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Well, the finger is healed over and feeling much better now – so I thought I’d put the finishing touches on this post (which I’ve been pecking away at slowly for the last week) and launch it…

It seems like lately, everyone from your local bank to nationwide concert tours are “going green” – cutting waste, switching to biofuels, giving their employees bonuses for biking to work, and installing compact fluorescent light bulbs. I’m sure in some cases (especially when it comes to the bulbs), there’s money to be saved – and in other cases “going green” might cost some coin but help out a company’s environmental image, and in yet other cases it’s done for the popular intangibles of “carbon neutrality” or “environmental awareness-raising”.

But all this greenness of late has got me thinking down a slightly different path… What would we – as people, as families, as businesses, as a society – do differently if we had to? If we had no less-green alternative, how much a part in our daily lives would “greenness” play? As an engineer, I don’t think in touchy-feely terms like “going green”, I think in numerical truisms: efficiency, cost, feasibility, return-on-investment. Until recently, as energy costs have spiked, greener alternatives were left to those who count “save the planet” among their life’s ambitions. But lately, the case for greenness has become less emotional and more scientific.

What if our homes – all our homes – ran on solar power? With a finite daytime load, and a limited capacity for overnight battery storage, how would our daily habits change? How would our lives differ? How would our society have grown and built itself up around the needs of a fundamentally-different model for collecting, moving, storing and expending energy?

What if the cost of gasoline in the US had never been below $10/gallon? Would we even consider buying a home more than a 10-minute commute from work, or where the path between the two wasn’t bike-able? Would the shoulders of our roads be wider, or the abdomens of our population narrower? Would routine motor freight even be feasible, or would we have an interstate rail system any less anemic than we do today?

Granted, hindsight is always 20/20, but what can asking these questions today – after the less-efficient answers have already been cast in the history books and into our social norms – do for us now? For me, it means looking at places where I might bridge the hypothetical into the real, and (more importantly) counting the beans to see if doing so actually makes sense. You won’t see me rushing out to buy my share of “carbon offset credits” any time soon (or any time not-soon, for that matter) but you might just find me taking a few extra seconds to make sure the lights on in our house are the same ones that I’m sharing the room with…