Good news for Green Energy

Many are concerned that lower oil prices will slow down the push to renewable energy.  The green machine believes that lower fuel costs will actually be temporary and will in fact boost the eventual deployment of greener vehicles and power generation.

One might ask why the Green Machine who uses thermodynamics as his guiding principles is optimistic that good will come of these low commodity prices.  With very low prices for steel, copper, aluminum, silver, glass, nickel, cobalt, polysilicon, and other raw materials that are used for the manufacture of new efficient vehicles, PV power stations, wind turbines, batteries, etc. more of these greener systems will be deployed around the globe.

The Green Machine is happy to see that China is embracing small electric vehicles and Europe is moving away from diesel vehicles to hybrids.  Younger people around the world are not that interested in even owning a vehicle.  Younger people are not interested in living in suburbia and the conspicuous waste of resources.  Car sharing will become a norm, car ownership may in fact drop quite considerably.

OPEC knows the world has gone through a sea change and they are now dumping oil on the market in a desperate attempt to continue their domination of the global energy market.  That OPEC is forgoing hundreds of billions of dollars in this futile attempt to turn back the clock is actually good for the world.  The money that otherwise would have ended up in corrupt hands is actually being spent on greener infrastructure in countries from India to Chile.  Money is being freed up for many infrastructure projects as global interest rates are diving.

The Collapse of oil prices and the resulting drop in global stock markets also means central banks will lower rather than raise interest rates.  This will not spur oil consumption but will spur investment is more energy efficient infrastructure.  30 years ago a strike in the coal or steel industry would cripple an economy like the US or the UK.  Now those industries are actually meaningless.  OPEC in 30 years will be meaningless.

The largest arrow in our quiver to green up the world is reduced consumption of fossil fuels and other mined or farmed resources via efficiency and the elimination of waste.  In 30 years I predict we will be using less oil, gas, and coal even with a population of 9 billion people.  In 30 years we will be using a quarter less plastics, steel, aluminum, glass, and cement on a global basis.  In 30 years folks will look back on the mid years of the second decade of the twenty first century and remark how the world woke up to a greener way of living.  In 2045 I will be 92 years old and will be very happy to see that I forecasted correctly.