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Stop Being Depressed About The Enviroment

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<<<Before you begin>>     I meant to publish this in December of 2014 and only uploaded it in February of 2015, So when I say last year I mean 2013 not 2014. Except once when I say 2014. This article might seem over optimistic. The point of this essey is not to give a completely accurate account of environmental issues today; it is that the account being given in the media is too pessimistic. So I don't talk about much of the bad new because it has already been covered. Please excuse the length. Feel free to read this in parts.


I was listening to a podcast on millennials and the environment. One of the panel said young people are too depressed to talk about the environment. This depression almost seems  a feature of environmentalism. I understand it. And I used to feel that way myself.

It seems like the rich and the greedy are grabbing more and more of the world. Coal dust chokes our planet. The percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere keeps on climbing. We creep ever closer to the tipping point where global warming is irreversible. Foxx news and the mainstream Republican party preach madness and lies.  Species keep dying. Every time you turn on the news a new environmental disaster has just happened. No one in power seems willing to do anything about it.

But this has more to do with bad news getting more views and the state of pessimism that has taken hold of America. Yes many things are going wrong. Fracking is a big problem. The drop in the price of gas means people are burning more. Some states are passing anti-solar laws. Less than 20% of our power comes from renewables. Most people still drive a gasoline car and have no desire to switch. Coal power plants are going to be belching out poison for at least another ten to twenty years. Yet these are only the mere tip of what is going on, with a giant iceberg of good news lying under the surface, unreported or under reported by the mainstream media.


Solar Power
Since the year 2000, installed solar photovoltaic has been growing by ten to thirty percent per year. Yes part of that is thanks to federal and state rebates. But over half of installed solar panels last year were in areas WITHOUT a solar tax credit. From 1977 to 2013 the price of solar went from $76.69 to 74 cents. Just 35 years ago solar was over one thousand times as expensive. I have seen a lot of ridiculous estimates on how much solar power we are going to have in ten, twenty. and thirty five years. If during the next 35 years solar drops in price at one tenth the speed it did over the LAsT 35 years it will be one hundredth what it is now. How are coal, oil, nuclear, and natural gas going to compete with that price? They can not. How much of our electricity will come from renewables in 2050? All of it!
Battery Power

Ivan you say, 'What an idiot you are'. Solar panels don't work at night. We will never have 100% renewable power.' Battery tech is not growing with the meteoric speed of computers and solar panels. Yet battery capacity has doubled in the last ten years. This does not equate to batteries being half the price but it comes close. Large scale power storage is only just beginning, but like solar it will grow and grow fast. Over the next twenty years it go from nothing to gigawatts. By the year 2050 we will have more than enough batteries to store all our solar energy during the night. It also brings us to-


The electric car
I have heard so many criticisms against the electric car, a thousand reasons why it will never work. The truth is, the electric car has just one problem. It is too expensive. All the talk about range anxiety, charging time, and true environmental impact are meaningless. If an electric car cost half the price of a gas car everyone would run out and buy one. People who already own two or more cars would buy an electric for the city and a gas car for trips. People who could not afford two cars would rationalize that they COULD afford one and a half; especially when the second car cost no money for gas. The cost of fuel and maintenance on an electric vehicle is amazingly low, almost nothing.

The lithium ion battery of today last longer, charges quicker, and costs less than the lithium battery of ten years ago. With the storage capacity of batteries doubling every ten years it is only a matter of time before the price of an electric car drops to that of a gas car and then becomes cheaper. My brother Ben is a gearhead and an an engineer. He told me in no uncertain terms that an electric car would never become as cheap as a gas car. He said it is just that gas will continue to go up in price until one day the gas car will become as expensive as the electric. But the electric car will never become cheaper he said. Last year I told him how much a Tesla model S cost and he told me I had made a mistake. It can't be that cheap he said. So I went to my computer. I told him, well Ben, I am on Tesla's web page. That is the price they are offering it at. He could not believe how cheap the model S had become. I believe the model S has dropped in price by a third since it was first offered. (don't quote me on that.) I had trouble finding the article to confirm that.

As for range; the model S comes with a variety of battery packs. The model S has only been out a few years. During that time the range offered on it has increased while the price has dropped. The largest package claims a range of up to 300 miles. With capacity doubling every ten years; that is 600 miles in ten years, 1200 miles in twenty years. Now who is going to complain about a range of a 1200 miles. When was the last time you drove a car 800 miles in a day? Right now the electric car is too expensive and does not have the range of a gasoline vehicle. But in the future it will. And that future is not in fifty years or even twenty. It might not take ten.


