I used to read a lot of sci-fi, much of it from the so-called "Golden Age of Science Fiction" in the 1940's and 50's. In those books, there was rarely a problem with power. It was there, generated by "atomics" or other technology that the authors were confident would be available in their futures. Well, this is their future. We haven't yet met the challenge of their imaginations, but now, with the right priority, and with our burgeoning technical abilities just waiting for an influx of the right investment, we aren't all that far away from the future they foresaw.
Simply put, here's the problem: People need to group up and move together more. And individually, less. This approach works just great in urban and close-in suburban environments, but for people in exurbia and rural places, not so well. What we need is a paradigm shift from the way Americans think about their sacred right to drive, because we also have to think about our planet's sacred right to survive into the next millennium with a thriving population of living things.
So - first we make it more difficult for people in cities to drive a car around or even into the city from their homes. The use of mass transit will have to be subsidized at least as much as the roads we drive cars on today, and the roads made more expensive to use. That's a lot of government spending being switched from one program to another. It's a priority.
There will always be some need for people movers like taxis and buses. The taxis like we have today don't have to be the people movers. I am suggesting small electric cars to move 2 to four people from place to place within urban areas. If buses are needed where no rail is available, let's use clean burning liquefied natural gas (LNG) or propane, or even hydrogen. Think of underground and light rail, monorail, borrow-cycles, telecommuting, and even - walking more.
Once urban mass transit has removed the need for driving internal combustion cars out of the urban areas of the country, there is still the massive problem of our rural and semi-rural to exurban areas. From a vantage point high above the planet, that is really most of the nation. But it's not most of the population. So it is imaginable, and manageable. And it's a priority.
The internal combustion engine running on petroleum products will disappear in a few centuries, except for antique car shows and museum exhibits, simply because there will be no more petroleum. So in the long run, the use of gasoline and diesel are no answer to anyone's mobility anywhere. We must turn to the use of smaller vehicles that use electric motors, or LNG, hydrogen, or any of the other alternative fuels that do not require pumping petroleum out of the ground. And we should include coal in the list of fuels that will disappear as well, so electric cars recharged by power generated at coal-burning plants are not the long term answer either. In the short term, engineers can make electric cars that will do whatever is needed - move people, move freight to a rail head, even provide power to the giant combines that farmers use to cultivate and harvest crops. Electric motors and batteries can do all of these jobs, and sooner rather than later. Another priority.
The big problem still to be solved is in point-of-use generated electricity to provide energy to these electric vehicles. Harness the sun? Use small local hydroelectric dams? Wind? Waves? Magnetic coupling? Thermal or short burst plasma generation? Long duration Tokamak contained fusion? The technologies already exists to make these electric generators available, and at short enough distances from most people that the loss over power lines will be minimal. This is a top priority and we should be investing in this research yesterday.
It's time to let our imaginations continue the job started by the sci-fi writers in the middle of the last century. Look back for some inspiration, but remember to look forward for the solution. Car companies of today can make the vehicles we need to continue our love affair with our precious mobility. But the mobility will mature and the vehicles will not resemble our beloved gas guzzlers. They will silently pull up to a "filling station" to recharge and then silently continue on their way, out in our lovely countryside, that we saved by making the responsible choices. And our cities will be populated with undergrounds and monorails buzzing along - also silently - with just a few electric or clean-burning fuel taxis moving people short distances, and a lot of people will not need to move at all because they will telecommute.
If we want to continue to be a mobile society, these priorities will have to be met. We didn't become a mobile society in the first place without making conscious choices to cover the country with concrete and gas stations. We have to make conscious decisions to back away from that paradigm and into the future.
**Addendum
Most of the responses to this challenge have dealt with over-the-road mobility. Air travel is a true dilemma. Airplanes are unique in that they must take their fuel along for the ride, and it must be very safe. There are sources of hydrocarbon fuels that may be adaptable for use in airplane or jet engines. But air travel may become a nostalgic memory for future generations, at least cheap air travel. Most futurists, myself included, foresee the solution to future air travel will be plant hydrocarbon extracts, and that there will be proportionately less air travel in the future as the Earth's population grows.
Some future air travel needs can be met through the use of large hybrid airship / lifting bodies. They can be used in groups to lift and move heavy loads. Their efficacy has been tested and proved, but since petroleum is still available and cheap, it is a technology waiting for a chance to shine. There will be a round-the-world flight this year by a Spanish design.
Boats and ships can use wind power to generate electricity. There are other sources of mobile power generation - even future generation nuclear - that can meet the need of the fleet.
