However, wormhole creation or warp drive is no-where near the reach of current technology. We are in need of reducing our consumption of energy not thru increased efficiency but by reducing unnecessary usage of equipment such as leaving the lights on or the PC on standby mode.
Hog wash! Blasphemy! Common Sense?!
No, this is the thing that everybody that wants to save the environment does not understand. The vast majority of people (and not just Americans, every industrialized company) could drastically reduce their energy composition and waste by doing small things that would cost them nothing. And they could reduce their heating and cooling (and thus energy waste) by doing cheap things such as more insulation, fixing cracks, etc etc. Not only do they reduce the energy they waste, they save money in the long run.
But people do not do this. Not even the people you here on TV bitching about how SUV’s waste gas really truly do this. Millions, maybe billions each year go into telling us how we are doomed and how certain people are evil really horrible studies of how evil we are, etc. Hardly any real money is going into research on new energy source (and guess what, that Oil Companies are by far leading in research funding of new energy sources). Not enough people are doing things to reduce energy waste, even in new construction. And why should they? Why would I want to pay 10X more upfront for some product when building by new house that saves 15% energy, when that price increase means I can not afford it? Instead of spending billions each year telling us how evil we are, subsidizing the cost of things like that would actually help.
Also, all of us here on this board leave in free societies. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting the privilege and luxury of driving a SUV that does not get great gas mileage. Seriously, there is nothing wrong with it. Think about it. Why is it wrong and evil to want to pay for a privilege? When people do not do the free and easy stuff to reduce their energy wasting, they really have no right to complain, as they are paying for their luxury of wasting energy.
Also, laws come into play. Freon (Refrigerant, R-12, Freon-12) was banned in the early 90’s in the US and other countries. It was banned because it was a fluorocarbon possibly causing harm to the ozone layer. It was replaced with a refrigerant that supposedly did not cause harm. Now, government and environmental officials where all over the banning of Freon-12. DuPont, the company that had the patent on Freon-12 also joined the fight against Freon-12, but they started their fight as their patent was going to expire and they could not longer get a piece of every manufactured Freon-12. So Freon-12 was banned (ok, a tiered ban, not all at once). But guess what, the next best thing that was supposedly safe for the ozone was another DuPont product with a fresh patent. Great, except, it is no where near as efficient as a refrigerant as Freon-12, as far as my knowledge, there has yet to be a safe refrigerant synthesized as efficient as Freon-12 (safe as not in environmentally, but as in if there is a leak in the coolant line you do not blow up really really big). Now, it has been since shown that the new refrigerants we use are just as harmful, if not more so, then the Freon-12 that was banned. But, we have not gone back to using Freon-12 yet because the environmentalists do not want to admit they where wrong, and even the ones that do, they inundated public opinion so much that it was bad and evil it is a hard battle, nearly impossible to restore using Freon-12. Now, refrigeration and air-conditioning is one of the most energy taxing things we in free societies do. Virtually all the recent improvements in refrigeration efficiency come from better insulation and better engineering. Even if switching back to Freon-12 could only improve the efficiency of those processes by 5%, when ~30% of the industrialized world’s energy composition goes to refrigeration that is a massive amount of savings.
What is the point of this long post?
The point is that energy consumption and waste is not, at all, a scientific problem, but a social one. As scientist we could invent the new ground breaking technology to save energy or produce clean energy. But it better be easy and cheap. It better be something the governments of the world can force onto its people.
The other option is education. Responsible education. Not just telling everybody “we are evil and destroying the environment and have to stop blah blah blah”. It is not just an American problem that most students graduating high school (or the equivalent in other countries) have no clue about real science, the real scientific process, how to critically think for themselves. How to look past their own needs and wants, both personally and tangibly.
I really wish more money was invested in energy research, not wasted at conventions and paying celebrities to speak and do commercials and stupid crap like that. And scientific research might provide answers or possibilities to solve the problem.
But ultimately, it is not a scientific problem, just a social problem. And I doubt anybody here has any idea of how to go about fixing it on a tangible level, not a idealistic level.
ChemBuddy | 
Chem Reddit | 
Topic: Should Oil & Gas Consumption undergo Cap-And-Trade Scheme? (Read 11300 times)