Because I work with Glenn Reynolds… or Glenn Harlan Reynolds, as he prefers to be called when writing outside the more informal blogosphere… on what sometimes relates to a daily basis on Pajamas Media matters, I sometimes forget what an original thinker he can be — or, more precisely, what a superb synthesizer. He shows it in a piece today for the NY Post: Green & Smart.
What I like about Glenn is he marches straight past the Gore Vidal bloviators and global warming religious fanatics on one side and the AGW-can’t-be-be-and-keep-your-liberal-hands-off-my-SUV cabal on the other and goes directly to real energy solutions. He dusts off the hair-shirt approach (tell that to the Chinese) and opts for new technology, specifically his favorite, nanotechnology: Nanotech is starting to yield super-strong, super-light materials, too. Imagine how much more efficient a family car could be if you cut the weight in half, even if you kept burning gas. But nanotech is also likely to produce better batteries and better motors, meaning that your lighter car may also be electric, powered ultimately by those nanodot solar panels.
All of these things are in the works now to greater and lesser degrees, but they could happen faster if there were more research and development support.
Makes sense to me. [Do you understand nanotechnology?-ed. Shhhh....]
The goal should simply be to directly lower everyone’s energy bills. Inevitably, the environment indirectly benefits. Unleashing the “animal spirits” of the capitalists is best way to achieve the results that we so desire. The empirical evidence is very clear on this point. And unless I’ve missed something, Glenn Reynolds and I are on the same page. We both are uncomfortable with politically motivated politicians getting involved in this matter.
I should add that I’m convinced the global warming idiocy and other radical environmentalist efforts have completely backfired. They have unwittingly made matters worse. I must reiterate my earlier point: just focus on lowering the consumers’ energy bills—and everything else will fall into place. It’s really that simple.
The “elites” are not looking out for you. No, they desire power and money. The free market doesn’t have time to play around with these rent seeking fools. That’s why they opt to instead manipulate our political class.
I would think the AGW crowd should be pleased with high gas prices. High prices result in lower consumption. But the warmers would prefer the money go to IGOs instead of greedy, evil corporations. So lower consumption is not hailed because the agenda isn’t lower consumption, but micromanagement of humanity by our elite overlords.
I too admire Professor Reynolds quite a bit, but we are still quite some distance away from such techno-utopian visions, and technology does not solve dilemmas inherent to human nature. Just as we surely live far better than our forebears, due in no small part to modern technology, we complain, we piss and we moan. The nano-future will contain its share of discontents and complaints too.
One of the things I appreciate about Prof. Reynolds is that he seems to understand that Malthusian gloom and doom discounts human ingenuity. Technological progress isn’t the answer to all our problems, but it’s a pretty good answer to a lot of them.
And BTW, I agree absolutely with David Thomson’s point about conservation and personal finance. I think that most people (perhaps especially Americans) react a lot more favorably to appeals to self-interest than to self-righteous preachiness. Myself, I’ve always been careful of my “carbon footprint” because I can think of much better uses for my limited funds than gasoline and utilities.
One should be careful about too much enthusiasm over solar energy. The solar input is finite, so even if a 100% efficient conversion were possible (it isn’t) vast areas of land would be needed to supply the equivalent energy currently derived from fossil fuels.
Oh, and let’s not discount the possibility of nanotech having its own issues. Remember asbestoisis? Little particles getting deep into lungs and staying there.
Sorry – I don’t mean to be a wet blanket (and I do think that technology will help greatly), but we need to be careful about predictions for the future.
ANY power generation technology will be denounced by a considerable number of “progressives” once it reaches the commercial deployment scale…however much they may have liked it when it was just an idea.
Wind turbines seem much friendlier when you’re looking at them in a magazine than when they actually exist in a place near you, and it turns out they make noise and kill birds. Land consumption by solar power will be unpopular once it ceases to be theoretical, as will the building of transmission lines to take the power somewhere useful.
I fully expect within the next 10 years to see protests against the “unfair” land use by solar power, with slogans like “Land for people–not for profit.”
photoncourier: Good point about wind turbines. Add to that the limited power practically available from that source: you need to figure out the places with sustained winds sufficient to generate meaningful power, then subtract the areas with bird and bat populations or migration routes, areas that interfere with the views of Gulfstream liberals (Ted Kennedy, call your service), and locations that are too remote from population centers to make the transmission worthwhile. The only surveys that I have seen don’t make these adjustments (some even include deepwater offshore sites) and are thus highly optimistic.
Unless your solar power station is in orbit, it’s going to have the earth in the way about half the time (not to mention clouds, etc). So solar, wind and tides all suffer from an intermittency that requires an energy store to smooth out.
Like a lot of alternative energy ideas, once you try to start scaling it up to the massive industrial scale needed to make a dent in our energy needs, severe problems show up.
Here’s an exercise. Look up insolation and calculate how big a collector you would need to power your house. Once you start factoring in both the inefficiency of photovoltaics and the limited frequencies they convert, it starts to get pretty big.
Meanwhile, I am somewhat concerned about the low level of solar activity.
Never forget that biofuels are simply an alternate form of solar power collection. I’d love to see a breakdown of kilowatt/hour for an acre of corn versus the same for an acre of solar panels. (I’m lazy, or I’d do it myself. But it boils down to gallons of ethanol in a year versus total kilowatts produced at the same place in the same year by the panels. As a back-of-the-envelope problem you could ignore the costs of corn-to-ethanol conversion and the costs of producing, installing, and maintaining the panels, I think….)