FEASIBLE IMPROVEMENTS THAT CAN BE MADE TO HUMANITY
Evolution: Primitive man burned wood for energy (10% of wood is made up of hydrogen). By the beginning of the industrial revolution, certain countries were burning coal for electricity (25% of coal is made up of hydrogen). Later in the 20th century, society began to rely more on petroleum to run automobiles and planes (50% of petroleum is made up of hydrogen). In the late 20th century and early 21st century, society began shifting to natural gas for energy (75% of natural gas is made up of hydrogen). It’s just a matter of time before society relies on pure hydrogen for its energy. As time goes on, we’re using less and less of the carbon in hydrocarbons and more and more of the hydrogen.
Over the past two hundred years, the industrial revolution has increased the standard of living of millions. It’s now time to evolve further and remove harmful aspects of the industrial revolution while remaining with the benefits. The key to accomplishing this is to manage natural resources in a sustainable manner. Sustainable is defined as a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged. That which is not sustainable cannot be sustained. Oil is a finite resource that eventually will run out. Instead of getting caught with skyrocketing oil prices caused by dwindling reserves, why not prepare in advance by implementing clean energy technologies.
Energy Reform
Shifting to Clean Energy Technologies: If campaign contribution reform, subsidy reform, and lobby reform are all accomplished, it would be easier for the government to shift society from a fossil fuel based energy infrastructure to one that relies exclusively on clean energy technologies. Hydrogen pushed through a fuel cell creates an electric current large enough to power a car or heat a home. Hydrogen can be extracted from any water whether it’s from a brook, a river, the ocean, or rainwater collected in a cistern. An electric current applied to the water breaks it into its elemental components, hydrogen and oxygen. If that initial electric current is generated from solar or wind power, fossil fuels are no longer needed. An energy infrastructure based on pure hydrogen captured through the use of clean energy technologies is not only technologically feasible and economically viable, it’s also common sense. With this kind of energy infrastructure the US would only need water, sun and wind to generate energy (of which the US has an ample supply) instead of relying on imported foreign oil. The total amount of energy of all types that the US uses in one year is approximately 0.2% of the total energy contained in the sunlight that shines on the US' 48 contiguous states in one year. Clean energy technologies already exist, however, if they were utilized on a national scale, it would lead to swift technological advances in the areas of photovoltaics, electricity generating windmills, fuel cells, and hydrogen collection and storage. Denmark currently produces 20% of its electricity from electricity generating windmills.
Where to Start: The sizable subsidies currently lavished on the fossil fuels industry should be redirected to subsidize the construction of manufacturing plants that fabricate photovoltaic equipment, wind power equipment, and hydrogen storage equipment. The US should ban the construction of fossil fuel power plants and nuclear energy facilities and eventually dismantle the ones that exist.
Renewable Energy in Every Town: The US should install solar panels on top of every roof. Solar energy generation should be supplemented with wind power by installing electricity generating windmills around the perimeter of every baseball, football and soccer field in every town adding lights near the top of them so that they light the fields for night games and adding a cell phone antenna to the structure in order to improve cell phone reception. Any additional energy generated beyond the town’s daily usage could be used to extract hydrogen from water. This hydrogen would be stockpiled and during periods of no sun and no wind the hydrogen inventories could be pushed through fuel cells, and the electricity generated would be pushed through the grid and sent to businesses and residences. The combination of solar panels and wind power allows clean electricity to be generated in a wide range of weather conditions (it’s very often windy when solar panels are not generating electricity, and vice versa, it’s very often sunny when it’s not windy).
Nanotechnology Enhancements to Photovoltaics: Artificial photosynthesis using nanotechnology, semiconductor solar cells and hybrids like the Graetzel cell are promising and active directions of research. The Graetzel cell is a hybrid approach to nanoscale photovoltaic material. An organic molecule (the dye that originally absorbs light) is combined with a nanostructured electrode made of titanium dioxide (a semiconductor), and the result is efficient charge separation. Such hybrid structures between molecular and semiconductor nanostructures may permit substantial advantages in terms of stability, efficiency, and cost. The Graetzel cells exemplify a major worldwide effort for capturing sunlight to provide energy sources that are efficient, nonpolluting, safe, and inexpensive. Graetzel cells can be produced using silk screening techniques, which makes them cheaper to make than most traditional photovoltaic cells. The initial cost of nanotechnology solar cells is the driving concern impeding the widespread adoption of the technology. Until mass production is possible, however, the price barrier will be hard to break, and this is likely to happen only if solar power becomes a priority of public policy and there are preorders to fill factories.