Coal
Today coal is the largest single contributor to global warming. It is just so dirty, even compared to other fossil fuels. Coal has been around for a long time, It has been making electricity for over 100 years. For most of that it's importance has been increasing not decreasing. Once all electrical power was renewable. All power came from hydro electric dams. That didn't last long. More and more electricity came to be generated from burning coal. By 2002 just over half of American electricity was generated by coal. There seemed to be no end in sight. Yet after 2003 the percent of electricity from coal started dropping. Because  demand for electricity itself was still rising the amount of coal burnt still went up over the next fives years. But after 2008 the actual amount of coal burnt in the US started heading down. In 2012 electricity produced from coal went below 40%. Last year It fell below 30% . In ten years it will be less than a quarter. How much less we will have to see. In twenty years coal will be pretty much gone.

But Ivan, most of our coal problems come from emerging powers like India and China. (One third of the entire world population.) Last year both China and India announced they would be vastly cutting their use of coal. China's announcement was met with skepticism. Sure more promises from an evil dictatorship trying to pull the wool over our eyes. But then China cut the amount of coal they buy from Australia by a considerable amount. And last year (2014) China mined less coal. India is also buying less coal. China and India are serious. They are getting off coal and getting onto solar.

Natural Gas
Unfortunately a lot of the reduction in coal has been due to an increase in natural gas. And that has been due to fracking. Fracking is so cheap for the company doing it and an environmental nightmare for the place it is being done. Those places that allowed fracking soon found that they lost more money than they were paid. Fracking costs jobs and money. Only the company that is fracking benefits. The number of countries, states, and counties banning fracking continues to rise, I predict a world wide ban on fracking in the next two decades. The cost to the world will continue beyond the time of fracking's use. The cost will be in wells you can't drink from, rivers you can't fish in,  land you can not farm, loss of property value, and increased medical bills. But Fracking will disappear. This will mean a minor return of coal for a short time. But by the time fracking ends in the Us solar will be sweeping the nation.

Carbon capture
This is the one area where I can report little good news. Despite the sweeping reduction in CO2 output that we are going to see over the coming years, we will need some carbon capture. This is not just because of global warming, but also because of ocean acidification and dozens of other reasons. I had really expected this technology to be further along than it is. I blame the lack of advancement completely on the insistence in the insane idea of burying carbon in the ground. People don't do anything because it is the right thing to do. They do things because they are angry, scared, tired, lazy, indignant, greedy, hungry, or horny.

There is a small factory that creates CO2. All of this CO2 goes next door to a micro brewery to be used in the beer making process. CO2 is useful for a lot more than making beer, soft drinks and dry ice. It has a thousand and one uses. The government should sponsor contests to find a cheap way to pull carbon Dioxide out of the air and water. Then the people who capture it can sell it. All advancement in clean air and water has come because NOT polluting was cheaper. We need to keep this in mind. Give any businessman a chance to make money and he will clean up any mess for entirely the wrong reason. Who cares why they did it. The mess is gone. Work with reality.

Although I have no solid evidence to believe that governments and businesses will finally get on this, yet I believe they will. The reasons I believe this are difficult to explain but they are real and not based on fluffy optimism. So on this one point I will ask you to have faith.

The next twenty years
In the next five years:-   Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla motors, will have finished building his battery plant. It will not yet be running at full capacity. Work will still be going on inside but it will be up and running. This will cause a great reduction in the price of batteries which will in turn cause a reduction in the cost of an electric car. Solar power will generate more than 1% of US electrical energy. Wind will exceed 5%. Megawatts of utility scale energy storage will come on line. No new coal  powered electrical plants will be planned. A small number of plants will be built; all of them will have been in planning for years. Many other planned coal plants will be cancelled. Many coal plants operating today will be shut down. Electric vehicles (hybrid and all electric combined) will make up two percent or more of vehicle sales. Probably the Tesla econobox will be released; changing the car market forever. It will be released too late to have much effect on the market within the five year range.

By ten years in the future:-   The drop in battery price will make gasoline-only vehicles a hard sell. Renewables will create over 20% of electrical energy for the grid. Gigawatts of grid electrical storage will have been installed. Increasing amounts of grid storage will make renewables more and more appealing. Over a hundred coal fired power plants in operation in the US today will be retired. No new coal fired power plant will be built or planned anywhere in the world. Increasing numbers of lawsuits and environmental laws will cause many coal plants to be closed well before their scheduled date.

In twenty years:-   I expect renewable energy to account for half of all electric power generation. There might well not be a single coal plant in operation anywhere in the world, unless it is for education and tourism. You know, like going to see people grind their own wheat and milk cows by hand.  Hybrid cars and electric cars will still be battling it out in the marketplace. No gasoline-only car will have been built for more than five years. Improvements in batteries over the last two decades will swing sales in favour of electric over hybrid cars. Many houses are not even hooked up to the grid. Battery storage is so cheap many people don't want to even "deal with the man."


