Kermit the Frog Famously Sang “It’s Not Easy Being Green”? Now we are Finding out That He Was Spot On

August 31, 2011 by  
Filed under Green Energy

Hybrid autos like the Toyota Prius offer better km’s to the litre of fuel without losing size or comfort, while electric automobiles undertake to transport us without the need for crude oil.

Each company is trying hard to get the best green stamp for their products, whether green cleaning companies or software developers. Windmills are now not the quaint Dutch paintings you see hanging on art studio walls; they are turning up on farms, mountain ridges, even in the ocean. Many governments seem to launch a new energy initiative every week, with the promise of more green jobs to counterbalance any transient agony in your wallet.

But while these green possibilities may now appear pervasive, they are not basically as common as we think. Take electricity: a minute quantity of our electricity came from renewable sources and most of that is hydroelectric power, not wind or solar. Nuclear power generation was beginning to look like a choice, but it is not very likely to get up in the trail of Japan’s nuclear disaster.

Green technology, particularly in cars, will get a big boost from higher oil prices. That's the good news. The bad news is that those increased prices result from higher demand in China and the 3rd world. Since November 2009, China has become the biggest auto market in the world. China’s car industry has been in fast development as far back as the early 1990s. In 2009, China produced 13.79 million vehicles, of which 8 million were passenger cars and 3.41 million were commercial autos. Most of the cars manufactured in China are sold within China, with only 369,600 vehicles being exported in 2009. This increasing demand for vehicles will have a huge impact on oil prices worldwide.

While we consume less oil, we might not be slowing the rate of fossil-fuel consumption; we may just be transferring that consumption some other place. Unless we somehow stop burning ordinary fuels, all of the carbon currently under the Earth’s surface will finish up in the atmosphere in the following few hundred years. As the physicist Robert B. Laughlin lately indicated in The American Scholar, from the Earth’s point of view, about a hundred years is less than the blink of an eye. But unfortunately that's not right for human lives which should be altered considerably.

Unfortunately, though we have better and better technologies that enable us to use less fossil fuel, yet we now do not have any scalable way to use no carbon, or anything close to none. Even speedily maturing technologies like wind power need carbon intensive backup generation capacity for those times when the wind does not blow. Nobody has yet designed a hybrid commercial airplane. Being green, we’re finding out, is going to be trickier than it sounds.

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