There is a need for military mobility that I have not discussed here. For completeness, I want to state I have not included that requirement.
Update 2-08-09
OS ate the links in my comment on Thursday, Feb. 5, at 3:30 pm. It's pretty hard to repair comments, so I am going to add these links back in here, or at least try to:
Link 1: Google is powering it's campus with clean solar power:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/corporate-solar-is-coming.html
or
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15301514/
or
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/38550/story.htm
Link 2: SC Johnson Company's success at powering one plant in the US with solar and cogeneration of power from a local landfill's methane production.
http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/2007_SC_Johnson_Public_Report.pdf Page 24++
Also see this blogger's page for a short text entry: http://renewableenergymilwaukee.blogspot.com/2008/10/sc-johnson-touts-renewable-energy.html
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Comments
Regards to population density, I point you to this series of experiments .
http://www.utopia-politics.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=38020&mode=linearplus
In a nutshell, rats in mice and a space restricted environment with unlimited food became increasingly dysfunctional. Reproductive activity significantly reduced, males tended to congregate in packs in the center open space, unattached females lived in less desirable solo quarters at the edge of the living space. kept the primary researcher opined that the rodents suffered from "death of spirit"
yes, we are not rats but, the industrial world has a below replacement birthrate. This is extremely pronounced in Japan (high density population) and in Europe (also high density populations). Acquaintances I've made in Europe are frequently single. Those with stable relationships do not have children. Not to worry, humans will never go extinct if we have a sufficient pool of people in rural spaces. what I mostly concerned with is the loss of knowledge about how to run the civilization as the younger "city mice" walk away from hard knowledge in favor of softer knowledge. From what I've seen in the dark green movement, I was say that not just walking but running away. any examination of the ideological mileposts for validity is usually met less than critical thought.
How are you going to entice people to move out of rural/suburban spaces? urban real estate is 3-4 times more expensive than suburban (which is a form of subsidy for car use) and further urban migration pressures will only jack up the urban real estate costs. I think the only fix is to level all buildings around each transit stop and put in high-density high rise blocks of flats housing 10k-20k people. you will also need transit stop industrial parks. Mixing industrial and residential space is not wise because what people need and what businesses need are orthogonal. In this case segregation is a better policy.
Another do the math scenario is wind power to run ships. How big a turbine would you need to power one of the current generation of container cargo ships. You might find that it's physically impossible to generate enough energy.
Soul power and wind power are distributed sources of energy. Suburbia has enough rooftops to generate all the power suburbia needs plus export energy to urban centers. A block of flats doesn't have enough surface area to generate energy for the residents of the building let alone contribute anything to the rest of the urban space.
You should also take into account cultural issues. If you start grouping people huge blocks, you will see tribal boundaries start up by neighborhoods, buildings, or even floors of a building. Keeping traffic local will encourage provincialism and in its worst form, xenophobia.
in the end, every environmental problem can be solved if you restrict peoples freedoms. your proposal relies too heavily on restricting freedoms and not on what people are truly motivated by, money and sex. Historically, people have moved to urban centers for better chance of finding work and through money, finding someone to have sex with. In your scenario, what happens to relationships if social or environmental pressures require you choose between being with someone you like or being close to where you work? how do you have a family when moving together means a smaller per person living space even if you discard all your belongings?
I'm not a dark greeny. I believe in a bright green future, one with high efficiency electric cars letting us preserve real estate investment and the possibility of distributed power generation, short range of electric planes (i.e. 200-400 miles) increasing amount of air travel. I also believe we should get off the planet for lunar or other colonization efforts. I do not accept the monopolies created by public transit and other artificial restrictions on human movement. remember, civilization takes energy.
in the end, most dark greenies have forgotten that the world is a wonderful place to see and restricting your vision to the local skyline is a horrific thing which should never be forced on anyone.
There has to be distributed power generation if we want to sustain any widely available means of recharging our vehicles outside of the urban environment. That's because of losses over long power lines, and because, again, our source of fuels for traditional power generation is disappearing. Except for hydro and nuclear, which can be centralized and can sustain large cities, there is no reason to put up with inefficiency of centralized power generation over long distances that we have today.
Single homes and even large office buildings can be designed and have been built that provide all of their own energy needs, using only solar power. Again, energy efficiency is a big part of the equation. Google is powering its office building (although not its disk farm) through the use of solar power
There are manufacturers who are using a combination of solar and / or co=generation from recovered methane from landfills to power their entire operation:
I could continue to quote current success stories, but what I want to cite are future successes.
