NO FUELING, NO CAMPFIRES
Friday, October 29, 2021
Before there was fire, all things we now describe as fuel weren’t used or burned.
Warmth at night first came from animal skins, shelters and living in warm places. During the day, the heat came from the sun. Then early man discovered how to replicate the work of lava and lightning by learning how to start and control fire.
That brought our species into a world of burning things to generate heat, and its many derivatives transformed energy, forging metal, inventing electricity, developing factories, furnaces, fuels, and flue stack exhausts = an economy.
There were no homes to heat, cars to drive, machinery to power, or rockets to launch. We’ve come a long way as a civilization intellectually, but one could argue we aren’t that far removed from those who sat around the first campfire, keeping warm and cooking food by burning something …
And today, those who want us to leap immediately into a post-carbon society say ‘keep the fossil fuels in the ground’ – that’s their solution. They could state that as a reasonable goal to be replaced over time by safer, cheaper forms of energy, but instead, they draw a line in the sand demanding immediate results without regard for 7.5 billion who would have their world pulled from beneath them.
On coal, the kind used for power plants and home heating, most people on the planet agree that is an achievable goal.
But we still want steel …
Keeping oil in the ground is a long haul ‘maybe proposition’ – because the world burns 90 million barrels every day.
Efforts to make it cleaner and more environmentally friendly are ‘not fast enough’ for those who care passionately and for those with dire warnings. They might want to rent a cave and stock up on animal skins.
Reality and reason get clouded by heated arguments.
Keeping fossil fuels in the ground is a long way off. Or, we could switch to nuclear – safe nuclear – but the passionate ones, the anti-nuclear folk, won’t stand for it, and politicians won’t fight them over it. They too should contact Air BnB to book a cave and stock up on furs – they can call it a hybrid-glamping experience.
So solar – yeah, the sun – must be the solution to everything.
It is the cause of life, and some would say it is the cause of climate change, and they will allow that humankind is only a handmaiden in that process of acceleration, and consider that the sun and the function of a massive spinning globe hurtling through space might have something to do with it too.
Opponents argue it is all human-caused.
They are both wrong, but they will also agree that there is no singular answer to the cause, which breeds this multitude of solutions, objections, disagreements. It’s become an emotional argument rather than a fact-based / reality-based one.
Can there be more than one solution?
Or is there no solution at all?
Does anyone have a cave I can rent?