“To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else” Leonardo Da Vinci.
“As our own species is in the process of proving. One cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying”Arthur C Clarke.
“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims” Buckminster Fuller
A continuation of a fictional reflection by a hundred-year-old Espe from 2112 about the start and on-going movement of transformation to Sustainable Living. I add clarification links and quotes as needed.
Our technological world in 2112 is as different from 2012 as 2012 was different from 1812. During the transition of that Covid era that was the great change, we had a lot of fear driving a climate catastrophe agenda around the world. As the decade of the 2020’s drew to a close people around the world, especially in the more developed countries of the time, were finally able to bring sense to the social and political narratives driven by the flawed economic reasoning creating the fear. The science used to perpetuate the catastrophe narrative was finally shown to be anything but settled. As long silenced scientists’ voices were heard people became more keenly interested in transparent public debate. Literally tens of millions of people took a stance and halted the agenda’s being pushed by economic imperatives that favored only the wealthy and did little for the globally impoverished.
One of the factors that created the change was wide-spread recognition that having available and affordable energy is vital to letting all humans thrive. One of my close friends at that time said it succinctly, “We need major cultural shifts (in consumption driven cultures) if we’re going to have a livable planet 75-100 years from now. If we keep training children to want stuff and to seek to have their own needs met at any cost and to live independently of a society, I’m afraid it’s a long-shot” LAJ. Power from Steam and Electricity were the reason we had an industrial revolution and technological society and was what was holding back less-developed countries from becoming self-sufficient. Everyone knew that our global society with its thirst for energy had a high ecological price and by 2026 had reached a point that we could not ignore that cost anymore. The power brokers went into overtime to push their catastrophe agenda’s, but by that time so many all over the world were struggling to survive frequent power outages because of the failing grid systems.
We had so much to deal with at the same time. Fortunately, many people like my parents had already begun to live as sustainably as they could within the global system before the transformation. It made us look a little odd-ball with our neighbors, but we eventually served as an example of how you could live somewhat sustainably even within what we now see as an insane consumer culture. My parents had our house in Colorado almost off the energy grid. My father had invested heavily in the available green technologies with the available solar panels, a small wind turbine, storage battery back up, and a geothermal heating-cooling system under our back crop garden. As my father would say, “The fact that we could invest in a different energy path meant that people didn’t have to reinvent the wheel so to speak, just be able to talk to people who understood how to live better for energy and food wherever we lived.”
The corruption and mismanagement of national energy production systems by the TNC (transnational corporations) energy companies (e.g., oil, gas and coal industries) meant that they had been busy accumulating break-through technologies for over a century and keeping them off the markets. We knew that available ‘green’ alternate energy systems in 2026 were only slightly better than fossil fuel systems, but they were all we had (or allowed to know about) at that time. One of the biggest technological problems of energy generation was energy storage. It was expensive and energy customers were very resistant to want to pay for them, so power companies would not invest in them. However, once grid systems started to fail and become really expensive, by 2028 communities everywhere, started to invest in local options and build them as local cooperatives without the need for corporate investment. Getting supplies to build these systems was hard as well, but the many global B-corporation companies joined in to help build a newer kind of truly ecologically sensitive international market system (see, Saving the world through Meetings? – A Rant, COP26 and much more – Part 1 {November 2021} and, Thinking Anew – Part 6 – Appropriate Technology 4 – Do NO Harm {January 2022})
In 2030, the push for localized energy was gaining a lot in all countries that had been classed more-developed and less-developed before 2030. The separations created by previous corporate control were finally breaking down enmasse and we were becoming a global collective of humanity and not a collection of 195 individual nations. The financial and lifestyle aspects that caused the gulf between less-developed and more-developed countries were breaking down, especially as people in the more-developed countries had to modify their lifestyles away from the old materialistic-consumer mentality. It was no longer an us and them mentality but one in which we all started being more spiritual about life in general and accepting that we were all in the same boat together.
If I could sum it up, I would say that the barricades of specialization created by business, technology, and economics started falling in 2030. Science, business and spirituality are not separate aspects in 2112, but uniquely integrated for the benefit of all life and the planet. If it doesn’t enhance health and life, we just don’t do it now. Of course, while it had its roots back in 2030, it still took a couple of decades to fully become the new spiritually minded global worldview, as materialistic hangouts were resistant to letting go of the old ways. Our fossil fuel energy generation was like an addiction and took a while to get past until the new technologies arrived during the mid-2030s (see Changing the Paradigm: Part 2 – Recognizing the Addiction – the Wave of New Technology {August 2020}).
By 2035 people in all countries were setting up localized energy generation and energy storage systems. While much resistance was notable to some of these energy storage systems (mostly the old ‘Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) complainers) the recognition that we all needed available and affordable energy kept us going. We tried to use Best Ecological Practices (BEPs) but the reality in the 2035-2040 period was that even though we were trying, the need for energy was a driving force in getting billions out of extreme poverty and still using many harmful manufacturing processes to provide essential goods and services. This was as true in Mombasa, Kenya, as in London, England, Bangkok, Thailand, or Kyoto, Japan.
The problem with energy generation is that you make it and you must use it or store it. Unlike other physical substances that can be stored in their physical form (like water in a lake), energy is not solid, so you have to store it by putting it into something that involves solidity that allows the energy to be retrieved later. The second law of thermodynamics then dictates that some energy is lost in each of the transfers meaning that while you can store energy, you lose quite a bit when you have to store it. That’s why storage was never an economic feasibility before the collapse. After 2028, we started building so many small scale systems globally that we were actually producing more than we needed and storage became a necessity for when the alternatives were not functioning at their optimum levels. (The great cutback of Fossil fuels from the climate catastrophe policies meant we had lost much of the traditional fossil fuel generation system.) Times and technologies were all chaotic. I recall as a young woman having to do so much education, not only to teach about a better way to live, new localized technology, and localizing for security and resilience, but also to alleviate the building panic as global economic-political systems unraveled.
We had spent eight hectic years building and managing more traditional energy storage schemes such as Compressed Air Storage, Hydrogen Storage, Pumped-Storage Hydroelectricity, Advanced Rail Energy Storage, Flywheel Energy Storage, Third Generation Advanced Lithium-Ion Battery Storage, Liquid Air Energy Storage, and Pumped Heat Electrical Storage were still resource and energy intensive to build and maintain.
And then in 2040, just when all around the world we thought it was all being managed well, the new, previously only suspected new kinds of energy technologies, flooded into our lives. You would have thought that should have been a good thing. It was, but too much too quick had its own issues.
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