WRT rats and mice, and personal space, I agree with you totally. Future cities and businesses will rely on telecommuting a lot more than we do today. Lucky will be the person who doesn't have to report to work over a road loaded with cranky car drivers, which I believe studies show is just as stressful as being crammed into Japanese trains (I've been there - both theres.)
Finally, I don't advocate for people to move into crowded cities. I think they should move away from them, to light rail terminus areas, but there should be more of those termini.
I think you may have slightly missed some of my points, and I apologize for my lack of clarity.
I do hate being a contrarian so I will argue briefly that we will not run out of oil. It will climb in price until only the very richest can afford to use it. This means transportation be effective first followed by industrial processes using petroleum as an industrial feedstock. There will be replacements that may be more or less harmful to the environment depending on the economics of the replacements.
Great to hear about the agreement on distributed power sources. I really don't like the idea of space dedicated to power generation especially when it is as potentially enormously damaging as the current solar thermal power plants in the Southwest. I may have to accept it however. I think a better solution is distributed power generation sharing with other uses. For example, there is no reason why an orchard couldn't have wind turbines as well as fruit trees. Suburban houses are perfect for distributed solar because it is usually more than enough square footage on most houses to produce power in excess of the power needed by the House. The downside of this is that you can kiss a lot of trees goodbye if they shade the property. A side note is this may actually be a good thing for carbon sequestration because grasses embed more carbon in the sod and resist erosion far better than trees do.
If we talk more, you'll hear me mutter "do the math" more than once. I will admit that I make mistakes in the calculations or models occasionally but, I'll take my lumps and redo the numbers with a correct model. One great "do the math" is if you look at the cost of setting up many rail systems, it may actually be cheaper to use the money for the buildout in the maintenance to purchase electric cars for all the potential customers. I have not actually done the numbers yet myself for variety reasons but, it's an interesting possible outcome. After all, what would you choose a smelly dirty ride that runs sporadically, always consumes a frightening amount of your time, is expensive and creates chokepoints tailor-made for government surveillance or, a personal vehicle that goes when you want to go, where you want to go without giving anybody any information you don't want to and is cheap to run.
This is a variant of the Amery Lovins (Rocky Mountains Institute) question he puts a city planners quite a few years back "imagine a car without any pollution and is cheap to run. What would that do to your cities?" I believe he terrified most of these planners. If the electric car future holds, Amery Lovins future comes true and we are not prepared except to tell people to use something more expensive, less functional and less safe.
Retrenchment, conservation will only take you so far and then you're out of runway and you're staring at billions of people at risk to plagues like the Black death and no place to put the bodies.
so, keep shooting for a bright green future, think lots of green energy doing wonderful things with wonderful aircraft we don't have yet mashed up with amazing cars that we only have the slightest hint of. that future would be a wonderful place to be. It's one I want to live in.
http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=102830
and we have some of the same notions. Please take a look at his description, which is written a lot better than mine, of the infrastructure changes needed to make personal mobility sustainable. In the short term and for land travel, Ron has hit the nail on the head.
There should be universities offering degrees in this technology field. We need people with nimble minds who can think about these future needs, and we need them yesterday.
I don't share the pessimism of some of the other comments about your approach, because I really don't think it's restrictive in any strong sense; it's just outlining possibilities along one direction. The only point I'd perhaps quibble with is the notion of making it "more difficult for people in cities to drive a car around". I think that for various reasons it would be better to focus on giving people fewer reasons to think that they need to do that. That's a more difficult problem--it's cheaper to impose congestion taxes on drivers than it is to fund better public transportation--but I think in the long run it might be more effective, at least politically.
I wish I could say more, but I can't do the math. :-)
You wrote "I think that for various reasons it would be better to focus on giving people fewer reasons to think that they need to do that. That's a more difficult problem--it's cheaper to impose congestion taxes on drivers than it is to fund better public transportation--but I think in the long run it might be more effective, at least politically."
It would definitely be more politically effective to do this via your method, and more in keeping with America's historic love affair with the car. The problem boils down to whether there will be financial resources in the future to both maintain sufficient road, bridges, parking lots, etc., for individual vehicles as our megalopolises expand, and also solve the dwindling petroleum source problems at the same time.
The way Congress and the President(s) decide to just print money these days, it would seem that there will be plenty to do all we need to do. But these years are aberrant. After the current fiscal crisis, we have another 100 or so years of oil to burn and then we better be ready to switch to other forms of fuels.
The problem with just switching from analog to digital TV makes it crystal clear that these changes don't happen fast or easily. And that change is so very minor compared to what has to happen by the time we run out of petroleum fuels.
Thanks for stopping by and leaving your thoughtful - umm - thoughts.