"But energy really does."Įnergy conservation can stave off the day of reckoning, but in the end you can't conserve what you don't have. "Terrorism doesn't threaten the viability of the heart of our high-technology lifestyle," says Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University. Some experts think this pursuit is even more important than the war on terrorism. In microcosm I'm like people in government, industry, and private life all over the world, who have tasted a bit of this curious and compelling kind of liberty and are determined to find more. The trouble with energy freedom is that it's addictive when you get a little, you want a lot. I'm going to have to start the generator and burn some more gasoline. Shade steals across my panels and over my heart. With my new panels, nothing stands between me and limitless energy-no foreign nation, no power company, no carbon-emission guilt. But it's clear that the carbon dioxide spewed by coal and other fossil fuels is warming the planet, as this magazine reported last September.Ĭutting loose from that worry is enticing. We won't run out of coal anytime soon, or the largely untapped deposits of tar sands and oil shale. Natural gas can be hard to transport and is prone to shortages. Instability where most oil is found, from the Persian Gulf to Nigeria to Venezuela, makes this lifeline fragile.
From the OPEC crunch of the 1970s to the skyrocketing cost of oil and gasoline today, the world's concern over energy has haunted presidential speeches, congressional campaigns, disaster books, and my own sense of well-being with the same kind of gnawing unease that characterized the Cold War.Īs National Geographic reported in June 2004, oil, no longer cheap, may soon decline. Maybe that's because for me, as for most Americans, one energy crisis or another has shadowed most of the past three decades. We want a lot of electrical outlets and a cappuccino maker. We don't want propane refrigerators, kerosene lamps, or composting toilets. I live on an island that happens to have no utilities, but otherwise my wife and I have a normal American life. The euphoria of energy freedom is addictive. A meter shows that 1,285 watts of power are blasting straight from the sun into my system, charging my batteries, cooling my refrigerator, humming through my computer, liberating my life. I have just installed a dozen solar panels on my roof, and they work. FREEDOM! I stand in a cluttered room surrounded by the debris of electrical enthusiasm: wire peelings, snippets of copper, yellow connectors, insulated pliers.
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