Energy

The essential challenge in Energy is that demand will always be higher than supply. Currently we harvest most of our energy cheaply, in the form of fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and petroleum. These forms of fuel provide for most societies needs and are great replacements for the cost of physical labor even when accounting for the cost of the machines that use these fuels. As the globe becomes more technically advanced we will need more factories and machines that run on these fuels directly and indirectly. New forms of regenerative energy are emerging but they are proving uneconomical and reliant on the petro-industrial infrastructure to be produced. The infrastructure changes required to incorporate fully regenerative energy systems would be unfathomable requiring massive cuts to energy consumption as well as large capital investments. 

Here are some solutions with a regenerative approach:

            Letting Nature Do the Work

There is no greater force known to man than nature. Before the industrial revolution animal power and human labor were harnessed by mechanical contraptions to magnify their output. Today we use machines which give us the ability to process large amounts of data and connect us with information that was not available in the 19^th century. 

Coupling our current knowledge and informational capability with Lyle’s concept of letting nature do jobs that we currently employ machines for such as: using the sun to generate heat and light in buildings, harnessing the sun’s energy for PV electricity generation as well as harnessing geothermal energy, using animals for labor rather than petrol consuming machines, and using mills along rivers in a sustainable way. By harnessing the laws of nature and the natural machines provided by the earth we can begin to provide a framework and a plan for weaning ourselves off of destructive energy consumption habits. The methods described would entail a great deal of careful consideration and thought that our society is not used to, but it is a better trade off than the alternative: running out of fuels with no back up plan.

Aggregating Not Isolating

The problem with industrial society is that a great deal of energy must be expended due to inefficiency and overspecialization of purpose. For example in cities like Los Angeles we see large amounts of sprawl and compartmentalization of business, industrial, and residential districts. It does not make sense that a large proportion of the city’s workforce must commute 30-60 minutes to work each day in traffic and even longer wait times on the way home. It is estimated that “Angelinos” spend roughly 70 hours a year in traffic according to FastLA with 38% of greenhouse gasses emitted due to transportation. If our communities were aggregated and labor and jobs were decentralized and community based with interconnectivity between businesses, industry, and residences we would very possibly see a dip in our energy consumption while curbing GHG emissions and stress levels in the population.