Food,
Energy, Transportation, Urban Design, Climate for an Eternity without Oil!
Jobs, Energy, Food, Climate & 100% Sustainability…
A new Paradigm to Provide Jobs, Prosperity, Energy, Fuel and Food so
that our Genes can Survive Eternity as the Fuels we have Disappear!
The world will reach 100% sustainability…because it
must if life is to survive here! The question is how to reach that 100%
sustainability, when it is not even on the radar of practically 100% of this
planet’s residents. We have just lived through the most extraordinary 200 years
of the Earth’s existence, burning 200 million years of carbon stored deep
underground in just that time. I am not a pessimist, but I do scratch my head
in wonder about how “growth without carbon” can continue for the eternity that
awaits!
The majority of the components of the genes that
combined when you were conceived have existed ever since life first began here,
hundreds of millions of years ago. They have since simply existed in different
combinations and recombinations to produce all of life since then! Does this
not suggest that we must imperatively look after those same components, in the
form of our children and great great…grandchildren forevermore?
Our human race is superb at seizing opportunities when
they present themselves, but not as good at predicting when dire necessity will
come knocking on our doors, as it has often done in our tumultuous history!
That, of course, has always resulted in the technological leaps and innovations
that currently support the Earth’s burgeoning populations. But, as the Earth’s stored
energy resources wind down, and energy powers everything, what will we do when
there are no more carbon-based fuels to burn?
All of those carbon-based fuels were produced by
plants from sunlight and the nearest source of nuclear fusion in our sun that
generates that sunlight. Almost all of the energy that we have spent in at
least the last 200 years exploiting carbon-based fuels comes from the millions
of years that it took to grow the necessary plants, and the animals that ate
the plants, whose remains now reside in the petroleum and coal that we now burn.
Therefore, ought we not turn immediately to the same source of energy that
produced those plants and animals, our sun, as the only truly perpetual source of the energy that we currently, and
will perpetually, depend on?
If we are to do that, how can we do it most
expeditiously…and believe me, time is running very short to maintain population
levels where they currently are!
Put your helmets on and fasten your seatbelts – the
ride ain’t gonna be easy!
- The new
infrastructure must be 100% Sustainable, with no more use of any petroleum or
coal…zip!
- It must
provide all the necessities that currently support this planet’s human, animal
and plant populations, including energy, food, transportation, with reductions
in the emissions, waste and poisons that our industrialized infrastructure currently
produces!
- It must be
buildable with currently available technologies, easy to scale-up from small
beginnings, approachable by all nations no matter what their access to technology,
and rapidly deployable, within 10 years!
So, now that I’ve defined the
impossible, where do we go from here?
10 years is actually a long time, given that the US
was able to convert from a peacetime economy to a highly productive wartime
economy in 1941 – 2. As the whole world now depends, as we do here in the USA,
for 60% - 95% of the energy used in transportation and food production on
petroleum, and the supply of petroleum will eventually disappear completely,
any sane individual would say that, well, we had better find replacements for
petroleum very quickly!
Let’s
pump the iron of paradigm change and
see what we can find!
- We will have
life on Earth for as long as the sun shines as it does now, so let’s build an
infrastructure that relies only on solar energy. It is far wiser to understand
that most of the energy that we currently use is from fossil fuels, meaning
from the remains of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. We
must convert everything that we do now to the direct use of such solar energy,
because the millions of years of stored solar energy that fossil fuels
represent will soon be absent!
- In addition, burning fossil fuels returns carbon
that was last in the atmosphere 60 – 100 million years ago to our present
atmosphere, with the consequences for global climate change that we are seeing!
- Wind is the
most powerful and economical form of solar energy, so let’s also base our
infrastructure on wind, in areas where it’s force is both strongest and most
consistent. The world’s current infrastructure is much more based on where
explorers first arrived and expanded their presence. We now have the
quantitative data that can be used to optimize where, how and when we can build
the world’s first 100% sustainable infrastructure!
