Technological Solutions
“Ceard a dheanfaidh muid feasta gan adhmad?”
“Now what will we do for timber, with the last of the woods laid low?” asks the 200 year old Irish song “Caoine Cill Chais”.
In 1865, Englishman William Stanley Jevons, one of the great social scientists of his day, wrote an exhaustive study titled "The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal Mines." Jevons' argument was that England was about to exhaust all available coal resources, which inevitably would mean the collapse of the industrial enterprise upon which Great Britain's empire depended.
Solutions have been continually found to situations like the ones listed above. People have a right to be optimistic to technological solutions being found to the predicted demise of fossil fuels. Especially, as necessity is the mother of invention.
Recently a Dublin company called Steorn placed an advertisement in New Scientist magazine requesting that scientists test their “perpetual energy” device. Their device was based on magnets and it is claimed by Steorn that it produces more energy than it uses. Such creation of energy would indeed be revolutionary and would change the world. It is something that has been attempted by “perpetual energy machine” inventors for hundreds of years and critics claim that it “breaks one of the golden rules of science which states that energy can neither be created or destroyed”. Time will tell.
However, at present, there is no technological fix in sight that can replace the amount of energy stored in fossil fuels. If a technological solution is found, how likely is it that it will overlap perfectly with problems that emerge from our use of fossil fuels?
The sensible thing for humanity to do would is to err on the side of caution – prepare ourselves just in case there is no sticking plaster fix to our fossil fuel problems. However, the best candidate for a sticking plaster at the moment are renewable energies such as wind, ocean and solar energy.
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“Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight” extract by Thom Hartmann. |