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The Northwest Passage was explored by the Europeans because they were told it existed by the natives of the northern regions of what is now Canada. Maybe the natives were just jerking the explorers chains, but it would be logical to presume that when Greenland was habitable there would also have existed a northwest passage.
The fact (or hypothesis) that the mini ice age closed the passage for hundreds of years seems to be something that has been conveniently forgotten.
I have probably close to 50 plus trees on the lot where my house is located, and only have to manage grass cutting on less than 5% of the land area on the same lot. I do that with a push mower bought for $20. I use no liquid fuel for ground maintenance.
When the industrial age began, humans had still affected the balance of natural C02 absorption by removing significant amounts of trees all over the planet. England is a prime example.
Studying the early industrialization is fascinating. What they accomplished with only the power that nature provided should be a good example of how to efficiently use energy.
The discovery of oil changed the game, energy cost was practically nothing and efficiency became a secondary consideration. While that is true, the fact that much of the progress of civilization was due to the burning of fossil fuels, much can also be blamed on the explosion of population growth in the last few centuries.
The real secret is to extract the abundance of energy available from natural sources and eventually replace fossil fuels with natural sources of energy. To do so requires the ability to store energy for the periods when it is less abundant. Much like the early civilizations learned to store the abundance of food when it was available to get through the times when it was not reproducible.
You can not store electricity efficiently, but there are ways to store the potential energy provided by solar energy, either directly, or through evaporation and rainfall, as well as tidal energy from the lunar cycle.
The core of the earth itself provides a virtually limitless supply of energy.
The vehicles we drive waste energy in many ways, but two of the most significant are idling (13%) and direct heating of the atmosphere through friction braking.
There are solutions to those two sources of waste that I have been pursuing for close to a decade.
To burden those who were born in areas of the planet with draconian laws which condemn them to poverty, especially when we who propose such actions are the worst of the prolific energy wasters is true hypocrisy, and Al Gore leads the list of those who want others to conserve, while he consumes an astronomical amount of energy and creates hundreds of times the pollution of an average citizen.
If you want to lead the poor to a better life, then do it by example, and true efforts of integrity, not by preaching something you do not practice yourself.
regards
Mech
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