- Food, energy
and transportation provision will all have to be revolutionized, as they all
depend almost entirely on petroleum, which will disappear, and cease causing
the potentially catastrophic global climate change that is currently running
away with the future of the components of our genes. What does that revolution
look like?
We’re
not yet in the position of the unfortunate gentleman above, but we must imagine
that we will be if we want to keep the Earth’s current populations alive using
our current energy, food and transportation infrastructure!
How can we turn our
absolute dependence on petroleum, coal and nuclear power into the largest
global construction project that this world has ever seen, with the creation of
millions of jobs on a global scale? We just have to replace where the energy
that we use came from originally, as below:
The
seas are rising around the north to south Linear City above, built at right
angles to the prevailing westerly winds in the Northern Hemisphere, which is
linked to another one across the straits. People are enjoying some sailing in
some vintage craft as a whale shark glides by, unseen. Optimism builds a much
stronger future than does greed and pessimism!
Everyone
can walk from where they live into fields to grow their own food without the
petroleum that is required for 95% of our current food production, all are
served by high-, medium-, and low-speed trains that use only 1/3 of the energy/passenger
mile of modern cars and aircraft, and that can also be powered by the ducted
wind turbines, in green, along the roofline! Please, please, please design me a
more sustainable infrastructure than this one!
They
would be built north to south, as indicated by the blue lines on the map above,
to connect our existing cities, and to supply those cities with food as
petroleum becomes increasingly expensive. As below, we would start 1) with the
construction of wind turbines along windy stretches of our north to south
freeway network, followed 2) with the installation of high-, medium, and
low-speed rail lines, and induction tracks in the freeways to overcome the
range problem of current electric vehicles. Finally 3) we would construct the
Linear Cities themselves, in any number of configurations and designs!
The
illustration at B) above depicts an East – West oriented Linear City, in red on
the map above, to link the North – South cities illustrated. They could be
built along waterways to take advantage of sail-powered transportation, below,
because we won’t be flying anywhere, and will enable all residents to grow
their own food, also below:
Everyone
can walk from where they live to their own fields to grow their own food
organically and cooperatively:
So,
where might these Linear Cities go, to be the most quickly advantageous and
beneficial, to reap the greatest wind energy potential, and to serve the
greatest populations? Please see below!
The
first map above is a combination of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s
map for wind resource potential, overlaid with a negative image of “Earthlights
at night” to give a relative idea of population and affluency levels. The map
on the right has the suggested infrastructure of linear cities, with the blue
lines being any of the north-to-south linear cities, and the red lines being
the east-to-west linear cities as suggested above.
This is
an extraordinary project, in scope, in innovation for sustainability, at a time
when we are all standing on the crumbling cliff edge of a fossil-fuelled
economy! History shows that we were only able to dramatically expand to our
current population levels by exploiting petroleum and coal resources beginning
in the 1800s, burning carbon that had been sequestered tens to hundreds of
millions of years ago!
Almost
all climate scientists, and almost all petroleum resource geologists have been
saying for years that this cannot continue. We therefore have the choice of
continuing business as usual, and dropping off a cliff as we reach the natural
conclusion of both trends, or of designing, building and using an
infrastructure that is 100% sustainable while we still have the energy to even
consider doing that!
How
many times have you read, or thought, those words, “100% sustainable”? It’s a
new idea, isn’t it! But, thinking about the future, and thinking about the
lives of the components of your genes, which we all hope will still be here
10,000 and 1,000,000 years from now, are there any alternatives to 100%
sustainability?!
Transportation
without any Petroleum!
I have
discussed the use of wind turbine driven high-, medium- and low-speed trains
above, but that still leaves most of the country, and most of the world without
transportation. What can we do for children in the Year 4000 for more local,
and overseas transportation, without the petroleum that currently fuels 95% of
our transportation needs here in the USA? And, while the solutions are critical
for those 2000 years from now, will they be any less critical within 20 years
for those here?