Transportation Reform: The US government should gather the world’s top relevant scientists and experts and have them create standards for hydrogen segregation and hydrogen storage infrastructure using nanoscale carbon tubes to store the hydrogen. This new hydrogen storage system would be utilized in fuel cell cars, buses, planes and trains. Gas stations should be converted into hydrogen stations that generate and store hydrogen that would be used to fill fuel cell cars. Hydrogen stations should have electricity generating windmills, solar panels and equipment that uses electricity to convert water into hydrogen. The government could pay the capital expenditure for this conversion and lease the equipment to the hydrogen station owners. Domestic automobile manufacturing companies should be required to sell only fuel cell cars in the US, and non-fuel cell cars should be outlawed from being imported or manufactured in the US.
The Bronx Project:
Supplemental Electricity Generation: Each town should be required to have at least one gym in the center of town in which all of the equipment (rowing machines, stair masters, stationary bikes, etc.) is specially designed to generate electricity. In the event of an energy shortage, residents could help by going to the gym and working out to generate more clean electricity. Some of this specially designed gym equipment could be located in people’s homes in order to supplement energy generation when the home’s photovoltaic system is not generating enough energy by itself to cover the home’s electricity usage.
Renewable Energy Infrastructure Financed: The purchase and installation of renewable energy equipment could be paid for by using low interest federal loans. Each individual photovoltaic panel installation would be connected to the grid so that any electricity that your home generates in excess of what you use would get sold back to the utility, and those proceeds would decrease the amount of the principal on your photovoltaic panel loan. Instead of paying an electric bill to your local utility, you would service your government loan. Your new monthly electricity payment could be set up to exactly match your original electricity payment. The new monthly payment would be paying principal and interest on the loan and also paying for any maintenance required. The payment would also have to take care of any excess electricity you would need to buy from the grid during times when you use more electricity than your home generates. Eventually, after your solar panel loan was paid off, you would only have to pay for the maintenance of the equipment, and if you were good at conserving energy, you could receive a monthly payment for the excess electricity that you sell back to the grid.
Clean Energy Technologies Promote Distributed Generation: The current energy infrastructure is plagued by bottlenecks that occur in the transmission and distribution of electricity. Rather than constructing more high voltage power lines running through residential neighborhoods that are major eyesores and potentially cause cancer, we should shift to a system of distributed generation. Distributed generation is when electricity generation facilities are situated next to the homes, factories and manufacturing plants that use the electricity thereby significantly reducing the amount of transmission and distribution equipment needed to send electricity from where it is generated to where it is used. An added benefit of distributed generation is the saving of electricity that typically gets lost during transmission when the electricity has to travel a long distance between the power plant that generates it and the home or business that uses it. Society would benefit enormously from the distributed generation of photovoltaic road surfaces. The higher the concentration of people in a given area, the higher the concentration of roads, the more energy that would be produced in those areas from photovoltaic road surfaces.
World Wide Energy Web: If energy generation occurred on the surfaces of every road and roof in the nation, the power grid would be built like the internet, distributing energy under the roads and connecting every structure adjacent to a paved road to the world wide energy web. If any one area stopped generating electricity, other nearby areas would immediately reroute some of their energy to the malfunctioning area. Distributed generation is more feasible with clean energy technologies because of the minimized resistance from residents caused by the not-in-my-backyard phenomenon. Installing clean energy distributed generation creates an opportunity to bury all power lines and remove telephone poles thereby beautifying neighborhoods and reducing human exposure to electromagnetic fields. America's power system has changed remarkably little over the past century with centralized utilities delivering electricity to passive customers. A smart grid would use digital technolgy to collect, communicate and react to data, making the system more efficient and reliable. For example, sensors would help utilities locate problems and fix them quickly. A nimble grid would integrate electricity from both predictable sources, such as coal, and fickle ones, such as the sun and wind. New and improved meters should be implemented to monitor both use and prices, as well as allow consumers to sell energy produced by them back to the grid. This would give consumers more control over their electiricty bill. For utilities, all these changes would lead to a reduction in consumption of energy which means a reduction in revenues for them, hardly and appealing prospect, but one that the government should force on them.