Dude Seriously
Twenty years is a long time. It is the time it took to go from the end of World war II with women in the kitchen with long dresses and men wearing hats and earning the money to 1965, with mini-skirts, free love, and the drug culture. It is the time from the 8-tracks of 1975 to the computer age of 1995. And it is time from the stone age computers of 1995 to the star trek smart phones of today. Twenty years is forever. It is not my predictions that are crazy. It is the predictions of the main stream media that are stupid. I am aware that the Solar cells and electric cars of today are not up to the job. We do not use the computers of 1995. Why would the people of 2035 use the solar cells and electric cars of 2015?

All technology has an explosion point. Someone comes up with a great idea but it doesn't quite work. It takes years, maybe decades to reach a point where inventions are useful. They had electric cars in the seventies. They were a piece of junk that didn't work. They went twenty miles an hours. They had no power windows, no air-conditioning, no radio, no heater and uncomfortable cloth seats. If someone hit you, you died. They had a range of twenty miles. They were a piece of junk that didn't work. They had truly crappy television sets in the thirties that no one bought. The car itself was being driven as early as the 1700's. They were a piece of junk that didn't work. That didn't stop people from buying cars in the 20's or televisions in the 50's. When a device starts working people start buying it. It does not matter how crappy it used to be.

Imagine standing in a farmer's field three miles outside Chicago in 1905. Imagine telling the farmer that in one generation cars were going to be all over, people would fly from city to city in great metal things. People in the city would have electric lights and where you were standing would be an apartment building. The farmer would think you were crazy. Yet that accurately describes the world of 1925. In 1945 no one owned a television. In 1965 if you didn't have a TV you were in a cult. In 1980 no one had a computer. In 2000 the phrase I don't own a computor was met with shock. No need to imagine having an argument with an imaginary farmer from 1980. I was still having arguments about whether computers were going to take off in the nineties. People would scream in my face. A couple of times I was afraid the nutcase would start punching. Not only was I wrong but I was some sort communist dope smoking, criminal, cult worshipping, hophead for even owning a computer. I am serius; I encounted this reaction dozens of times. I was amazed at the ability of the older generation to delude themselves about computers. I am Just as amazed about the denial about solar and electric cars today. I was right about computers. I was right about CD's. I was right about cell phones and I'm right about this.

(timing is everything.
I was late posting this essay and the Superbowl showed the BMW i3 ad.)Link below

It is not that environmental issues won't be a problem in the future. Nor will electric cars and solar power fix everything. Environmental laws were passed in the middle ages. The ancient Greeks and Romans saw some of the things they were doing were hurting them. They stopped doing those things. Keeping our air and water clean is a struggle that is thousands of years old. It will never end. But if medieval kings can come up workable solutions I think we can too. There is no real reason to be pessimistic about the future. Nor should we divide into two armed camps that don't talk to each other; one screaming "the environment" the other shouting "Jobs". Cleantech creates more jobs than coal and oil per dollar spent. Efficiency makes more money for the economy than pollution costs the economy. And pollution does cost the economy.

Yes, we COULD be doing better than we are right now. Yes, we SHOULD be doing better. But we always could have done better. If nothing could be improved then everything would be perfect. And perfection doesn't exist and never will. A large part of the fix we are in is because of pessimism. The idea that we are doomed hurts us, almost as much as the pollution itself hurts us. But the future looks bright. And the more we believe in the future, the more we believe that problems have solutions, the more we roll up our sleeves, the brighter that future will be.

Please check out some or all of the news links below.
If you find any of the facts I stated to be wrong, tell me and I will correct them if you are correct.
This a companion piece to the editorial "Cheer Up!"

Here is the BMW ad I promised you. www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1jwWw…
The facts I have stated are in the following links

www.treehugger.com/economics/c…
www.treehugger.com/green-jobs/…
www.treehugger.com/clean-techn…
www.treehugger.com/energy-poli…
www.greentechmedia.com/article…   (listen to podcast)
www.forbes.com/sites/peterdiam…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pow…
www.greentechmedia.com/article…
www.greentechmedia.com/article…
I feel like this list should be longer. I may have to update it
. Chear UP!I was listening to a podcast about millennials (young people) and one of the hosts said that young people were often too depressed to think about the environment. And generally speaking there seems to be a creeping doom that has infected everyone from flightiest  quiche eating liberal to the craziest gun totting tea party fanatic. From rich to poor, smart to dumb, religious to atheist, old to young, liberal to conservative, no group seems safe from ever more popular idea that the end is near.
And I would just like to say.
COULD YOU ALL CHEER THE HELL UP!!!!!!
Did you know for a hundred years that no cathedrals were built in Europe. Around 950 all the rich people got together and realized that cathedrals took a hundred years to build and God was going to end the world in 50 years. What a huge waste of money to start building a cathedral now. When 1000 AD showed up and everyone was still there, they thought they must have gotten the exact date of 1000 AD wrong. So they waited. Aroun
 
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