The car
above uses a highly optimized gas turbine – flywheel, or diesel - electric
hybrid that will burn any gaseous or liquid fuel, that serves as a gimbaled
gyroscope to keep the car reasonably level, and is equipped with the profile and
structure illustrated just above to attenuate the shocks caused in collisions
from almost any angle, to save the lives of the occupants. In addition, the
flywheel delivers power to all 4 wheels electrically using traction control to
avoid any wheel spin, and absorbs that power without locking the wheels (a form
of ABS) to make the flywheel turn faster, thus conserving the energy that is almost
always lost while braking.
Transportation over Water!
The following is from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships-create-pollution-cars-world.html#ixzz1bwEL7CSd
“As
ships get bigger, the pollution is getting worse. The most staggering statistic
of all is that just 16 of the world’s largest ships can produce as much
lung-clogging sulfur pollution as all the world’s cars...and, they can burn the
cheapest, filthiest, high-sulfur fuel: the thick residues left behind in
refineries after the lighter liquids have been taken. The stuff nobody on land
is allowed to use…which leaves behind a trail of potentially lethal chemicals:
sulfur and smoke that have been linked to breathing problems, inflammation,
cancer and heart disease.”
Those
pollutants almost certainly fall as particulates into the surrounding ocean –
what do they do to the ocean environment, and the animals and plants that live
there? We are also at the top of the food pyramid in the fish that we eat, so
what are those pollutants also doing to us?
“Christian
Eyde Moller, boss of the DK shipping company in Rotterdam, recently described
this as ‘just waste oil, basically what is left over after all the cleaner
fuels have been extracted from crude oil. It’s tar, the same as asphalt. It’s
the cheapest and dirtiest fuel in the world’.
“Smoke
and sulfur are not the only threats from ships’ funnels. Every year they are
also belching out almost one billion tons of carbon dioxide. Ships are as big a
contributor to global warming as aircraft – but have had much less attention
from environmentalists.”
Just as
land transportation without petroleum will experience changes in the paradigms
used, transportation over large bodies of water will have to change
dramatically! Again, we must optimize our use of the wind, with new and
surprising technologies, as below:
The
Blimpfoil illustrated at the top has tethered reverse hydrofoils, as do they
all to keep their lightweight hulls close to the surface of the water, that
also deploy upside-down train bogies that are channeled into/under rail I-beams
in port cities so that the Blimpfoil can fly from Kansas City to Moscow
non-stop, for example!
All
these craft benefit from both GPS and weather satellites, so that they can be
directed to fly or sail any number of miles to the north or the south to take
advantage of higher-speed, and more favorably oriented, wind streams. The foils
can also be equipped with sonic alarms and buzzers to encourage whales, large
fish and surfers to avoid their path!
- The history of civilization is perhaps 4000 to 10,000 years old, of
which we are most familiar with the last 2000 years, which is an incredibly short time! If you divide that 2000 years by
the 20 years that is roughly the period of the “average generation” according
to the variety of definitions that are available, we have 100 generations back
to the year 0, a date and year that we in the West know well.
- Most of us know 5 generations in our own families, from grandparents to
grandchildren, including ourselves. If you divide 100 generations by 5, you get
20, so it is only 20 times the generations that we know personally in our own
families back to the year 0, which is
absolutely incredible! It is only 20 times the generations that we know in
our own families that include almost all of reasonably recorded history.
- We have done an incredible amount in a very short time, from the first
sailing ships on the Nile 4000 years ago, the first cuneiform writing in
Mesopotamia in 3500 BC, and marks on tortoise shells from China dating from
6000BC, the last of which makes all of human history only 80 times the
generations that we know in our own families!
- And, if we were to measure in lifetimes of 50 years rather than in
generations of 20 years, that multiple would drop from 80 to 32, only 32 times
the lifetimes of those that we know in our own families back to the dawn of
civilization, and they didn’t even realize what they were starting, just as we
don’t, as we look forward into a future without petroleum and the start of
potentially catastrophic global climate change. Those who cannot dream, cannot advance, cannot survive!
