By Jove! It appears that, once again, the cost of petroleum has gone through the roof! If only society had heeded my words once again and switched to a less costly, more efficient mode of transportation. Batteries, you say? Unreliable. Solar!? Har, we are decades away from that. No, no, no. Steam, my dear boy! The energy source of the past and future. Check your pocket watch, for the time of steam has come.
Under the power of steam, the only thing that will skyrocket is you in your jet pack. You heard that correctly, old boy. Steam-powered jet packs! Throw on your leather top hat, pull down your goggles, strap a bunch of cogs to your belt for some reason, and come with me on a fantastical adventure! An adventure to the future where all you need is some water to power your house, car, and dirigible. Just imagine using the same water for your morning cuppa tea as you do to power your computation machine. All for the cost of a shave and a haircut! Now doesn’t that just fog your monocle?!
Once the polar ice caps melt, we will have plenty of water to heat to boiling point and push through a complicated series of iron tubes and meters in order to power locomotives and automated launderettes. Now that’s what I call sustainability! Why, when last I checked, a liter of water costs much less than a liter of petrol. What the bourgeois Romanovs in Moscow do will have no consequence on your steam-powered robot butler.
Drought schmought! Water cannot just disappear, you daft nitwit! It has to go somewhere once we flush our toilets and water our metallic gardens. I suspect that it is collected in vast reservoirs deep underground and all we have to do is drill for it. I know what you are saying, “But Sir Reginald, we already drill for oil and it is destroying the planet.” Ah! But my drilling machines will be environmentally friendly because they will run on, you guessed it, steam! I LOVE STEAM!
I just need five million in gold doubloons to get my water drilling machine up and running. Soon enough we will be wealthy steam barons living in floating mansions on islands in the sky that stay aloft via the power of steam. STEAM!