Changes 2008 – Part 3

Alternative Fuels.

I know, this idea is not new, but I think this is the year we reached the “tipping point” where prices, politics and common sense have come together. There are a million ideas floating around out there, and I don’t think we have the right answer yet. But I think we have reached the point where the search for alternative fuel will lead us to a technological breakthrough. It will be something that will create wholesale change like the internal combustion engine or the silicon chip. I’m sure the work is already underway in some obscure laboratory that we now know nothing about.

There is a huge economic incentive to this search, the discovery will make some people immensely rich. That is a good thing. Just like some benefited greatly from the industrial and computer revolutions, so will some get rich on cheap, clean energy. And then we will all benefit.

This economic incentive will “fuel” the quest, don’t think it will be warm fuzzy environmentalists doing the work. It will be engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, businessmen and venture capitalists who will make energy available on a scale we can not now imagine. Thirty years ago we could not imagine the amount of information that would be available 24/7 to everyone through the internet. What will life be like when cheap, clean energy is equally available? What was life like before the silicon chip or the internal combustion engine? It will be that different. And it will probably occur even faster than the computer revolution, since all change is accelerating.

I don’t know what it is yet, but I know we are all now aware it needs to exist and we are willing to pay for it. I do predict one thing though, it will bring about the end of the internal combustion engine. We will have to stop burning things to get our energy. Wood, coal and petroleum will no longer be burned to power our machines. Nuclear, wind, solar or geothermal might be the source cultivated and distributed by new processes. Or maybe something totally new.

But now we are all looking for it, and that means it is just a matter of time. We are now ready for this change.