Is it getting easier to be green?

Image by Darwin Bell via Flickr

Back in the old days as a child, I and many of my generation were taught the importance of the environment, and how we had to work to protect and conserve it for the future.  This was a reasonably straight forward thing for us, as most of us lived or were brought up on farms where our lives and future seemed very intertwined with said environment.

Now, farming and a lot of the direct industries which work with the environment, have undergone massive changes to their practices and products.  Farming today is more in tune with the environment that it shares, mainly because if it wasn't, there probably wouldn't be a environment to support farming.

I often wonder if any of that education on the importance of protecting and conserving the nature has had any effect on the technology that we have.  If those of my generation have been working on new technologies destined to solve the problems or practices of the previous generation's technology.

I found a post on Environmental Graffiti on "11 Green Technologies That Vanished..." and I found some of my answers.  It appears, and I can remember a few, that there have been a number of noble efforts to create green technologies, it's just not many make it to market.  Classed as 'Eco Vapour-ware', these technologies have promised much, and as the conspiracy theorists fight over the reasons why they came to nothing, we can only hope that the real technologies will one day make it through.

As a side note, it is interesting to see the role that the new tech 'A' listeners seem to be taking.  Kevin Rose grabbed a bit of attention with his iPower idea this week, and as the Tesla's start getting delivered, it seems that the tech crowd are putting their money where their carbon footprint was.  As much as I won't be able to afford to buy into these green technologies now, as was pointed out by Jason Calacanis, (when questioned about his coming Tesla ) he and the others are founding the development of better price, and featured versions.

So maybe the above list of failures may have been shorter if they were pitched to the 30 somethings that had the dollars and the celebrity to support them.  Are we seeing the changing of the old business guard? and the power of the little company to make the odd dollar, giving more of the Jason's and Kevin's of the world the chance to practice their Eco conscience's?  I hope so, because a cell phone I can charge just by shaking it would be really cool.

Jason Remnant.

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Comments

[TJ]

Goddamn electric cars. They're like the fricking moon landing. When people spend all their energy jumping too far they find they did nothing along the way so have to make the same effort next time. The US spent a fortune on the moon landing only to have it prove nothing other than they were better than the Russians (who as it turned out couldn't give a toss about landing men on the moon). NASA then has to turn around and ask for money with nothing to show for the first effort except the rubbish they left on the moon - like an electric car.

Electric cars are about the same. Rather than moving towards them logically like Hybrids are many people are encouraging a jump straight to them. Isn't it logical to hybridise current petrol cars and let battery technology mature to a point where it's worthwhile going fully electric? Even then I don't know if I believe fully electric cars will ever return as good ROI as a hybrid because we'll gradually switch from Petrol to LPG to Hydrogen which will all be proven technologies.