US President Donald Trump’s decision to drag his country out of the Paris Agreement on climate change has brought the issue into even sharper focus than usual. Many people from all walks of life still have doubts that climate change is a reality, or more specifically that it is being caused by people and the pollutants we produce. I was on the fence until recently when I watched a documentary by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a man who I admire greatly, which assured me that the science behind climate change is real and irrefutable.
If you don’t know who I’m talking about, Tyson is an astrophysicist who was a protégé of Carl Sagan, one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century (in fact, I would argue, of all time). Sagan is perhaps best known for having created the TV series ‘Cosmos: A Personal Voyage’ in 1980, which inspired many bright young minds to pursue a career in science. In tribute to his mentor and the impact of that seminal TV series, Tyson presented an updated series, ‘Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey’, in 2014, and it was during an episode of the latter that he presented the aforementioned facts behind climate change. Colour me convinced.
Ultimately, regardless of whether one is a believer or not, Trump’s decision seems to have strengthened the resolve of the rest of the world to push even harder for measures to combat climate change. Putting aside the moral issues, one would have thought a man with Trump’s business acumen could see that there are market forces at work that the USA would do better to align itself with than fight against.
In essence, there are two key facets to reducing our carbon footprint. The first involves improving the efficiency of our energy usage, something that extends from government regulations and standards all the way to seemingly insignificant things we can do differently in our daily lives. The second is making better use of renewable, or sustainable, sources of energy – broadly speaking, the harvesting of energy from natural sources. This can be done on various different scales, with large-scale resources such as solar and wind being the most prominent. Much of the most interesting and forward-thinking research, though, involves harnessing prolific energy sources at a small scale.
Perhaps the most attention-grabbing example of the former method has been proposed by Iceland. In a project codenamed Thor, the country has drilled 4,7 km into the earth to access the power of a volcano. Such tapping of geothermal energy is nothing new, but the amount of energy accessible at such extreme depths is expected to be roughly 10 times what current geothermal wells can produce. On the small-scale front, examples include water motion sensors that harness energy from the motion of the very water they are designed to monitor (you can read more about this in ‘Self-powered water motion sensors’).
In between these two extremes, some of the biggest and most practical leaps in innovation are happening in the automotive sphere, which has historically been one of the worst polluting culprits. A report by IDTechEx, examining this market, finds that “Electric vehicles are creating more and more of their own electricity from daylight, wind and other sources including regeneration. Regeneration converts wasted heat and movement in the vehicle into electricity, as with a turbine in the exhaust. More elegantly, regeneration prevents wasted heat and movement in the first place, as with regenerative suspension giving a better ride and longer range and flywheels replacing burning brake discs. Shock absorbers can create electricity that controls them to give a smoother ride. Yes, it does make sense. Indeed it is the future.”
The report predicts that, within 20 years, energy harvesting will become a huge business as tens of millions of vehicles annually will be Energy Independent Vehicles (EIV) that get all their electricity without plugging in. Too bad Trump won’t be in the White House to see it.
Brett van den Bosch
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