Global warming: a solution
Global warming is the calamity du jour. We’ve had the Y2K scare, the ozone layer disaster, the planet alignment doom and the meteorite crash panic. It has it all: fanatic followers, a global campaign (led by an ex-future president of USA, no less), rabid nay-sayers, corporate interests, government involvement, hare-brained schemes… The works. According to one side, this flavour of human civilization has about a century left, give or take. The other side maintains that in terms of environmental impact, volcanoes beat us hands-down. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? The debate rages on.
The generated noise was enough, however, to attract regulatory notice. Carbon offsetting, biofuels, alternative energy sources, eco light bulbs - no matter where you read this, your government has probably sponsored or imposed at least one of them, and if it didn’t, the rest of the world is probably busy denouncing it right now as a retrograde, selfish and pig-headed rule, unfit for the brave new world of the XXIst century. They’re probably looking into banning methane-producing monsters (also known as cows) as we speak.
But there’s one place where they’re not going to look - although they should, it’s one of the most inefficient and resource-hungry industry on the planet. No, it’s not unfiltered coal plants. It’s not cows either, evil as they may be. It’s us. Or, to be more specific, it’s us tourists.
Tourism has got to be the number one global warmth generator nowadays. And it starts with the kerosene burnt to take surfers from Finland to Australia or ski enthusiasts from Japan to Switzerland - or, closer to home, the petrol wasted inching along on roads chock-full of caravans. Sure, there are people now paying a so-called voluntary “carbon offset tax”. That’s pretty much as efficient as giving an aspirin to a 3rd degree burn victim. Just makes one feel unjustifiably good about oneself.
Then there’s the resources consumed once the tourist gets there. The food they eat, some of which is more often than not also flown in. The air conditioning in the hotel room. The useless junk that only exists because they need to buy souvenirs. We should also take into account the building and maintenance costs of the hotels, which must be just about the most inefficient form of sheltering known to man - given that most of them are only open “on-season”, 4-6 months a year.
A special place in global-warmer hell should be reserved for low-cost airlines. These glorified buses make it easier than ever for a bloke of average means to set foot on strange, miraculous lands and have a BigMac and a beer thereabouts. Their planes should be cordoned off by flower-wearing hippies, and GreenPeace activists should chain themselves to the landing gears. But no. Hippies are off visiting San Francisco, the hippy capital of the world, and GreenPeace activists are too busy chasing Japan’s whale-hunting fleet in the Antarctic Ocean, which is ok, you know, because their boats are sail-powered and completely environment neutral.
So seriously, stop tourism. It’s an environmental disaster. Get people to have their holidays in their backyard, or at least within cycling distance of their homes. I’m sure it’s going to be a popular idea with the green crowd. Want to see new places, experience new things and cultures? You can see them all on Discovery Travel. Exotic dishes? I’m sure a deli close by will be able to accommodate your wishes.
Just stay at home, and let me enjoy some peace and quiet while I’m on holiday.
Teach your children to lie
No, no, no - you say. Lie? We should teach them to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them, cross their heart and all that. They have to be honest to a fault, you know, straightforward and trustworthy. That is, just like their parents.
Sounds familiar? Almost every one of you reading these words has heard the sermon about lies and liars and (if you were lucky enough) the eternal rewards set aside for the good honest children. Your parents tried in their own way to teach you that lying is bad for you. And in 99.999% of cases, they failed utterly.
If truthfulness is such a praised and desired quality in today’s society, why aren’t the liars the exception, rather than the rule? If everyone was better off telling all of the truth, all of the time, why aren’t we living in a world where lies and deceit are things of ancient unenlightened past? I’ll tell you why. Because that’s in itself the biggest lie of all.
Indeed, unless you’ve spent your tender years in a vegetative state - in which case, you have my sympathy - you first leaned how to lie from your own parents. They lied to you, willingly or not, and when you lied to them, they rewarded you, thus reinforcing the behaviour. And when you got caught with a lie, they punished you for it, thus forcing you to learn to lie better next time. And so you lied, and so it went, and if anything, you should be thankful to them for teaching you. After all, your own ability to function in society is solidly based upon your ability to lie.
There are indeed degrees to a lie, and you went through them all. First there was the blatant, stupid lie, when you painted the walls with your mother’s cosmetics and then denied vigorously - while wiping rouge off your hands. Your parents’ feedback made you give that up pretty early in your lying career, and you should be grateful for that.
Then you learned about the difference between telling the truth and being polite, like that time when Aunt Irma brought you that horrid pink sweater for your birthday, and not only you had to thank her, you had to wear the damn thing until she was gone. Or when you had to spend a whole day in your room for telling your daddy’s boss that he’s ugly and he smells - because he did, and it was the truth, and why weren’t you supposed to tell it all of a sudden?
In time you also learned that you can protect your parents from certain aspects of your young life that they strongly disapprove. Like hanging out with friends they don’t like - “Where were you?” “Oh, out playing, ma’” “Not at Johnny’s?” “No, I was with Paulie and Amber with the bikes around the park”. It’s just a little white lie, and they’re now happier for it. Or, if your parents were really strict about lying, you would just “forget” to mention some parts of your day. Lying by omission is not technically a lie - after all, you haven’t said anything untrue. And so it goes.
Of course you’ve seen your parents do it. You’ve seen your mom being all nice and sugary with your new neighbour’s wife, only to talk trash about her with her girlfriends afterwards. You’ve seen dad handling door-to-door salesmen. You’ve seen them engaged in a million social interactions where they lie and hide and smile about it, because that’s how it’s done.
