Energy vs. ecosystem sustainability: Combining solar and hydrogen technologies

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Roger D Masters

Dartmouth College, USA

: Expert Opin Environ Biol

Abstract

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Media coverage of American economic policy has often focused on the need to insure long-term energy supplies, ignoringevidence that CO2 releases from our currently used fuels are a major factor in global warming. Linking sufficient energy supply with ecosystem sustainability will be impossible without finding alternatives to oil and coal, responsible for America’s emissions of 5.76 billion tons of CO2(which were only exceeded by China’s 6 billion tons from coal). The energy market has already selected the fuels of the future. All major automobile countries are developing, and several will soon be selling, vehicles powered by hydrogen or hydrogen-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius FCV (ending the age of gasoline fuel). Electricity supplies for huge coal-powered generating plants are already being supplemented by solar energy. New technologies, like a novel road surface composed of heavy plastified sheets containing solar collectors, when installed throughout our highways, promise to replace existing coal-fired generating plants with a non-polluting system of low operating cost. Our future energy policy can achieve energy independence and reduce CO2 emissions by focusing investment on these new technologies. Since our economic competitors in Europe and Asia have begun subsidizing hydrogen and solar energy to replace oil and coal, we need to develop a coherent energy policy based on thesenew, domestically available and nonpolluting fuels (with - if possible - technologies “patented in the U.S.”)

Biography

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Email: Roger.D.Masters@dartmouth.edu