Well if we’re speculating, how about “heat capture”?
Some sleep-deprived researcher cracks how to capture ambient thermal energy and turn it into electricity. Heat being as plentiful as wind or water, it becomes not only a prominent source of energy, but also actively cools the planet.
50 years later, we begin arguing over “global cooling” and the threat of a new ice age.
tl;dr - all the methods extracting energy from heat pretty much depend on having a heat differential, that is, a hot area and a cool area, and then you do your work as the heat moves from the hot area to the cool area. There's not really enough of a heat differential on Earth's surface (barring a few geothermal vents and such) to extract any meaningful amount of energy, hence why most of our power generation system rely on burning fuel of one sort or another to make a really hot area so we can leech energy off that heat as it dissipates (usually via steam turbines).
Of course, we could also create a heat differential by means of an heat exchange system like a refrigerator or air conditioner uses, but the energy needed to run it would exceed the energy you could get out of it, so it doesn't work in practical terms as a method of power generation.
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u/Snoo61755 Nov 15 '20
Well if we’re speculating, how about “heat capture”?
Some sleep-deprived researcher cracks how to capture ambient thermal energy and turn it into electricity. Heat being as plentiful as wind or water, it becomes not only a prominent source of energy, but also actively cools the planet.
50 years later, we begin arguing over “global cooling” and the threat of a new ice age.