Energy Security: Distributed generation with clean energy technologies is much more secure than the refineries, power plants and nuclear facilities on which this country currently relies. Even if terrorists hijacked a 767 commercial airliner and flew a suicide mission into a field of electricity generating windmills clipping off the top of each and every one, the result of this attack would be that the people living in the immediate area would have their lights flicker a little. By comparison, our current energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Also, generating power domestically with clean energy technology staves off our reliance on oil from unstable oil rich countries.
The Downside: Complaints regarding electricity generating windmill have been voiced, the main three being that they are an eyesore, they are noisy, and they kill birds. It’s a common occurrence to live near man-made noises such as the noise of nearby railroad, a highway or just a busy street and generally what happens is that people get so accustomed to the noise that after a while they don’t even notice it. Americans are endowed with the inalienable right to live in an environment with clean air, clean water and free of radioactivity. The benefits of relying on solar and wind power for energy far outweigh the costs. Americans have made huge sacrifices in recent years to secure energy sources. The ultimate sacrifice has been the death of its soldiers. It doesn’t have to come to that.
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Foreign Policy Reform
Proactive vs. Reactive: The US typically generates its foreign policy by reacting to global events that take place. The World Trade Center gets destroyed, the US reacts by militarily imposed regime change in Afghanistan. Iran is building weapons of mass destruction, the US reacts by imposing sanctions and threatens the possibility of militarily imposed regime change. Rather than reacting with military interventions which lead to temporary solutions that further antagonize unstable countries of the world, the US should implement non-violent proactive policies that foster stability and result in potentially permanent solutions. If the US must engage in nation building, the worst time to do it is shortly after toppling the ruler of that country and occupying the country with our military. It is far better to approach the troubled country as a peaceful friend who wishes to extend a helping hand. The US has always thrived by leveraging technological innovations and should utilize this ability in its attempt to alleviate poverty in foreign nations.
Maximizing Stability by Minimizing Misery: The most effective way to stop terrorism is to create political and social stability in volatile nations that are the source of terrorism. This can be done by minimizing or eradicating the suffering and affliction experienced by the people in those nations. The US must incorporate the fight against poverty, ignorance, and repression into the war on terror and must fight these fights with the same urgency, determination and commitment of resources as the current war on terror. We have an alliance against terrorism, but it should be expanded to include an alliance for more global justice and a better global environment. The US must take the lead to provide global public goods to the unstable nations of the world.
How to Increase the Standard of Living of Suffering Foreigners: We should make significant efforts to improve the standard of living of the lower classes of unstable nations. Their standard of living level should determine the kind of aid we provide to them. If the majority of the people in an unstable country are starving, the US should provide them with the means to grow food, the means to build shelter, clean water, electricity, sewer services and municipal sanitation. If instead, people have the basics, we should provide them with means to gain more access to wealth. This could be done by putting in place the rules and institutions that make mature market economies work such as energy infrastructure, freer international trade, the free movement of people and capital, technology transfer, widespread land ownership and protection of property rights, legal guarantees of competition, enforceable contracts, macroeconomic stability, public health programs, free vaccinations, a free interstate highway system, Social Security and unemployment insurance, free and mandatory public education, a public university system, subsidies for private colleges, and the rule of law. The people’s needs would determine the type of help that they receive in the form of aid. Aid should never fall into the hands of the government officials of unstable nations; it should be administered directly to the people experiencing the misery.
One Country at a Time: The following strategy can only be executed after implementing a clean energy infrastructure domestically because the best way for the US to lead is by example:
1. Announce to the world that the US will assist any country willing to accept its help in the development of their energy infrastructure. The US will start with one willing country from each continent. The selected country will get factories that manufacture clean energy technology equipment. One city in the selected country will be modernized with clean energy infrastructure, roads, plumbing and a sewage system. The selected country will be expected to use this city as a paradigm for the modernization of all of its other cities.
2. Create a list of willing participants in each continent and order them in terms of political and social instability as well as potential terrorist threats.
3. Select one country from each continent that will be helped first.
4. Announce to the world the names of the selected countries and also announce that the US will only help one country in each continent at a time.
5. Send a team of engineers to the selected countries to ascertain the location of natural resources that can be used to build clean energy equipment such as wind turbines, photovoltaic panels and fuel cells.
6. Select a city based on the highest presence of suffering people and proximity to necessary raw materials and set up a referendum to have the people of the selected city vote on whether to accept the infrastructure improvements proposed by the US thereby getting a mandate from the citizens before starting construction and enabling citizens to sample a democratic process.
