Have you ever been in the American Southwest?
Among the desolate beauty, around the flying plastic bags, over the minerals, and resting upon the beer cans is a lot of sunshine. That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? After a summer of wandering about the desert feeling like a nomadic mop, I found myself questioning the logic of funding shale, building pipelines, and drilling into the Arctic–all to pump a few more gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
During the same time, from the rabbit-holes of the fossil fuel industry came the pronouncement of the United States’ coming ascension as the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels. At last, the sordid efforts of lobbyists and soft oil money pouring into the government–aided by our taxes–have a definitive yield. We’re number one! A dysfunctional funding mechanism has thrust us bolding backwards into 20th century. We can now take pride in keeping the CO2 generation systems running at full tilt. Then, in the fall, the propaganda systems began to belch out insane declarations about coal being supplanted by natural gas as a power generation tool–a good step away from suicide–but lunacy nonetheless.
Was it fear of the future? Or was the foolish pride of mad-hatter-pseudo-citizens making us all barmy? Consider how it doesn’t make sense: Solar manufacturers in the US are struggling, while an archaic industry ekes out that last little bit of fossil fuel at a furious pace–a baffling quandary.
A few years ago, I toured a manufacturing site that produces solar panels. I spoke with Engineering. According to them, their facility builds enough solar panels to generate approximately 400 megawatts of power–every year. This means that a single mid-sized solar manufacturing facility builds the equivalent of a coal-fired generating facility, or a large natural gas generating facility, every year. How long does it take to build a single fossil fuel generating plant, years? If we had made solar energy our priority–instead of economic myth–how many gigawatts could we put into service every year without GHGs? The answer is the number of US solar panel manufacturing facilities times their 24/7 annual panel output in gigawatts, times about two-thirds.
From that discussion, I developed my first position on the question of clean energy: Let’s request our tax dollars be spent building manufacturing plants that make our country energy independent of terrestrial resources. This, even though we know we would have to develop a whole new set of industries that feed sun-based power generation. There would be rapid growth bottlenecks by the trainload, like rising wages…Oh darn. In addition, the fossil fuel industry could publish a report on all the bottlenecks inherent in a US-based solar industry and place it on the Internet–in concert with their attempted assassination of alternative energy. Then people could read the reports, research a bottleneck, like wheeling, transmission costs, or batteries, and start a company to solve the problem.
Another notion of the time: This is the Information Age. Let’s fully delineate the problems–lay out the questions. Develop Internet-based incubators to share knowledge that feeds the vibrant economics of intellectual exchange. Spread the wealth of deliberation by creating more knowledge. What, I wondered, was the seed of this change? Why wasn’t it already done–fear of Intellectual Socialism? Don’t share information: Knowledge is Ignorance. Was dippy the new daft?
Then recently the feeling that funding archaic energy models has a brainless, offensive sense to it–when we could be supporting clean energy systems in the desert–came clear. So, I thought, even if events like Sandy, Irene, Katrina, a few thousand unnamed tornadoes, and the forest fires don’t concern us; considering the drought taking our rivers to places where no man had gone before, or the battering of infrastructure and the spread of invasive species to places ill equipped to handle them–like our bodies. We had to make progress. Didn’t we?
That’s when I saw it.
There is a sharp stick flying loose in our society that seeks our blindness. Its point is a declaration that we are a nation addicted to liquid fuel. That we cannot transition to clean energy without making adjustments that will take too-many years. That weapon, those answers, place tribute to systemic failure, spin that embraces the deadliest poison possible for our society. The blessing of collapse: “We cannot solve the problem of anthropogenic forcing of the climate so we will adjust to misery and ride it out.”
Mom, is that stupidity in the oven?
Do people have any idea how bad the climate will get?
Then this summer, I began to question if whether we were really so dull we cannot solve the riddle of clean energy when there is so much solar energy available to us in the Southwest? Or is there something wicked, something endemic to our species that derails us? Could it be the ego of man diligently seeking to defile all it touches in an effort to protect itself? That man’s ego builds pipelines, fracks the ground, pumps poison into the environment, and drills into virgin habitat simply for lust. Or worse, do we heave gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, betraying our progeny, all to declare omnipotence and feed our desires?
Then today, I questioned that question. Perhaps it is not the ego of man. The energized planetary systems now produce increased randomness throughout the ecosystem. We are children of this planet. It is chance, enhanced chaos, which drives our species’ recent bizarre behavior. Stranger things have happened: Like the most educated nation on the planet media-poking itself blind to environmental seppuku.
In the end, all that had happened for me was that I acknowledged the development of solar power in the US Southwest as a key part of the solution to anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance–but there was another quandary. What the hell were we waiting for?
LENR?
That’s when clarity struck. The actual fuel of our species is neither fossil fuels nor clean energy. The genuine fuel of our species is the questions we ask, not the answers we seek. Questions always frame the answers. If you want to solve the climate crisis, ask the questions, but don’t ingest answers. Use the answers to find the next questions. This piece is not just philosophy–it’s a survival posture. We live in a time of rapid planetary change.
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