Two Roads Diverged

The Environmental News Network recently published a great article by James Quigley of the Center for Sustainable Energy entitled 'Energy and Climate Crises: On a Collision Course at a Fork in the Road'. Are current economic models guiding global markets to a sustainable future? How can we improve our stewardship of finite resources while continuing economic growth? Here are some excerpts:

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.
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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.
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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.