by Carlhole » Sun 16 Aug 2009, 17:59:38
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Epilogue
Sometime in the 21st century -- Brooklyn New York
Bill lives in a world where gasoline, where it can be found, costs $20 per gallon. In Bill's world, however, the price of gas no longer rules our conversations. In fact, the price of gas isn't even in the conversation. It's a non-issue. Nobody buys the stuff, hardly, so nobody cares. In Bill's world the weather is again at the top of pedestrian gabbing fare. Nobody talks about how, last week, they fill their tank only half way because it's all they could afford. Nor do people talk about how awesome it was to fill their tank for a mere $15. In Bill's world, there are no tanks and everything is already full, all the time.
At 27 years old, Bill is typical for an American his age. He last rode in an airplane 15 years ago he doubts he'll ever cross the threshold of another airport gate ever again. And he doesn't care. He travels frequently, but always by high-speed train. Bill lives in New York and often rides the train two hours to visit his parents in Pittsburgh. His father enjoys regaling him with tales of airports and trips to New York that took the family six hours door to door. It all sounds ridiculous to Bill, the schlepping, the airports, the delays, the baggage hassles. But he appreciates his dad's amazement with the nation's train network, even if he sees it as just a utility that's always been there for him as an adult.
Bill arrives to train for an hour to see his sister in Boston are for two hours for a weekend getaway on the French streets of Montréal. He often trips to Chicago to spend long weekends with his older brother, who also shows up in New York quite often. When he's on the go, and that's fairly often, Bill expects to be sitting, or sometimes standing, on the train before anything else, whether it's in a subway car slicing its way downtown or train that blurs the passing scenery of upstate New York.
Like 70% of the people his age, Bill has never owned a car. Gasoline cars are around, but he doesn't ride in them too often. They're just as many electric cars plying the streets of the city now, too. But owning one of these, while attractive and a bit glamorous, isn't cheap and just isn't needed. His Chicagoan brother, two years his elder, doesn't own a car nor does his Boston living sister, two years his junior. Love them, in fact ever expects to own a car. Bill's parents, who live in Mount Lebanon area of Pittsburgh, own a small electric sedan that they love. Bill's father keeps making noises that they will ditch their car, garage, and the house and move into central Pittsburgh, which is once again a bustling, vibrant city core that would have reminded Bills late grandfather of the city's glory days decades ago.
When Bill rides the train to New Jersey landscape to the west or the near upstate terrain to the north, he passes by acre after acre of produce farms. Some of this land, just 20 years ago, teamed with cheap subdivisions. Some of it boasted corn and grain crops. Now this land supplies New York and its close by neighbors with tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, cucumbers, spinach, romain, and just about anything Bill might find in the fresh produce aisle at his neighborhood shop. The high-speed train line is shadowed by normal freight line that brings the vegetables and fruit into the city every day. The same ring of farms surrounds all US towns now big and small. Food, for Bill, has almost always been local. American farms as much as it ever has, but it's crops are spread evenly around the country, distributed regionally rather than nationally. Illinois grows less corn and has more wheat, apple orchards, greenhouses, and potatoes. California, conversely, grows more corn and wheat while cranking out fewer avocados and citrus fruit. Fruit is just too expensive when it has to be shipped cross country.
Bill lives in a four-story building in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. It's an old building, built near the beginning of the 20th century, but it pulses with technology. Bill's hot water and half of his electricity come from solar panels in the building's roof and upper walls. The solar panels operate a system that mimics the photosynthesis process in plants. The energy harnessed by the cells during the day, which splits water molecules and oxygen gas and valuable hydrogen atoms, can be used by the homes at night through a fuel cell that recombines the hydrogen and oxygen and harnesses the energy released during their bonding.
Flat roofs in New York Pittsburg, California, or anywhere else, that aren't used for solar cells often have gardens or grass installed. 6 inches of dirt nursing an overhead collection of plants helps keep buildings insulated in the winter and cool in the summer. The green roofs displace less water, which helps keep sewage plants from being overwhelmed while their insulating effects allow power plants to produce less electricity. Many homes, including many walk-up buildings in New York City, boast extensive produce gardens on their roofs. The gardens are often maintained by a tranche of companies that have cropped up solely for the purpose of keeping the buildings and inhabitants deep in sustainable and fresh vegetables around six months of the year. It's the ultimate supply chain reduction.
When Bill turns on and anything in his house that's sucking power from an outlet, he can track the exact power usage down to hundredths of kilowatt hours. In a $20 world, many homes in America will be equipped with an energy monitoring system. Bill can track the usage of each light socket and outlet throughout his apartment. He knows that watching that last hour of television cost him 80 cents. These systems, in a $20 world, have been mandated in places like the Northeast California to help consumers conserve energy and prevent grid blackouts. The strategy has worked brilliantly; when people see exactly what it costs them to leave that extra light or that on watch television on, a quickly wise up, encouraged by savings they can see and realize instantaneously.
