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EarthFuture.com by Guy Dauncey
It's October 2025 and the lights are on. The traffic is running smoothly,
the economy is whirring and there is no fossil fuel being burnt in the province.
No coal, no gas, no oil.
So where's all the energy coming from? How did we solve two of the
world's biggest problems ... the carbon emissions that
have been causing global climate change and the worldwide shortage of oil and
gas?
It's been a roller coaster opening to the century. Forest fires, insect
plagues, water shortages and power cuts have been the backdrop to a never-ending
crisis in the BC economy, as ski resorts went bankrupt from a lack of snow, the
forest sector went belly-up from fire, mountain pine beetle and European boycotts,
and the airline industry collapsed as a result of new drug-resistant infections,
knocking out the tourist industry. So how did we survive? With a lot of pain,
by re-inventing community democracy and by digging deep into our own resilience.
Every house, shop and factory has solar shingles on its roof, generating energy
through the long hot summer months. As soon as mass production kicked in, the
price of solar fell and everyone was up on the roof changing their shingles. Within
a five-year period, almost everyone had them.
Then there are the small domestic wind turbines, spinning noiselessly on rooftops
in the winter. They weren't even on the radar screen 20 years ago.
And all along the offshore north coast, and inland, there are the windfarms, with
their big 3.5 Mw turbines. We marry it with hydro, by using wind on blustery days
and conserving water inside the dams. On calm days, when the coast is as still
as a monk in the meditation room at the BC legislature, the stored water is used
for hydro electric generation.
Tidal energy has been another development. BC's boaters and kayakers
have always known what fierce currents we have. Now we are turning them to good
use, with turbines that sit on the ocean bottom, providing steady, reliable lunar
power.
When you total up the electricity that's coming from hydro, the smaller
micro-hydro, tidal systems, rooftop solar and wind and the large wind farms, plus
electricity from biomass plants, wave power and a handful of geothermal plants,
we are producing four times the electricity we need and selling the surplus to
California.
Then there's the breakthrough that has turned every sewage treatment
plant into a money-spinning source of hydrogen. It's an amazing feeling,
knowing that your shit is going to end up in the tank of your bicycle or car.
Talk about closing the loop. It's kilometres per dump we talk about
now, not kilometres per litre. The hydrogen is used in industry and in the hybrid
electric hypercars which moved in when the oil supply began to decline, sending
prices skyward.
Hydrogen is not the only fuel of choice, however. For the other stunning breakthrough,
you have to visit your local landfill and watch as a hundred years of debris is
thermally depolymerized, turning it into water and useable oil. Our sewage has
become our source of hydrogen; our landfill has become our source of oil.
Of course, it helps that every home and factory is twice as efficient as it was,
reducing the amount of power we need and neutralizing the impact of population
growth. There's no more hot water going down the drain ...
it's all recaptured by a heat exchange system that transfers the heat
to the cold water pipe that feeds the hot water cistern. When you add a rooftop
solar hot water system, you've got half your hot water needs covered.
Add a ground-source heat loop and you've got your heating needs covered
too.
The smart oil companies saw it coming, and joined the green energy revolution.
The dumb ones tried to sabotage it. For a short while, they nearly ruined it for
all of us, taking over the US government and turning it into a power-crazy "oiligarchy",
attempting to impose a thousand year "demoilcracy." Well,
they're gone now, thanks to the waves of Internet-organized activism
that finally persuaded shareholders to pull the plug.
It's a small world, full of big problems: but we're
getting there.
Guy Dauncey is the author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate
Change (New Society Publishers, 2001) and other titles. He lives in Victoria.
www.earthfuture.com.
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