Fighting Oil Addiction, The Daimlerchrysler WayAddicted to oil? Yeah, me too. Feeling a little guilty about it? Well, so am I, but isn't admitting to our dependency on oil a bit like saying we're addicted to air? Imagine life or our lifestyle without sufficient quantities of those two precious compounds.
Fortunately, some big thinkers out there are envisioning such scenarios and figuring out ways to guide us, the simple users, to a better life.
There isn't much big thinking can do, or needs to do, about optimizing the two-stroke mechanism that autonomically pumps oxygen into our bloodstream. In contrast, and borne from the critical need for cleaner, more efficient ways to fuel humankind's huge engine, big thinkers are required to come up with effective innovations to existing technology and, at the same time, explore new ways to free us entirely from our addiction to petroleum-based energy.
Much of the research is being conducted in the automotive sector, where the impact of increasing petroleum use is clearly evident. There are currently some 900 million vehicles crowding the world's roads, and 60 million more are added every year, so if you think finding a parking spot at the mall is tough now...
Securing a parking place is, of course, hardly the chief challenge facing our mobile society. Dwindling oil supplies and the harmful effects of the internal combustion engine on human health and the environment are the most urgent problems facing us, and in the search for solutions, the world's automakers have unleashed their biggest thinkers. None, however, have more clearly announced their approach to solving these conundrums than DaimlerChrysler.
It was fitting that our introduction to DC's holistic, multi-stage program, called "Sustainable Mobility," was in Iceland. Owing to its unique geography and abundance of geothermal activity, Iceland has become a center of research and development into renewable energy sources. The country's goal is a lofty one-complete petro-independence by 2050 via a switch to hydrogen power. Wait, that's not as wacky as it sounds.
Iceland already fulfills all of its heating and electrical needs by tapping into the geothermal forces that well up through fissures in the mid-Atlantic ridge. Like a few other of the world's "hot spots," such as Hawaii, the Canary Islands, and Yellowstone National Park, Iceland sits atop a giant pool of molten magma, which often makes its way to the surface through one of the island's 100 active volcanoes. Though it can be a destructive force, the magma also super-heats giant reservoirs of underground water, which are then tapped for the heating of air and water and for the generation of electricity through steam-powered turbines.