All of this eco-friendly activity comes at a time when the environment, global warming, climate change and the need for renewable energy sources and alternatives is in the public eye as never before. In an age where we are predicted to see more incredible technological advances and developments over the next 20 to 30 years than we have seen in the last 2000 combined, human ingenuity will be put to the test as never before to solve our environmental and energy problems and needs.

Solar panels are more efficient than ever and are becoming increasingly more so, geothermal energy continues to hold great promise with experiments continuing in selected locations around the world and even cold fusion is back in the news, with an article from this month’s New Scientist magazine talking about experiments conducted at the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, California.

As the article is from the issue on-shelves now, it’s available for subscribers only and I presume it will be freely available to read next month, although anyone wanting immediate access can pay for a New Scientist subscription to read it immediately and access the rest of their archives.

While the new claim of cold fusion continues being tested by scientific peers, the electrochemists Pamela Mosier-Boss and Stanislaw Szpak, in conjunction with their manager, Frank Gordon, from the San Diego centre’s navigation and applied sciences department were intrigued and have been busily experimenting on a cold fusion theory, with the article going on to explain how they have done it.

According to the article have run hundreds of tests and cold fusion experiements at weekends and during their spare moments, and have published more than a dozen papers in various peer-reviewed journals, with a new debate on whether the effects being observed truly are cold fusion or not.

The article concludes by quoting David Nagel, “a physicist and research professor at George Washington University in Washington DC who has followed the cold fusion saga since its inception, [who] reports a growing willingness by the US Department of Energy to consider funding experiments to follow up these tantalising hints” [of cold fusion] who says that “it’s the weight of the evidence,” that we need to consider and that “this could be the year when things change for cold fusion… or maybe next year.”

New inventions and ideas in energy generation are being worked on every day, and if history and technological progress is any guide, someone will come up with something that changes everything.

What we don’t know is whether this discovery will come in 5 years, 15 years, 30 years, next week or at all. But given the limitless power from the Sun and from nature that we have only scratched the surface of truly harnessing in an incredibly efficient manner, can there be any doubt that humanity will come up with several new power sources?

The only thing that could really go wrong is if we blow ourselves up in some kind of global nuclear catastrophe or if global warming happens on a much faster timescale than expected, with a storyline that could well be the exact reverse of the global freezing seen in the movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’.

I don’t personally think these kinds of doom and gloom disasters will happen tomorrow as depicted in the movies, but it should now be obvious to us all, given UN reports on climate change and plenty of other evidence that our wasteful ‘energy hog’ lifestyles and polluting energy generation factories and processes are affecting us all, our health and that of the planet, that we must change our ways.

Business, manufacturers, the energy industry and individuals engaging in the micro-generation of power for their own needs through solar, wind, hydro and other technologies, selling excess energy back into the grid have all seen the need to become eco-friendly and energy efficient.

So how long will it take before we all go green?! Read on for the conclusion...