This almost certainly isn’t the ultimate solution to our country’s energy problems, but using exercise bikes to generate some of the electricity you need to power the rest of your gym certainly is clever. And it tends, I think, to illustrate the point that human ingenuity is our greatest natural resource. Given adequate incentive to find ways of doing what we want to do in more efficient, greener ways we’ll figure out a lot of stuff — not a single technological breakthrough that solves all problems, but a dozen major advances and 12,000 minor ones like the human dynamo.
Already, I think, you’ve seen a tremendous flowering of innovative green ideas. But the trouble is that at the moment the incentives exist primarily as a means of doing marketing to a niche market of upscale consumers. That’s nice, and it’s produced some clever notions, but what’s really needed is smart policies that drive incentives in a bigger and broader manner.
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