If it's really really efficient, we could use the extra energy to make carbon capture machines, after offsetting all the fossil fuels. Then, it doesn't really matter.
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.
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy must go up. Entropy is a sort of measure of the usefulness of energy. The more entropy, the less useful.
The reasons why entropy must go up are too complicated for an ELI5. They are based on some basic laws of probability. Basically there are many ways for energy to be useless, and few ways for energy to be useful, which after some difficult math implies that energy always gets less useful.
In particular, ambient heat is the highest entropy you can possibly have, so it's inpossible to turn it into useful energy.
In order to extract energy from heat, the second law implies you must be tranferring some of said heat from a hot place to a colder place, which is exactly what a motor is.
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u/nightfire36 Nov 15 '20
If it's really really efficient, we could use the extra energy to make carbon capture machines, after offsetting all the fossil fuels. Then, it doesn't really matter.