Cartoons
When I was a kid, one of childhood’s traditions was cartoons on Saturday morning. At the time I didn’t realize it was actually a “parent trick”: I would watch early morning cartoons, and Mom and Dad would get an extra hour or two of recovery time from Friday night. They were smart, and everyone was happy.
It was the 60’s. Cartoons were hand drawn, and included traditional characters like Bugs Bunny and Road Runner. There also were the “shows”, like the Flintstones, that told the story of a white suburban family in stone-age times. Kids could all relate to Fred Flintstones’ car; we used our feet for brakes on vehicles too.
It was only as I got older, really right at the end of my Saturday Morning cartoon viewing; that the first automated cartoon came out, Speed Racer. I guess I remember it best for the opening sequence of every show, as it seemed like dozens were killed in car wrecks as the singers joyfully called out, “Go Speed Racer Go”!!
If the Flintstones represented a mythical past, The Jetsons represented exactly one hundred years in the future in 2062. They too were a white urban family, living in a huge apartment floating far above the ground in Orbit City. Robots did “the dirty work”, though they could be quirky, like Rosie the Jetsons’ housekeeper. To kids of the 1960’s, the Jetsons set “the future”. We expect flying cars, soaring buildings, robot assistance and vacations on the moon. And don’t forget Astro the dog could talk, though I’m not sure I want my three pups to be able to discuss dinner every night!
Halfway There
We are kind of on the way to a Jetsons future. No we don’t have the flying cars yet, but Amazon already is delivering packages by drone. And we don’t have Rosie the Maid robots, but I was surprised to see an IRobot lawn mower moving along the other day. Houses can be controlled from our phones (not mine, we still have to turn lights on and off manually) and we have “wrist radios” just like another cartoon, Dick Tracy. So forty years from the Jetsons we are headed that way.
The Jetsons never got too much into detail as to how their world was powered, but their flying cars ran on power capsules, not liquid fuel, so we can guess that they have passed the petroleum era. And why shouldn’t we?
Fossil Fuel
Look, whatever political stand you take, fossil fuels are not the fuels of the future. Sure we’ve found that fracking has extended the life of petroleum. And we have turned our technology into wresting the last expensive bits of gas and oil from the earth. But it’s a zero sum game; there is a finite end to fossil fuels. Meanwhile, we risk ground water from fracking, the oceans from deep well pumping, and pristine wilderness from oil exploitation.
Transportation will probably be the last industry to give up petroleum. Planes and trucks are going to need it, and it’s hard to imagine a recreational vehicle pulling a camper that could run on batteries. But there’s a whole lot we can do to move away from fossil fuels, and it’s inevitable that we will have to do it. And it has that most important benefit of protecting our future. The Jetsons might have been telling us more than we realized. Their soaring apartments are far above the ground, maybe the environmental changes brought by fossil fuels literally forced them to live in the clouds.
Solutions
We know that there is a clock ticking, a clock that will run out by 2050. The changes to our environment that we are making from fossil fuel pollution will be unalterable if we don’t stop. And we can, and we can do it while creating an entire new opportunity for mass employment when we do it.
Let’s just think about some “easy” things we can do, today, to change the future. We have huge swaths of land filled with suburban housing. If each of those houses were equipped with solar energy shingles, linked to battery storage units in the house, we could move our households to sixty to eighty percent renewable energy. Yes, there’s a significant “up front” cost, but over decades it pays for itself. In the meantime, we don’t use coal or gas created electricity from the grid.
And that electricity grid needs to move to renewable sources as well. Solar is one, wind farms are another. We should be making huge investments in those industries, instead of taking $60 million bribes here in Ohio to prop up old nuclear plants or build new fossil fuel generators. In the US, electric power generation represents 32% of greenhouse gas pollution (EPA).
Generate power at home, make the grid non-polluting, and then plug in your electric commuter car. 28% of pollution comes from transportation activities; we can reduce a lot of that by moving to electric cars. It might be better to create more mass transportation, but if Americans are addicted to their individual vehicles, as both the Flintstones and the Jetsons showed, then let’s have traffic jams with non-polluting cars.
Flying Cars
It’s 2020 and the clock is ticking on our environment. Storms are stronger and more frequent, areas like Central America are facing droughts that are driving folks to migrate north, tides are getting higher, and the whole world is warming. We can still “dodge the bullet”, and we can do so and employ a whole lot of folks. It’s really not even a question of technology: it’s a question of will.
We know what that cleaner environment will look like. A strange “benefit” of the pandemic was that for a few weeks we stayed at home, and pollution literally went away. We saw what could be done.
So while we do all of our fighting about stopping a second term of Donald Trump, add this to the list of why a Joe Biden Presidency would be better for our world. He is committed to a renewable energy America by 2040.
And that still gives us twenty-two years to get our flying cars!!
