| Not too complex really. The #1 thing is to encourage flexible working so we can work locally more often - shared office spaces (if required) can be a great resource eg. You get to know people who can provide a great painting service etc. After that, encouraging building energy efficiency so aircon is not needed so often would be beneficial - well designed buildings that promote airflow without heat exchange for instance. Extra insulation and so on. Promoting more localised towns and cities, with shared waste/water facilities is good - that datacenter heat can drive aircon or hot water for the town. Lastly, electric cars as you've said, have many problems - care to see how 2 different companies' cars handle parking in a busy car park? ;) The best transport option might be smartrail (similar to https://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/?m=1 but steel wheel/LIM and faster). Smartrail and PRT are designed as a point to point separated-grade network carrying on av. 1 person or a pallette of goods. With a hanging rail you don't need heavy batteries, parking for the vehicles, you can run a pod straight into the factory to pickup goods, and large/rich places can pay to have track straight to their door. You can prefab the rail and as land usage is just poles in the ground it can be rolled out over fields etc quickly. Track is one-way to eliminate junctions. Pods are on-demand ie. No waiting. Accessibility improves, you can use the top of the rail to generate (solar) power, run highspeed internet cables in the rail to improve comms across a country, and save on distribution center logistics as you're going point to point. The last mile may possibly be an issue, but forklift drones and bicycles can take most of the load I feel. Drivers for this are that it would go fast (200mph+ as light pods so little wear), can go overnight (sleeper pods), you could buy track to your door, personal transport (like a cinema room if you want). The main real issue with cars is that there's a large lobby behind what is a legacy transport solution... By way of example, UltraPRT has been running flawlessly at Heathrow airport for 10 years, was built on time, on budget, and performs exactly as predicted/modelled. For more info checkout http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/ in particular Swedetrack The last thing to mention, and the elephant in the room, is overpopulation. Looking at the stats it seems that birthrates for developed countries is in decline, so the obvious solution is to give everyone a good quality of life. The issue here is actually at the heart of economics - how do we run an economy with an ageing demographic? Japan is the leader here and they are placing a bet on robotics. What happens though when robots consume 80% of jobs? That may be the issue we need to solve, and as you can effectively tie energy to economic prosperity on a macro scale, a solution presents itself - create more (environmentally friendly) energy sources to raise global wealth. |