rather sci-fi, but when you take a step back it isn’t so strange. We are in that very process right now. As inefficient as it may be, we are slowly converting our planet into energy. Our current mind set is so obsessed with energy that everywhere we look we see a potential energy cash crop. Cellulose, algae, hydrogen, methane, waves, wind, the core of the earth… There is only a minor regard for the impact on other elements of human existence. Food, water, clean air, clean living environments.

Perhaps we know something we don’t know. Perhaps there is a way to free our bodies from these base requirements and survive on Energy alone. At the rate things are going I guess we’ll find out.