When Bill gets outside his apartment door and locks the bolt from the outside, the electronic lock relays the signal for the homes interlink electric system, extinguishing all the lights and turning off air conditioning systems. During times of peak demand, a small LED light glows on all the light switches and outlets in Bill's flat, reminding him that electricity is more expensive at that moment. Little prods like that help American homes the world of $20 gas use 50% less energy per capita than he did in a world of two dollar gasoline.
In his kitchen, Bill brews tea heated by the energy of the sun. Bill's kitchen cups are not plastic made from oil, the plastic made from sugar or corn plant grown in Ohio. The spent water from build building is recycled flush toilets were to water back and front yard plants. Bill jogs in athletic shirts made of finely knit wool, not polyester, which is used less and less because of its high costs. Bills running shoes havef natural rubber bottoms -- as in tree rubber -- since the composite petro-based materials that used to be made from petroleum and were so common in the past sneakers are all but forgotten. Bill's street has been paved in concrete as part of New York's plan to get a small streets on the 20 year pavement plan.
Without as much car traffic, the streets can survive longer. If they're concrete, they can withstand the rigors of winter better than asphalt, which has seen its main advantage -- cheapness -- erode. Along the concrete streets, New York has installed fee-based electrical outlets for the charging of cars. Trolley cars returned to the streets of Brooklyn, Chicago, Sacramento, and dozens of other towns, serving as bridges between some citys' subway-deprived warrens and their newly expanded, glistening and efficient underground lines. During rush hour, when the trolleys come frequently, people boarding a trolley car can usually see another car up the street within two blocks in one down the street within the same distance.
Bill lives in the original heart of American urban density, but 90% of Americans also call high density urban centers home now. City land speculators have struck it rich while exurbian landlords have been ruined.
Bill's girlfriend wears lipstick made from argan oil from a Moroccan ironwood tree rather than petroleum. Bill's wine, and most wines, come in boxed membranes that take far less energy to produce than glass bottles. Much of Bill's newer furniture, his flooring, and some of his summertime BBQ wares -- biodegradable plates, knives, and forks -- are made of bamboo shoots and fibers come from plantations in Florida and Texas. The bamboo plant builds mass more prodigiously than any tree possibly could and has, along with bio plastics, helped replace many oil-based plastics around the house.
Bill works for a company that designs tidal power stations all over the world. Such installations can be seen all all along the East and West Coast now, as was much of the developed coastline in the world. The seas's constant swirl as an energy source that, once an efficient method for harnessing it came about, could not be ignored. Bill's job is one of millions that have been created for a new world built on new energy paradigm, one is not centered on oil, but instead on a multitude of energy is coming from things as disparate as the Earth's molten core to the sun coming from the center of our solar system.
Bills gig owes its existence directly to individually companies that, during the last 20 years, have been powering our rapid tap dance adaptation as our oil use diminishes. The global economy, once powered by crude, is now powered by trade and materials and devices to capture and preserve the energy we have. Cargo ships to cross the oceans, but not with the rush-hour regularity of before. Now they're full of solar arrays, wind turbines, massive batteries, millions of electric cars, and thousands of new high-speed train parts.
In Bill's world, cargo ships have evolved into gargantuan nuclear powered islands that measure 4000 feet long and 400 feet high, and weigh more than 1,000,000 tons. The Queen Mary two, by comparison, since it 1100 feet long and weighs 150,000 tons. These new ships' cavernous bellies will be 10 times larger than the standard container ships of the day. These massive ships evolved not of additional amounts of international trade, but of exorbitant diesel prices. The ships will revive trade between the world's giant economies after some aspects of globalization were stymied by the high cost of moving anything. Many people now take trendy cruises to cross the Atlantic in four days on a nuclear powered mega-cruise ship rather than pay twice as much to fly. European vacations don't disappear for Americans, but they come less often, and when they do, they last two or three weeks rather than just one. These nuclear ships will be, in Bill's $20 existence, the latest manifestation of nuclear powers' democratization. The United States current policy of keeping nuclear power away from anybody but our closest allies will be incompatible in the world of rapidly expanding energy demand and decreasing crude oil supplies. Hundreds of new nuclear plants will dot the globe from South America to the Middle East to Southeast Asia. Multinational companies that build these reactors, such as GE, will revel in the world nuclear renaissance. The reactors will be built to generate a little high-level nuclear fodder -- the stuff of nuclear bombs -- as possible, but tight international policing will still be needed. The world won't have any other choice, as these changes will be dictated from an economic pulpit, not an emotional one,
The future energy world, and hence, the modern world will be ruled by strict efficiency metrics, not mere it-works-so-don't-fix-it methodologies. The world's route to energy equilibrium will be determined by sets of equations that determine utility, worth, and function. The same equations will replace our gluttonous American model for life with an elegant one, a model so innovative that our world, while recognizable, will be far, far from the same. These energy equations will render McMansions defunct and SUVs dinosaurs. These equations will fill our ridges with wind turbines and send cars from our roads. These equations aren't expressed through indecipherable statistics, but through one simple modern idiom: dollars per gallon.
