Use High Energy Products

One of the fallacies of the current environmental debate is that high energy products are intrinsically bad. This is not so, energy from the sun, incident solar gain, is the major part of this planets sustainable ‘income’, it is the ecological degradation associated with energy generation that must be addressed. Exploitation of solar energy including wind, wave, tidal, solar cracked seawater hydrogen and biofuels, as sustainable resources to minimize the use of the limited ‘capital’ of raw materials is essential to the long term future success of sustainability.

With the application of sustainable, environmentally benign energy supply techniques, high energy materials which are otherwise low in impact are demonstrated to be a major viable, environmentally acceptable resource. There are numerous high energy products: aluminium, carbon fibre, Dacron, Kevlar, stainless steel, glass which have considerable environmental advantages in terms of raw material procurement, longevity, recyclability, broad applicability and transport impacts which significantly outweigh the impacts associated with the embodied energy of manufacture.

This pattern reinforces the need for research and development of high-tech materials and energy sourcing to solve the problems we now face and to provide opportunity for new unforeseen solutions. The proviso is of course that such high tech materials must also be environmentally low-impact and be non-toxic, durable and recyclable.

So… Rule of Thumb… develop environmentally benign, sustainable energy sources for high energy, low environmental impact processes and encourage the use of materials expressly produced by such processes.