While the noisy fiasco of Bush appears to drown out all other issues, or render them as sideshows, this - the galloping implications of global-warming - is the big tent. The notion of our planet as an interlocking set of self-stabilizing forces, tending towards an optimal condition for life, is mind-blowing. It also casts a distinct shadow-suggestion that, if we don't play well, the earth might just put us out of its misery. And move on, as they say.

I hope Salon will publish more on the growing awareness of the crisis, and things that can be done. It is, as Gore says, the one issue that can potentially galvanize us more than divide. It's not as sexy as he-said-we-said politics, but the rewards, right now, seem greater than can be imagined.

>>Not, of course, American quantities -- each of us uses on average eight times the energy that a Chinese citizen does -- but relatively serious quantities nonetheless.<< Bill McKibben

Ummm...

1) there are 4 times as many of them than there are of us

2) it's not that they're somehow more virtuous; it's merely that the 'average' Chinese (80%) is a poor, barely subsistence, farmer out in the countryside who simply cannot afford high consumption of energy

3) consumption is in any case growing 2.5X faster than in the West due to rapid urbanization, and

4) China is one of the least energy efficient consumers anywhere using nearly triple the energy per unit of output as we do, partly because the costs are so heavily subsidised.

Are we hurtling toward disaster? Nope. We're 'there' already.

The answer is diversification. Since we can't store electricity, the electrical grid has to be scaled so as to supply the biggest load that routinely occurs. The biggest load on the electrical grid is summer air conditioning. What a happy coincidence then that that's exactly when solar power is most abundant. Stick solar cells on every rooftop to help power the AC and the grid can relax; that negates the unfortunate fact that solar power is way more expensive per watt than any other source. Similarly, where there are winds and nobody to NIMBY, put windmills; where there are tides put tidal generators; where there are geysers put geothermal generators; where there are mill ponds put hydro generators; etc. Where there are existing nuke plants without obvious flaws (like straddling a fault line) bring them up to current standards, but don't build any new ones, that route is finanacially and environmentally a loser. Keep the new and clean fossil fuel plants running to fill in the gaps.

One main reason this isn't done is that it goes in the opposite direction from the economic trend to centralize power generation and distribution. But technically, digital technology should be adquate to coordinate and control the system. Consider the radio-telephones of decades ago, with a big radio transmitter/receiver attached to a huge antenna that could handle a few dozen mobile phones over a far-flung area, versus the current cell phone system with a myriad of small local systems coordinated by a competent digital network, handling millions of phones across the nation.

In order to maintain a semblance of our civilization we need to produce things like aluminum, steel, titanium, etc. These things require lots of concentrated power. Steel melting furnaces require around 60 megawatts each. Bigger furnaces use less power per unit of output, so decentalization would increase our use of energy. A lb of titanium requires about 10 kilowatt hours of energy. The silicon that solar panels need is made in large electric arc furnaces. The minimum energy required per unit of output is a thermodynamic given. The larger the production unit the closer you can get to the thermodynamic minimum. So you need perhaps hundreds of megawatts available in a space of only a square mile or so. The amount of copper needed to deliver that power from widely scattered sources boggles the mind. Of course the copper would require its thermodynamic minimum energy to make. So we will always need a lot of big powerplants, preferably nuclear.

Any of you liberal arts majors who might argue that we can do better than what thermodynamics says we can do are arguing from a deep reservoir of stupidity. Get an elementary thermo text and try to read and understand it before shooting off you mouths or keyboards. In fact a reasonable understanding of thermo by a large percent of our citizenry would really help in fixing our future. But that is a lot harder than trying to be literary.

Whether it's making steel or even NEEDING steel...I recall that physicists in the 1800s proved that the Earth could be no older than 30,000 years, given the amount of coal the sun had to be burning.

Our civilization is not based on particular technologies, nor has it ever been. Only our current economy is. And that crucial difference is usually lost on those more heavily invested in the latter than the former.

Well, of course we can get along without steel. Reduce the population to a few hundred miilion or less, live on natural materials, and we can do it. But, given a choice most of us would opt for at least a somewhat technological civilization. One of these days we're going to get a supervolcano, or a large asteroid strike. The effects or prevention of in the case of the asteroid, could only be mitigated by high technology.

BTW, I should have mentioned the three laws of thermodynamics in my last post (paraphrased into liberal arts language).

1. You can't win.

2. You can't even break even.

3. You can't get out of the game.

You know a liitle too much about what some scientists were saying 150 years ago, but not enough about the real history of science. The blast furnace was not "scientifically" understood until the 20th century, long after it was producing millions of tons of steel. Steel has been the basis of civilization for thousands of years. So I would not be too sure that it can be replaced or done without. Wooden plows will work, but one man and his jackass can only do a few acres. Also, technology is fun for those who can do it. Don't deny us our simple pleasures, just because you probably can't.

"Perhaps we are NIMBYs," he writes, referring to the abbreviation for the phrase "Not in My Backyard," "but we see those urban politicians [pushing wind power] like some unthinking physicians who have forgotten their Hippocratic Oath and are trying to keep alive a dying civilization by useless and inappropriate chemotherapy when there is no hope of cure and the treatment renders the last stages of life unbearable."

This sounds like a potent metaphor alrighty, but it's pretty wrong-headed.

There was a study published last year, written up in the NYT, that said about 50% of women with TREATABLE breast cancer quit chemo prematurely because of the harsh side effects.

LIVES COULD BE SAVED the doctors said if so many people didn't bail on the chemo before it was finished.

(Now what drug helps people finish their chemo? I have no idea. Can someone tell me?)

Anyhow, the moral of my story is -- we can't bail now just because the treatment is a little more painful than we imagined.