7. Send over the heavy machinery needed to carry out the construction processes.
8. Next to the selected city, build factories that manufacture state of the art wind turbine, solar panel, fuel cell and hydrogen storage equipment.
9. Make available online all the technical plans for the factories, advertise this website to the rest of the world, and teach the locals how to recreate these factories in other locations.
10. Dig up the streets of the selected city and install underground sewage, plumbing and electricity infrastructure that connects to every home in the area.
11. Install well digging equipment, water pumps, and field irrigation systems.
12. Use a combination of US military personnel and local tradesmen to carry out these construction projects.
13. Pay wages to the local construction workers.
14. After the one city is completely upgraded, move on to the next country in that continent.
When other countries see the successes achieved in the first country, many will be eager to take part in this form of aid. Attempt to get other developed countries to assist with the funding for these projects. Provide consulting services to previously assisted countries. This strategy would initiate a slow conversion to a system based on capitalism and democracy because the inhabitants would learn that the harder they work, the more they are compensated, and the greater the improvement to their standard of living.
If We Help Foreigners, They Won’t Attack Us: If the US could implement this strategy in unstable nations, the poor people in those countries would be much less likely to engage in terrorist activities against the US or any other country because these people would come to know the US as the country that helped them, that gave them a job, and that enabled them to support their families. The people of these volatile nations would know the US as the country that made a real effort to help by donating their time, money and technology with the altruistic goal of stopping their suffering. Recipients of this sort of aid would be less inclined to join an anti-American terrorist cell. This is the most feasible method of effectively stopping terrorism.
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Military Reform
Fighting Terrorism: The military’s ultimate mission is to keep the country secure and its biggest challenge is terrorism. If the military is going to successfully tackle terrorism, it has to master the ability to facilitate labor intensive construction of clean energy infrastructure in unstable foreign countries. However, having the strongest military is still necessary to show that although we are willing to help, we will always defend ourselves against any aggressor nation.
Soft Power: Soft power lies in the ability to influence and persuade foreign countries rather than force them. The willingness of other countries to cooperate on the solution of issues that affect more than one country depends on their own self-interest and on the attractiveness of American positions. Soft power works if others want what you want, and with soft power there is less need to persuade by using carrots and sticks. Soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals and policies. When America’s policies are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others, its soft power is enhanced. Soft power is a viable way to prevent terrorists from recruiting supporters from among the moderate majority, and to deal with issues that affect more than one country that require multilateral cooperation for their solution; issues such as the environment. Hard power, the ability to coerce, grows out of a country’s military and economic might. The use of hard power to solve the world’s problems usually gets many people killed, creates huge animosity among different groups and often doesn’t accomplish what the user of hard power set out to do. Soft power in foreign policy is rarely harnessed on a grand scale, and if it doesn’t wind up accomplishing what the user set out to do, then there is no harm done. No one gets killed through the use of soft power.
Military Diseconomies of Scale: The US military has experienced a period of diseconomies of scale which means that for every additional billion dollars of taxpayer money spent on the military, overall national security increases only marginally if at all. In order to protect ourselves against terrorist threats, it is no longer adequate to simply increase our military strength and superiority over other countries. We should retrain our soldiers to enable them to contribute to soft power initiatives and simultaneously reduce the level of expenditures on weaponry and missiles.
Appropriate Military Intervention: Civil wars in countries such as Rwanda, The Congo, Sudan and Sierra Leone inflict the most egregious human rights violations in the world. These are the types of conflicts in which it is appropriate to use hard power.
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US Resilience: The US economy is extremely versatile. When US businesses become unable to compete due to obsolescence, they lay off workers, but the system as a whole becomes stronger and better able to provide services. By discontinuing a fossil fuel economy, companies in those sectors will either re-invent themselves and find a new business model to follow, or go bankrupt. To a certain extent displacement of jobs is likely to occur, but new jobs would be created in new clean energy technology businesses.
Benefits of Success:
1. Less Americans killed in military operations
2. Clean energy infrastructure installed in the US and abroad
3. Stability brought to other nations (less wars, less ill will)
4. Strengthened domestic security
5. Poverty relief and job creation in poor countries
6. Reduced corruption and decreased income gap between poor and wealthy
7. Improved reputation abroad and strengthened cooperative relationship with foreign countries
8. Being proactive about the world’s problems rather than reactive
9. Moving humanity closer to sustainability
10. Increased global happiness