That’s how we’re able to function as a society. There was a film called “Liar Liar” where a young Jim Carrey was compelled by his son’s birthday wish to tell the truth for one whole day. The results were hilarious - in the movie - but also quite scary, when examined in depth. We tell a hundred lies a day and never even think about them. They are ingrained in our social persona, part of the reason we are able to leave among people. Ever tried spending one whole day telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Try it, and tell me how you failed.
So teach your children to lie. If you’re squeamish about the word “lie”, call it something else, but teach them anyway. Teach them how to lie and how to recognize a lie. Teach them about self-serving lies, social lies, political lies, attorney lies and advertiser lies. Teach them how to recognize the intent behind a lie. Teach them how to use lies, fight lies and go beyond lies to find out who they can and cannot trust.
And if you want to teach them to always tell the truth to their parents, you have to make yourself worthy of their trust. Teach them that your love for them is unconditional and not affected by what they say or do. That being your children is reason enough for you to help them and support them to the best of your abilities. Cos’ everybody makes mistakes in life - I know you did - and the best you can do is learn and move on. And if you love them enough, and care about them enough, you will teach them above all this one important lesson.
Everybody lies.
Batteries not included
What I’m about to tell you is probably not new, and may even be something you thought about yourself. I’m arguing that an efficient battery is the answer to our energy problems. Not ethanol. Not biofuels. Not even fusion- although that would be kinda neat. Batteries.
Now, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. It’s one of the advantages of having a two hour commute, I guess: lots of free time in which you can do nothing but holding on to a wheel and thinking - sometimes out loud. So if you happened to find this page - accidentally or otherwise - please bear with me, ’cause this is important.
During the course of our history as a civilization there were a few important paradigm shifts pertaining to the way we use energy. There was the wheel - harnessing the energy of beasts. There was the sail - wind power. The steam - coal power. Oil. Uranium. And now we’re looking into ethanol, wind turbines, solar power, geothermal energy, heat exchangers and a host of other new technologies, all aiming at producing reliable and safe energy.
Just the other day on BBC World Service, there was a big row about the decommissioning of the ageing British nuclear power stations, and the controversy surrounding the government’s plans of building new ones. And then we have the even bigger rows about the crops that are now cultivated for ethanol, which cause mass deforestation and a diminishing of the food supply for poorer and less power-hungry nations. There are big talks about the unreliability and inefficiency of solar and wind power, and European Union’s plans of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020 is met with skepticism and incredulity.
Which got me thinking: why don’t we pave Sahara then with photovoltaic cells and let them cook us electricity? Politics notwithstanding, there is actually one serious reason. Reliability. Or more exactly, the lack thereof.
You see, we want our energy to be reliable. That’s the first big requirement. When we push the button or the switch, power should be there, and at the expected voltage and amperage at that, because otherwise our light bulbs are going to blow up. Our engines expect a fuel of certain quality, otherwise they won’t start. The energy that we consume, in other words, has to be a linear function. Which is funny, because or consumption patterns are anything but linear. Of course, we could say that flicking on a light won’t affect the grid that much, but we’re talking factories, assembly lines and other such energy hogs. You can’t just turn off a nuclear power station over night, for instance, because people are not working, so you have to get that power off the grid.
A nice experiment done in the Netherlands used this energy surplus to drop the temperature in a few major deep freeze storage facilities by 4-5 degrees Celsius overnight (from -50C to -55C, for instance) - and letting them come back to the original temperature during the day. The freezers ended up using almost no power at all during the day, and the smart mind who thought this ended up saving his company a lot of money. What he created is essentially a large scale battery, storing power overnight and using it during the day.
The problem with this approach though is that our freezers cannot put power back on the grid during the day. But this is a great idea. What if you could do that in your home? Imagine just storing up the cheap night power and powering your home appliances during the day with it. An efficient energy storage would work wonders for the solar and wind power producers as well; they would just pack up the sunshine and store it for the rainy days. Literally.
The other half of the puzzle is the transportability of energy. You see, that’s what makes oil great. You can transport it relatively easy over large distances, and you can store it indeterminately, as long as you don’t light a fire too close to it. And best of all, you can use it to move vehicles around. The only necessary infrastructure is a well maintained road (or runway, or harbor). No strings attached.
Now imagine having a battery that can reliably power your car for 1000 km or more. And that can fully charge in 3 minutes. No hassle, no choices of leaded, unleaded and ultimate, no smelly fumes - just a big plug and a cup of coffee and it’s done. A pipe dream? This is the domain of the supercapacitor, a new research field which uses the advances in nanotechnology to try to attain these very desirable characteristics described above.
This is where we should be going. Reliable and transportable energy storage. If we achieve this, the energy sources won’t matter any more. We’ll just pave Sahara with photovoltaic cells, we’ll plug every geothermal source in Iceland and we’ll build huge supercapacitor silos to store that energy for future use. And for transportation we’ll just retrofit the supertankers of today with the same big capacitors - or maybe another, yet to be discovered energy storage device - and bring the energy to where is needed. No more energy hunger. No more oil wars. A brave new world.
EDIT: We’re almost there! Stanford researchers discovery may lead to a ten-fold increase in battery life. Well done, world.
EDIT2: Here’s another article about ultracapacitors.
