Guess I should start working on my lower body and join the rickshaw drivers at Asakusa across the river from me for when oil collapses.
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The problem is that people don’t want to give up the convenience of massive private transportation vehicles, as long as you try and keep society structured around cars and traveling large distances for things that should be more localized and achieved by alternative means then you are going to have a hard time finding solutions to the fact that gasoline has a high energy density.
Really, it’s both a societal as well as a technical issue. Hopefully it is a bit of a wake up call for more people but I highly doubt it.
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On 9/12/2001 I fully expected my president to change America in the face of this new threat. At the time, I and most Americans saw the threat as the middle-eastern stranglehold on energy. “Here’s our chance! More nuclear. Smarter grid. Incentives to remove gas and oil furnaces. Maybe even electric cars.” But nope. It was “pull out your credit cards and spend!” and “drill, baby, drill”. Can’t lie. The discovery of fracking changed the dynamics for the US completely. I did not see that coming and at points I did take some comfort in it. But while becoming the world’s new largest producer made many here wildly rich, it may ultimately have made the country poorer. At this point we could have been cleaner, leaner and more future-oriented. It is such a shame that nuclear comes with the potential ability to weaponize the byproducts. Fukushima comes to mind too. I still believe this should have been our answer to 9/11 and YOUR answer today.
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The best moment to get into green, renewable energy was 20 years ago.
The second best moment is now.
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Oh wow, looks like straight out of Cyberpunk 2020
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That’s about a dollar more per gallon than we are paying in South Carolina.
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First they came for the oil..then they came for the sheep…
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To add to what you are saying, the US grew reliant on semiconductor production in Taiwan, next door to an aggressive peer adversary, who has repeatedly stated that they intend to reclaim the island nation. And then Tesla and Apple build factories within the peer adversary’s borders and expect that their IP will be secure, while strengthening the host nation’s economy, and with that, their military. It feels like we’ve been sold the rope to hang ourselves.
At least we are a net exporter of oil, which seems to have little impact on the price.
@Clutch such a beautiful aircraft. Possibly perfect.
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The current timeline being the dumbest one ever imaginable, and then that pushing inadvertently towards clean energy due to cost is neat.
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Yeah, we know how that feels 
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I’m convinced we all went extinct from Coronavirus and are now in The Bad Place.
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If hydrogen wasn’t such a ***** to store and transport I’d agree. But at this point I’ll rather bet on new battery tech than on hydrogen. The improvements they have made lately (as soon as someone saw an opportunity to make money with it) concerning energy density as well as resource usage are huge.
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Hard to store plus production and conversion to mechanical energy is about 20% effective overall at best (without storage losses).
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Do we ever
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We’re not talking hockey here! 
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No we’re not. I don’t think Americans will ever really understand what happened the last year or so. I don’t think we’ll ever go back to how things were.
Still, we got some nice cheap Chinese EVs coming here, so there’s that
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I am more optimistic from this side of the “fence”, in that I’m not convinced that most US citizens hold animosity toward our northern neighbors, nor do I feel that our leader, albeit elected, represents the nation’s general sentiment. If it does, then I suppose that we reap what we sow. I don’t want to start a political debate, so will leave it at that.
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Yep, I love my American’s forever and I’m not holding you personally responsible @chipwich 
. I just know that sometimes a lot of the news about stuff like this doesn’t get about down there in the US. People are honestly pretty pissed up here. Canadians are super good at resentment too. The super nice thing is more a facade but lots of anger.
I would go more for ‘I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed’. 
On another note of energy stuff, the solar stuff coming out of China is crazy cheap - I heard the UK was changing some rules to allow things like balcony panels that literally just plug in with a built in cheap convertor. I do think decentralization away from the grid is going to be the way to go.
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This Auke Hoekstra guy knows a lot about energy systems. Struggling to find his blog on the energy system of the future, but this one is similar:
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