Ranting, ranting - or is it?

Dear Friends -

Rule of Writing Number One - Keep it focused, and tight.

Personal foul! Elu! Ranting and rambling! Fifteen yard penalty, repeat first down!

Topics in the community blog have been percolating in my mind, as well as other society-wide issues. This is out of character for what I have wanted this blog to be - but maybe not, maybe I want it to be a mixed bag - like me.

Topics for tonight: Imperialism; Energy; Climate change and conservation; Science and Religion

There is an old Gospel hymn I remember from my youth - "I Wonder as I Wander." I'm thinking of that tonight.

I wonder as I wander - I wander into national policy, and what do I find? Imperialism -

My country has invaded a sovereign nation in the Middle East. The excuse was that this nation, Iraq, had weapons of mass destruction. Mind you, the Administration never claimed that Iraq had delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction such that they would threaten America. So why did we invade this sovereign country? Because it had an evil dictator? We didn't invade Germany between 1933 and 1941, Hitler; North Korea after 1953, Kim Il Sung, then Kim Jong Il; China ever, Mao Zedong; Argentina ever, Juan Peron; Chile ever, Pinochet; the Soviet Union ever, Stalin, Andropov and company; and so forth. So I can't believe the party line that Saddam was so bad that his absence was worth the lives of 3,000 Americans and 600,000 Iraqis. Besides, if he were that bad, slipping a sniper in might have been a little cheaper in the costs that matter. And the other costs, too. OK, maybe we invaded because we wanted to bring the blessings of democracy to Iraq. But we staged the invasion from bases in Saudi Arabia, and while we were there we didn't bring that nation the blessings of liberty - the House of Saud with it's legion of crown princes, etc., still has a strangle hold on that country. Maybe it was because of oil - but we bend over for the Saudis and Kuwaitis and Nigerians and Venezuelans and Mexicans, so the oil in Iraq doesn't seem to be critical. OK, here's a reason, and it's the truth - George Bush and Dick Cheney are the biggest and baddest motherfuckers on the planet, and they are going to kick some camel jockey ass and go down in history as the American Caesars. And if that means we kill a few thousand here and there, theirs, ours, fuck it, whoever, well, they have died for the glory of America, so their mamas and papas should wipe off their tears, take the triangularly folded flag, and bless this beloved land with a smile on their faces and a song in their hearts. As for the maimed, that's what VA Hospitals are for, no sweat.

And I wonder - Doesn't anybody care?


I wonder as I wander. I wander through the streets of my town on a winter evening. What do I find? Issues of Energy -

Our children's children are going to curse us. The United States, with 5% of the world population, uses one-quarter of the oil production of the world right now. We are energy pigs. Look out at your town or city tonight. What do you see? Light everywhere, that's what. Sixty-five percent of American electricity is produced with fossil fuels. Look around you, what do you see? Plastics, everywhere. Almost all plastic uses crude oil products as their raw material. Drive down the road, and what do you see? Hundreds upon thousands of your fellow citizens joining you in inefficiently (gasoline produces power at around 40% efficiency) moving 4,000 pounds of metal to get 200 pounds of person somewhere they don't need to go anyway. Oh, and the metal - our society is based on metal - steel and aluminum, particularly. It takes enormous amounts of heat - primarily from fossil fuels - to produce useable metals.

