I just finished last year's "green" bestseller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman, and I gotta tell you, I'm not optimistic about preventing this planet from beoming a seething oven by 2050. My grandkids are gonna need an awful lot of sunscreen, and probably filtration masks.
Short of someone miraculously inventing flying trees, which--running on nothing but water vapor--convert carbon dioxide into oxygen faster than we can pump it into the atmosphere, the planet is screwed. By my calculations, to offset current CO2 emissions we would need about 100 billion of these flying trees, we need them five years ago, and they need to convert CO2 into oxygen a whole lot faster than ordinary trees. Even if the technology existed, which it doesn't, what company can be trusted to build 100 billion flying trees? What country can be trusted to launch them?
I vote that we not let Microsoft build the 100 billion flying trees, because Flying Tree 2.0 would crash into someone's house or head unless it's updated about every fifteen minutes. We'd have flying trees sending this message back to Earth: "Update me now or I'll shut down. Update me now or I'll shut down. Update now? Huh? Huh? How about now? Tough noogies, I need to shut down anyway. Shut down now? Okay, how about now? Look, I'm out of patience with your desire to get some work done instead of restarting me. Restarting in five, four, three, two, one. . ."
Not pretty.
We should probably not elect Wal-Mart to build 100 billion flying trees because their flying trees would import thousands of metric tons of cheap imports from Asia when nobody is looking.
McDonald's cannot build the flying trees either, because they would bear McFakefruit that is 99% high fructose corn syrup, and this would result in very obese birds and flying squirrels on a crash course with extinction.
And finally, the Disney Corporation is the worst choice of all to build the flying trees, because their flying trees would blast the Jonas Brothers and Mylie Cyrus and "It's A Small World" and drive everybody over the age of 12 stark raving insane.
So leave the free market out of the equation. Oh, I know! Let the government build the flying trees!
What a wonderful idea. We'll borrow from China to build 100 billion flying trees. Let's hope they don't cost much more than the hot-air balloon from Melbourne, Australia, pictured above right.
Russia, Iraq, and North Korea (not to mention China) will be so pleased to see CO2-converting flying trees from America in their airspace, you just can't imagine. They will take off their hats and their eyes will fill with tears of gratitude that the good old USA is saving the planet. And if North Korea built the flying trees, we would do the same.
It will not occur to anybody, including Al Quaeda, that the flying trees could be weapons, or could be made into weapons running on water vapor. Nobody will shoot the trees down, take them apart, and copy the technology for nefarious ends. Of course they won't. Because nobody believes that Jesus or Mohammed is going to bail them out anyway before things get too bad, that natural disasters are a sign of impending paradise, and that the immediate, much less long-term, fate of the planet does not matter.
Mmm-hmm.
This scenario, of course, leaves out the fact that we are losing millions of trees every day that didn't cost anybody a cent. Even if we put 100 billion flying trees in the air, indigenous third-world peoples would, at best, stop clear-cutting the tropical rainforest long enough to worship the flying trees, then go back to destroying species with blithe abandon because their kids won't be eating next week unless they cut trees down. The fact that my grandchildren may look back sadly at extinct orangutans does not matter quite as much to the rainforest tribal folks as the fact that their children are starving right this minute. I can understand that.
Here lies the problem with Friedman's entire thesis, which is that his whole "green revolution" rests on the miraculous discovery of "cheap, clean, reliable electrons" that can be mass-produced and which people can be educated not to abuse, whether innocently out of dire need, or malevolently for the heck of it. I'll address the last half of this thesis first, then go back and address the cheap electrons thing. In considering the propensity of some people to abuse whatever they get their mitts on, I'm having a flashback to Political Science 101, in which the prof put to my class these three provocative questions:
- Who rules?
- To what end?
- What about the 5 percent of people who are just plain dog-kickin', cat-skinnin' bad?
Those five percent get their hands on cheap clean energy, and they will do so much damage, so fast, that global warming looks benign by comparison.
Now about the electrons: human beings in the entire course of history have not managed to mass-produce cheap, clean, reliable anything. Nothing can be produced without waste. Nothing can be produced without cost. The mere fact that Friedman is talking about electrons makes it seem more scientific and therefore less ludicrous, but put anything else into Freidman's mantra and it looks like sheer fantasy:
We need a bountiful source of cheap, clean, reliable patio furniture. The government can m ake it happen.
We need a bountiful source of cheap, clean, reliable post-it notes. The government can make it happen.
We need a bountiful source of cheap, clean, reliable lawyers. The government can make it happen.
People like to consume. I like to consume. This is why, on the first day of Economics 101, my prof wrote SCARCITY in giant letters across the entire length of the blackboard. That is the first principle of economics. There is not, and there never will be, enough of anything to satisfy all human wants and needs. Energy included. The limitless human hunger for energy has already irreversibly damaged the natural world, and the damage will continue apace.
I am praying that nobody, and I mean nobody, figures out cold fusion or any other perfect, cheaper-than-dirt, non-polluting, limitless source of energy. It will lead to one of two things:
- War in the name of war, as making weapons becomes easier and cheaper than ever and people kill each other just because;
- War in the name of peace, as the good guys try to figure out who the bad guys are and how to keep free cheap energy out of their hands by killing them whenever and wherever they acquire it.
We cannot trust in 50% conservation and 50% miracles. The really scary facts about the environment are these:
- Conservation is the only solution; any new technology is too slow.
- Even if all human beings had the will to conserve as much energy as possible from this point forward, the effort would still fall short of what is necessary to avert disastrous climate change in my lifetime.
Now who wants cheesecake? Chilled, not baked. Yes, it's evil, wasteful corporate food, but I need comfort from someplace. How 'bout if I recycle the box?
