Daniel Gross wrote an article for Slate.com recently about green technology and its economic possibilities. In the The Real "Green" Innovation, Gross talks about tax incentives and other methods of encouraging people to adopt alternative energy sources. His conclusion is that, "the future of the alternative-energy industry now depends far more on financial engineering than mechanical engineering."
Some good stuff about the conditions necessary for a greener lifestyle on a scale that might do some global good.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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The comment "the future of the alternative-energy industry now depends far more on financial engineering than mechanical engineering" is apt. Green energy technology – simple stuff like insulation, solar and wind power, etc., already exists. Home-nuke stuff isn't needed. The problem is that green is more expensive. People need incentives to act. My purchase of solar panels for my home was definitely affected by the $10,000 incentive offered by the State of California and the local utility.
Five years later, I'm pleased with my purchase and (with hindsight) should have done it even without incentives. The solar system has increased the value of our home and our electricity bill is nearly zero.
In the end, most things turn out to depend on the money, don't they? So it goes...
A further complication is that greenness is an elusive thing. The critical issue is an analytical method called Life Cycle Assessment, which enables us to examine any artifact in terms of all of its subsidiary industrial processes.
For example, Cemeterian's solar panels are green in the sense that they produce electricity without the need for a polluting electrical power plant. However, they were manufactured in a factory somewhere and transported to his house. The components they were made of were also manufactured and transported. Somewhere along the way, ore was mined, chemicals were mixed, waste was disposed of, etc. The greenness of Cemeterian's panels is properly measured by the cumulative impact of all of the processes that went into manufacturing and installing them.
There is an excellent article about LCA analysis on the Scientific American site. See http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=green-is-a-mirage
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