The Designers of Our Electricity Grids Couldn't Foretell the Future

In response to my post on Thomas Edision, Frequent commenter Brian McGowan notes that, in the early days of electrification, the Wizard felt that many American households should employ batteries powered by wind turbines to be entirely self sufficient in terms of energy. Of course, this calls to mind all the decisions our society made over the last century or so, most of which, in retrospect, turned out to have significantly negative environmental consequences.

The very least we can say is that, if we had these decisions to make over again, we would have made them differently.

The real issue isn’t that the people who made those decisions were ethically impaired. No one could have understood the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels at that time. Yet while we don’t impute a lack of moral judgment to those people, we certainly see the need to make a mid-course correction here in the 21st Century. Now that it has become clear that we are in the process of destroying the only planet we have with our runaway burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, we need to work very hard,  and very quickly, to take this in a new direction.