The last great oil fields have been found, and developed. (What about the ANWR - The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - That is a footnote in world energy. It contains enough crude oil to supply American needs for less than two years, at the expense of permanently damaging a fragile ecosystem - For instance, the moss which grows there takes more than 100 years to recover from the passage of one light vehicle.) Oil production will peak around 2010. It is virtually certain that crude oil production will be severely curtailed by the end of this century. That will eliminate the primary energy source, and an essential chemical resource upon which the plastics industry depends. (No replacement energy source will fulfill the chemical industry's needs, so we will likely be restricting crude oil to chemical uses toward the end of the production.) Coal reserves arguably will last for 255 years. However, the standard years-of-reserves estimates keep getting shorter. In 1904, there were coal reserves for 1000 years; in 1988, 300 years. And then? We are assuming that some sort of miraculous invention will bail us out. Hey, Gary Larsen did cartoon jokes about this, how scientists writing formulae on a blackboard would stick in the middle of the equation, "Here, a Miracle occurs." What is that miracle going to be? Solar? Solar is very inefficient (18%), and most of the United States has insufficient sunny days to depend on solar anyway. Geothermal? Thermal sources near the surface are very rare, at least with the heat it takes to produce electricity. Drilling technology is nowhere near developed enough to drill deeply enough to find real heat, "several miles" for some deposits, and much, much deeper to find truly hot magma in usable quantity. Hydrogen? That's a cop out. Hydrogen takes electricity from other sources to produce. Nuclear? We are running short of uranium, too. All of the products of reactors that in turn fuel other reactors come from uranium. Current estimates say that known uranium deposits will be depleted by 2060. Wind? Inefficient in the extreme, and currently produces 0.6% of electricity in the U.S. Ah, fusion, the Miracle that will occur. If only we develop a material or energy which will contain a reaction that burns at 730 million degrees Celsius, and a way to start that reaction, and a way to tap the heat of that reaction. Or maybe NOTHING. Maybe, just maybe, we will have a great "Power Down" event. With the power down will go huge disruption in food production and a die-off of lots and lots of humans.

And I wonder - Doesn't anybody care?


I wonder as I wander. I wander onto websites and research reports of the majority of qualified climate scientists. What do I find? Issues of Climate change and conservation -

The same scientists who predicted an upcoming Ice Age 15 years ago now predict global warming. That's both true and logically uncompelling to the point of the right-wing argument that climate change is a problem.

One particularly dumbshit article I read (I cruise all sorts of fringe sites) was that global warming is a good thing because it will make the plains of northern Canada and northern Russia the new breadbaskets of the world. There are two problems with that. First, the soil there is thin and incompatible with large-scale agriculture. Second, I suppose the writer of that thinks it's OK that tropical and sub-tropical latitudes become overheated Hells, and mid-latitudes (like the American Mid-west) the new deserts.

The Arctic ice-cover is melting. Within our lifetimes, it will be possible to sail a surface ship across the North Pole. Huge ice shelves have broken off the glaciers of Antarctica. One result of these events is that vast quantities of fresh water are being and will be dumped into the ocean. This will raise the sea level, and disturb the salinity of the oceans, upon which sea life depends. Sea life includes phytoplankton, which is a major resource for atmospheric oxygen, and the major dumping ground for excess carbon. When surface waters are cold, nutrients which feed phytoplankton come to the surface. When surface waters are warm, the nutrients from below are blocked, and there is a large die-off of phytoplankton. Phytoplankton forms the vast majority of the dead biomass at the bottom of the ocean, which binds 90% of the world's carbon content.

We continue to dump billions of tons of carbon per year into the atmosphere. In 1900, atmospherica carbon measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii was 295 ppm (parts per million); in 1997, 360 ppm. The rate of destruction of the forests, another major "carbon sink" is increasing. Currently, 53,000 square miles of forest are lost every year. That's about the size of North Carolina. The industrial powers of the world made a baby step with the Kyoto Accords. The United States signed them, changed the party of the Administration, and abrogated them.

We are heading for the climate cliff. Once we fall off, we aren't going to levitate back to the edge.

And I wonder - Doesn't anybody care?


I wonder as I wander. I wander to the most local of government meetings, the local school board. What do I find? Science is perverted in the name of religion -

School boards cite the "controversy" of Evolution versus Creation. They want to place stickers in science textbooks to urge students to examine the "evidence" that says that evolution didn't occur, and that the Earth is about 4,000 years old. Teachers, teachers I know who have been to college, refuse to teach evolution, or any part of geology which differs with the account of creation in Genesis. The government won't let park rangers at the Grand Canyon state that the geological record shows erosion of the canyon by the Colorado River over something in the order of five million years, with most of the downcutting occuring in the last two million years. They are encouraged to speculate that the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's Flood.

God is important to me. He created this Earth. He did so using wonderful mechanisms that science can detect and measure. But because the scientific evidence differs from the stories told to simple people when the Bible was written, we are dumbing down America.

And I wonder - Doesn't anybody care?

Doesn't anybody care?

Perhaps I'll write with less (righteous?) anger and more focus on these individual issues later. I'm just very frustrated and very worried tonight about our America. I was a flag-waver way before flag-waving was cool. It pains me that we are descending into a society of arrogance and stupidity.

Mizpah. (See Genesis 31:49)

Roger