- This discussion of generations is important because we can quickly see
how important, how crucial, each of the generations in our families is! If one
person in that chain had failed to live past the age of 15, we simply wouldn’t
be here, as are the “ghosts” of those who failed to reproduce.
- We cannot cry over our own history, or that of those who are not here,
but we can plan for the success of the generations that will follow ours so
that they can enjoy life to the full! What can you do for your children and
grandchildren to give them both confidence and joy to face their own futures?
What insights can you give them from your life so that, at an early age, they
can make plans to make their lives and those of their children the most
fruitful and enjoyable?
- Where will we be when we fall back to the same levels of fossil fuel
energy inputs that prevailed 100 years ago? Where will we be in 2000, 4000, and
10,000 years when we haven’t had access to petroleum for 99% of that time? The
time to act is now, this very minute. Everyone must look up from what they are
doing and consider what their great great great great great great great
grandchildren might be able to do if we do nothing, in the absence of any
systems to provide for energy, food, jobs, housing, civilization, education,
and a future for our genes, every one of them!
-
PS. The following is a comparison between
the number of pages referenced by Google for the combination of “Wall Street”
and “food production”, and “Wall Street” and “Oil Production”, and the Dow
Jones Industrial Averages for the past decade. It seems that there is a
reasonably close correlation between all 4! Let’s get some grad students onto
this to see whether we can make Wall Street more transparent, so that fewer
people lose their shirts there!
What
may be interesting in examining the above is that a high occurrence of sites
that mention “Wall Street”, and “oil production” and/or “food production” in
the same article came after the crash
in 2002-03, whereas it continued and
preceded the crash this time, to rise far higher still after the crash. So,
perhaps Wall Street learned just how important “oil production” and/or “food
production” are to world economies, and has done its best to safeguard its own
money, and the transfer of others’ money into their own accounts to “safeguard”
that as well?
Many,
if not most, observers of stock markets have said that as the oil supply
picture becomes more troubled, market trends will become more volatile. If this
is true, then the last 2 very volatile weeks in August, 2011 on Wall Street may
be an indicator that the, “lack of new significant oil discoveries confirm
that there is an impending oil crisis that will hit the global economy. This
would further drive up already accelerating oil prices making it all the more
difficult for the US economy to keep the stock market from crashing without preamble.
Peak oil prices are set to cause the largest tumble down in the history of the economy.”
(http://www.oil-price.net/en/articles/rising-oil-prices-predict-economic-recession.php).
Inevitably,
the world will have to move away from oil as a source for anything. The sooner
that we achieve that the easier and least expensive that transition will be!
What will happen to global populations that quadrupled with the support of oil
in the last century if we fail? If we can render energy supplies and food production
more predictable, steady, and subject to democratic influence, by sourcing it
directly from the sun as above, perhaps the world will be able to support more
people with less waste and volatility, more predictably, forever!
Therefore
Linear Ecocities because, in the end, we must imagine how to manage without a
single drop of the oil that accounts for 95%+ of our transportation fuels and
food production! As outlined, Linear Cities can more than adequately resolve
the inevitable supply problems that energy, food and transportation will very
soon see. Do we want to guillotine the prospects that we can offer to our great
grandchildren by doing nothing? Are the Republican changing the democratic
regimes of this country to assure themselves of continuing access to power,
food and transportation at the expense of everyone else, while the Democrats
are scrambling to develop new paradigms to fill that same gap? The near future
will reveal everything!
I
have constructed this model as a goal at the end of the first curve in an oval
racecourse. I challenge anyone to provide a better, more sustainable model! At
the same time, I am also happy to predict that all of us will not be living in
Linear Ecocities like those that I illustrate in 1,000 years and 10,000 years.
Just as car, medical and communications technologies have evolved rapidly, the
Linear Ecocity will also be subject to rapid evolution, including paradigm
change! At least, I hope so!
For
further information, please contact:
Mr.
Kim Gyr
Director,
Green Millennium
10057-3
Michigan Street
Empire
MI 49630-8505
1
231 392 6511
humansolutions@greenmillennium.eu
http://www.greenmillennium.eu