{"id":251,"date":"2017-10-10T04:47:27","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T04:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/?p=251"},"modified":"2017-10-16T22:41:52","modified_gmt":"2017-10-16T22:41:52","slug":"engineering-our-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/2017\/10\/10\/engineering-our-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Engineering Our Future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What really stood out to me in the past couple of weeks has been my personal impact in releasing pollutants into the atmosphere. I do not consider myself a wasteful person, but my calculated carbon footprint was over 10 times what was considered sustainable. It is crazy to think that an eight hour airplane flight in itself would qualify a person as \u201cnot sustainable.\u201d When looking at this issue, I believe it best to be honest. The use of airplanes, cars, heating systems, and other energy intensive systems will not stop in the near future. As the world keeps expanding, more and more people will use carbon emitting devices. The only solution I can see is to engineer our way out of this mess.<\/p>\n<p>Alternative forms of energy such as wind or solar could have a big impact on carbon emissions if perfected. Currently, one of the biggest struggles for clean energy is how to store it. Modern day batteries do not have the capacity for large-scale, long term energy storage. If we could surpass this hurdle, a journey towards carbon neutrality would be much more plausible. Infrastructure upgrades such as expanded highways, more efficient public transit, or even new ideas such as Elon Musk\u2019s Hyperloop could be very effective.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-254 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/hyperloop-300x188.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"386\" height=\"242\" srcset=\"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/hyperloop-300x188.jpg 300w, https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/hyperloop.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 386px) 100vw, 386px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Smarter packaging with less waste coupled with better, easier to use recycling systems could also help create less waste. Also, imagine if new houses were all built with Tesla&#8217;s solar panels!<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-253 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/solar-pic-300x157.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"428\" height=\"224\" srcset=\"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/solar-pic-300x157.jpg 300w, https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/solar-pic-768x401.jpg 768w, https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/solar-pic-1024x535.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/solar-pic-624x326.jpg 624w, https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/solar-pic.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 428px) 100vw, 428px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Heating and electricity costs would be lower for the owners of the house, and less carbon would be admitted. In general, we need to create energy efficient products that have a monentary incentive over former products for them to be successful. If we could do that, an adaption to green energy would be much faster.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Image and Topic Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;http:\/\/www.pocket-lint.com\/news\/132405-what-is-elon-musk-s-hyperloop-the-700mph-subsonic-train-explained&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;https:\/\/www.tesla.com\/solarroof&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What really stood out to me in the past couple of weeks has been my personal impact in releasing pollutants into the atmosphere. I do not consider myself a wasteful person, but my calculated carbon footprint was over 10 times what was considered sustainable. It is crazy to think that an eight hour airplane flight in itself would qualify a&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/2017\/10\/10\/engineering-our-future\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-2","tag-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/honr392a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}