> Batteries might have improved, but they are high maintenance and polluting.
My brother came home from elementary school one day telling us how modern electricity production causes pollution (sure, that's true) and if we'd go back to powering our society by burning wood, the way people did it in ancient times, we wouldn't have the pollution.
Burning wood, of course, causes plenty of pollution; a major way to see the decline in civilization after the fall of Rome is to notice how the level of particulate pollution from fires cratered. If we were to produce the same amount of power we produce now, but from wood instead of coal and oil, our pollution situation would be much worse. Also, we'd quickly run out of wood.
I think people today have imprinted on the message "coal and oil production of electricity is bad". Making your own batteries from a non-fossil-fuel source isn't a way of powering your home more efficiently, or of reducing pollution, it's a way of refusing to partake in coal consumption -- the hijab of the environmentalist movement.
Net positive below a certain scale (especially for the whales), negative above it. The contentious bit is where the tipping point is. For coal, the first time it was restricted in London due to pollution killing the populace, was 1306.
My brother came home from elementary school one day telling us how modern electricity production causes pollution (sure, that's true) and if we'd go back to powering our society by burning wood, the way people did it in ancient times, we wouldn't have the pollution.
Burning wood, of course, causes plenty of pollution; a major way to see the decline in civilization after the fall of Rome is to notice how the level of particulate pollution from fires cratered. If we were to produce the same amount of power we produce now, but from wood instead of coal and oil, our pollution situation would be much worse. Also, we'd quickly run out of wood.
I think people today have imprinted on the message "coal and oil production of electricity is bad". Making your own batteries from a non-fossil-fuel source isn't a way of powering your home more efficiently, or of reducing pollution, it's a way of refusing to partake in coal consumption -- the hijab of the environmentalist movement.