Item: We put in enough solar panels two-three years back to reduce our SDG&E bill for electricity from $180 to $5/month. The installation amortizes over ten years and has been tocking like a clock with no problems since we installed it. We get some months where they credit us $5 instead of billing it. This includes the baseline costs such as metering.

Item: The leading explorations into nano-scale phenomena are frequently coming up with molecular-sized constructs for harvesting and channeling energy from ambient thermal, light, mechanical motion and sound pulses. It is only a matter of time, for example, before a roof tile can be built that responds to all these things by harvesting microscale levels of energy second by second from every gust of air, mechanical vibration, thermal gradient, infrared or ultraviolet or visible light impinging on it. At that point a house will be wholly self-powering.

Item: The huge tonnage of the world's oceans are pumped up and down twice a day by the biggest pump in the solar system, the lunar pull, combined with assorted vectors of momentum from the planets motion and other gravitic forces. We have not even begun to realize the benefits of harvesting this entirely passive and renewable resource.

Item: The thermal gradient between the top of an average roof and a spot, say, fifteen feet below the back yard would be enough to drive a slow but steady Sterling engine most of the time. We are bathing in enough energy to run the planet on, once we get serious about pursuing it.

Item: Quantum-scale energetic phenomena are not even close to being understood or managed in any except the most superficial ways so far. It is distinctly possible that the mechanisms of energy production in the physical universe's basic structure might completely change the way we look at energy once they are better understood. Zero-point energy and the origins and dynamics of quantum foam are two areas where strange discoveries are waiting to be made. It is possible, too, that space itself is energetic in some way not yet understood. These are enticing speculations, so far.

Item: It is possible that the right combination of sound frequencies can make ordinary water or slightly "doped" water produce explosive energy yields; the phenomena of sono-luminescence is being studied in the US, Japan and other places. It remains to be seen whether this phenomena can ber scaled and whether it can be done in an economically fruitful way.

So don't give up hope, my fellow carbonators.

The era of drawing burnable fuel out of the ancient deposits in the Earth's shell and using them to pollute the atmosphere, distort the climate and also power our civilization is drawing to a tortured close no matter how profitable it has been.