Slashdot Mirror
The City of the Future
Ponca City, We Love You writes "One century ago, many Americans still had not seen a movie or ridden in an automobile. The New York World greeted its readers on January 1, 1908 with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America: 'We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves,' the newspaper said. 'We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need.' Today the NY Times asked ten knowledgeable New Yorkers to imagine New York City a century from today. Their visions include archaeological excavations at the Fresh Kills landfill, the waterfront at Third Avenue and Seventh Avenue, a dome over Central Park, and a virtual reality grid superimposed over the city."
Dude, there's no shortage of energy and I say that as a fully paid up peak oil convert.
We're surrounded by energy. Once natural oil production starts to slide (and I can believe that'll happen in 0-5 years, if not before) we can and probably will replace it with coal-to-liquids technology, which is crap for global warming but does solve the problem of powering our food trucks.
It's an open question what will happen after that. Our investment in petroleum based propulsion is gigantic. It's lockin on a far bigger scale than Windows ever was. Even relatively minor changes like ethanol have problems with things like pipeline incompatability. Bigger changes like going to all-electric cars are thrown around without thinking through the costs.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised at all if in 2108 we're still using cars powered by petroleum. Not petroleum that we suck out of the ground with hi-tech straws of course. That'll probably end in the next 50 years. Probably, either petroleum manufactured from biomass or extracted directly from the air and water (CO from the air, H from electrolysis, CO + H == syngas, input to the fischer-trope process). Petrol is amazingly energy dense, easy to transport and we have very hundreds of millions (billions?) of vehicles deployed that use it already ..... carbon-neutral renewable petroleum? What's not to like?