Powering the future and saving the planet - two opposing approaches
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Posted on September 1, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Fossil fuel dependency, Renewable fuels
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Skimming through the Washington Post today, I came upon two very different articles that say something very important about two very different ways to approach the coming crises — the crisis of global climate change and the fossil fuel energy crunch.
Fossil fuels are the major sources of greenhouse gases that are cooking the atmosphere. And fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas, will be reaching peak in the course of this generation.
So we have to find other ways to power our needs (not our excess - no technology will be able to do that — but our needs).
So here’s one approach, Beyond Wind and Solar, a New Generation of Clean Energy. This article is about some of the exciting, innovative technologies that are being researched and developed, some of them very experimental and pretty exotic, like harnessing the energy of ocean tides.
This is that ‘all hands on deck’ approach to the problem. We have to move away from fossil fuels, and we have to do this before we cook the planet to the point where it cannot support life as we know it, including us. Rather than sit in despair, engineers and scientists get busy.
This is important because there is no one technology that will save us, including solar and wind. What it will take is multiple approaches, lots of appropriate technology, little and big, locally sourced and produced as much as possible. There is a great deal of effort and ingenuity going into all this, and much of it without significant public funds.
Here’s the other approach, U.N. Climate Talks End in Cloud of Discord:
Industrialized, Developing Nations Still at Odds Over How and When to Cut Emissions.
Aren’t we tired of this? Aren’t we tired of being represented in international talks on climate change by a White House playing an obstructionist role over and over again? Aren’t we tired of the western industrialized countries who have created this global warming crisis refusing to take their full responsibility for dealing with it?
Two things are required: 1) that the US and other developed countries cut their emissions drastically and soon (80% by 2050 is in the range of what is necessary); 2) that rich countries provide financial assistance and innovative technologies to poor countries so that they can develop in a way that does not lock in more greenhouse gas emissions for the foreseeable future.
It is very clear that our lameduck President Bush will stall action for the remainder of his term. The talks he has proposed for 15 nations to discuss and set ‘aspirational goals’ to cut carbon emissions is a joke, given the urgency.
And that makes Congress and the next elections extremely important. Advocates who care about these things should look long and hard at candidates’ records on climate change and energy, and who in the energy sector provides funds for their campaigns. This administration was at the service of the oil and gas companies and their record shows it. So, too, the coal industry, and we know, for example, that Obama has received contributions from the coal industry and supports further development of liquified coal — which comes to us mostly from strip-mining and mountaintopping. He also gets money from the nuclear energy industry.
This, along with the Iraq war, is the most important issue of our times — this little business of saving the planet. It is long past time when this government needs to get its priorities straight.
Technorati Tags: alternative renewable energy sources, clean energy, UN climate talks
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Six million people to 6 billion people! That looks to me like unbridled, near exponential growth of absolute human numbers worldwide over the past several thousand years, with most of that growth occurring very recently. If we go from 6 billion people to 9 billion by 2050, as is projected by the UN Population Division, and people continue to conspicuously consume Earth’s finite resources as we are ravenously doing now, what will be left to sustain the life as we know it for our children and their children, let alone coming generations?
Are our current leaders missing something vital for future of life, human wellbeing and environmental health.
Perhaps someone can take a moment to explain how a great democracy of 300 million good people becomes perverted by a tiny, selfish confederacy of wealthy and politically powerful dunces?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/