Back to the Future? Clean energy, clean cars, and 7 ways we’ve leapt forward from 1985 to 2015

UCSUSA

At the end of the classic 1985 movie “Back to the Future”, our young heroes travel in a flying DeLorean to a distant time: October 21, 2015, to be precise. What Marty McFly and Jennifer Parker find is a world that is familiar in a lot of ways, but advanced in others.

In our own version of 2015, we’re distinctly deficient in self-tying shoes, self-drying clothes, and hoverboards (maybe). And (maybe more importantly) there’s a decided dearth of garbage-fed flux capacitors for flying cars. It turns out we still power a few too many of our cars and homes with fossil fuels (that’s so 20^th century…). But when it comes to some other aspects of energy and transportation, here are seven examples of how we’ve come a long way.

Here are a few indications of the progress we’ve made since 1985:

Okay, so not having KITT around isn’t necessarily progress. But don’t worry: more autonomous (and talking?) vehicles just might be in our (near) future.

And a lot of the other progress noted above has come about in just the last few years. Way more efficient ways of moving ourselves from Point A to Point B. And way more than 1.21 “jiga-watts” of clean-electron-making machines. (As one point of reference: By the beginning of 2015 the U.S. had enough wind turbines—and enough wind—to generate enough electricity to power more than 17.5 million homes.)

And we, like a hacked DeLorean accelerating toward 88 MPH, just might be ready to take it to a whole new plain. When it comes to clean energy and clean cars, “Doc” Brown just might be proud of us. Great Scott!

Source: UCSUSA. Reproduced with permission.