“Disposable" income becomes less disposable as more of it is disposed on fuel that hikes the price of everything that gets to market by trucks, that also consume fuel to get it there, which includes almost every tangible thing you can buy in this economy.
A Guest Commentary
War rages in the Middle East as commodities traders wrangle over the price of crude oil flowing in precarious abundance from that troubled land. Motorists around the country -- and the world-- watch helplessly as prices at the pump ratchet up with numbing regularity. Airline executives agonize over raising ticket prices to cover soaring fuel costs that diminish sales. Families are putting the brakes on vacations that include long distance car trips.
“Disposable" income becomes less disposable as more of it is disposed on fuel that hikes the price of everything that gets to market by trucks, that also consume fuel to get it there, which includes almost every tangible thing you can buy in this economy. Oil companies still reap huge profits as they funnel more wealth to the campaign coffers of elected officials who give us the best pro-oil government oil money can buy. Electricity costs are going up as natural gas supplies are taxed and the demand for more coal pushes its price upward. People who heat their homes with fuel oil are bracing themselves for the sticker shock of the coming heating season.
On a collision course with this energy crisis is the crisis of global climate change. Melting glaciers and receding polar ice shelves are delivering new supplies of fresh water to the oceans on a Biblical scale. Sea level is rising, both from the melting ice and thermal expansion as surface temperature increases. More violent storms are brewing as drought wreaks havoc with wildfires in the West and excessive rainfall floods out scores of towns in the East. A heat wave scorches the country and sets off power outages as the demand for air conditioning overloads the electric grid. Although the warming is tied to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, human activity now pumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ever before.
Here's the rub: if carbon dioxide should be avoided, then we must find a way to remove the carbon from these fuels (oil, coal, etc.) and "sequester" it before it enters the atmosphere, which may be technically possible but almost certainly economically and socially improbable, or, discontinue its use and replace it with non-carbon energy production. This fork in the road is fraught with peril. Down one side is nuclear power that while avoiding the carbon problem encounters the radioactive waste problem, which some would have us believe is solved by a nuclear waste dump called Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where, it is believed, nuclear waste will sit unmolested in perpetuity, but the well-known geological history of the Earth tells us it will not, as does the ethos of terrorism that now so abounds in global society. So who are we kidding here? And can nuke proponents guarantee there will never be another Three-Mile Island or Chernobyl? The insurance industry is decidedly unwilling to take that chance.
Down the other fork in the road is renewable energy, virtually inexhaustible, at least until the Sun burns itself out. It is common knowledge that as much as ten-thousand times more solar energy falls on the Earth’s surface each day as is used in all daily human activity. With existing, off-the-shelf solar photovoltaic (sunlight-to-electricity) technology operating at a mere 10% efficiency on only 10% of the land mass of Arizona, we could provide for all of the country's electrical power demand. We could accomplish the same end by turning Minnesota into a wind farm with existing wind-to-electric technology. It is not suggested here that we do either to Arizona or Minnesota. The point is that we could distribute this generation capacity throughout the land, putting people to work in a sustainable economy, have a surplus of power to produce hydrogen to propel motor vehicles down the nation’s highway spewing nothing more than water vapor, free ourselves from the violent chemistry of fossil fuels and the social violence it spawns as we grow increasingly desperate to secure it against the demands of others, and in the process, save ourselves from the terrible fate awaiting the human race and most of the other living creatures on the planet if we continue to do nothing about global climate change.
What is needed now more than ever is a public that is awakened from its complacency and leadership that has enough vision to overcome the seduction of powerful interests who are blinded by their own preoccupation with the global extraction and delivery of fossil fuels. This country that undertook massive public works projects like putting a man on the moon, or building the interstate highway system, and became the most vital economy of all time, has a choice of either fading into oblivion, or correcting the course of human history. We can do it. We should, or at least die trying.
ENN welcomes a wide range of perspectives in its Commentary Series. To find out more or to submit a commentary for consideration please contact ENN's editor, Carrie Schluter: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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