Old or New?
We are coming quickly to the finish line with the use of fossil fuels. There are politicians and power mongers that want to use fossil fuels until they are completely depleted. Not only is that greed motivated, it is potentially catastrophic to the global economy. I don’t think that there are any clear answers or solutions to the problem but there are things that can be done to prepare to break our dependency on fossil fuels. Solar and wind energy are the two obvious choices to develop short term, but there is also a lot of research being done on tidal power.
That is a new one for me personally. I had no idea until recently that there was any research being done in the field of tidal power, but then again it does make sense. The Earth is basically a big ball of water, so why not choose to harness 2/3 of the surface of the planet as a source of renewable energy. Tidal power makes use of the relative motions of our Earth-Moon system. It’s all about changes in relative motion created by the gravitational forces between the Earth and Moon, and since those forces are infinite for all practical purposes, tidal power is considered to be renewable.
Serious research into the field of tidal power came about during the oil crisis of the 1970s and continues to grow even more important with the looming depletion of oil within the next 50 years or so. Currently there are plans for the world’s first tidal energy farm to be built off the coast of Wales. It’s a good sign that we are not just exploring and harvesting energy from the sun and wind forces on our planet. Actually it looks more like were are becoming modern alchemists and seeking to use the things that pseudo-sciences have told us to look to all along.
Earth, Water, Fire and Air are the primal elements and those are the areas that we are now looking into as our future sources of power generation. So we have had to the solutions in front of us for a long time but were have only recently learned how to use them with any real efficiency.
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