Is there anything we can do about Peak Oil and Global Warming?

I have a real suggestion for the group.  I will have to work up to it, so please bear with me.  I was prompted by the allegation that I am consumed by thoughts that nothing can be done and I intend to make the case that isn't correct.

First, go here and scroll down to get an idea of what is going on globally so we can all start on the same page.  http://www.worldometers.info/

I am not particularly consumed by anything; neither am I restricted in thought to one solution for one problem - like peak oil. Let me clarify my position. It is not a matter that nothing CAN be done.  It is that nothing WILL be done.  Why would companies which make a profit of a billion dollars a day...or their shareholders...want to stop doing that?  The simple fact is that there are buyers for fossil fuel and we have about 600 years of it left, much in the form of high-sulfur coal.  If the US doesn't buy it to burn it makes no difference.  Someone will.  Demand controls supply.  It will be burned somewhere on earth.  The 30 billion metric tonnes of CO2 generated this year will be bad enough but the increase in atmospheric water vapor will be much worse. Maybe as much as a 5% increase per degree of warming.  Water vapor is our most important greenhouse medium.  We can SAY we need to stop it. People have been saying that for thirty years. We are not going to stop it that way.  

At the rate we are losing arable land...~50,000 square MILES a year, we have only about 250 years of arable land left and even that fades in importance when one looks at water.  The Colorado river no longer reaches the sea. The amount of fresh water available for irrigation is decreasing.  Water rationing has been in effect for many years, but only works if there is enough to ration.  And there will only be enough to ration if the weather continues to provide a sufficient annual snowpack to support the infrastructure the human race has created over the past couple of hundred years to deliver it.  Our warnings are not being heeded.

Pakistan (and the world) experienced the hottest summer on record - too hot for people.  And then it washed away in an unprecedented flood. The weather has changed and discussions of peak oil will not change it back.  It is written off as a fluke.

So the immediate problem isn't peak oil.  Is it water?  We are rapidly running out.  Desalination plants need clean (read deep) water sources - they are expensive to maintain, require constant membrane replacement, are very energy intensive, and they lose 30% by volume of the water they process as highly mineralized sludge which has to be stored in toxic lakes.  Putting it back in the ocean merely means processing more and more highly concentrated mineral solutions.  Thus processing a billion gallons of water a day would create a cesspool of 300 million gallons of sludge a day and require a large nuclear generation plant on-site to power it.

Yet even with unlimited energy available to desalinate the water, it cannot be pumped uphill.  I cannot imagine a way to pump 150 million gallons of water a day from a coastal desalination plant to Denver.  Canals only work in one direction. 200,000 tanker trucks a day, perhaps?

But wait!  There's more.  GMO canola, which is not regulated, has jumped the fence in North Dakota.  I blogged about it.   At first it doesn't seem to be too important, but actions have consequences.  Most of the major ones are unintended.

Fishing out the main ocean predators has led to an explosion in the jellyfish populations worldwide.  I blogged about it.   That doesn't seem too important either.  None of these things, taken alone, seem to be a big deal and everyone has their own personal issue to try and make sense of. Like peak oil.  But it doesn't work that way.  All of these things are connected.  Humans just aren't wired to connect the dots on a global scale. The reason this concept is so difficult to teach is that most of the toxins are colorless, odorless and tasteless. We are wired to notice the clear and present danger of saber-toothed tigers.  Lions and tigers and bears, OH MY!

My suggestion is as follows:  Individual issues like energy and water cannot be solved individually because people don't think the  issues are that important or that serious...OR CONNECTED.  Fully a third of the US and probably more believe anthropogenic global warming is a hoax regardless of their thermometer reading. They cannot relate a huge seaweed bloom to anything or care when one creates an hypoxic zone.  But everyone knows that Bristol Palin is going to be on 'Dancing with the stars'.  I know it and I don't have a TV.

I believe the only way to solve the 'problem' which, by definition includes ALL of the interrelated problems, many of which we cannot even know exist, is to teach people to think of the biosphere as a closed system.  Not as individual nations, each free to pursue it's own interests. We live in a bubble.  Everything that happens in our industrialized bubble affects everything else.  But Rick Dawkins and Jared Diamond tell me that ain't happenin'.  It is conceptually beyond our capacity to learn on a global scale except as an exercise and then only during one attention span.  Even if governments didn't lie to their citizens...but they all do.

My idea:  One of my favorite NOVA series of all time was 'Connections' with Richard Burke.  It made sense out of seemingly disconnected events.  A show like that which connected the world and the climate and jellyfish and everything we know is happening might do the same thing.  It is even possible that we might make great discoveries...and one of them might be great enough to change our course.

I am sure every scientist in the world would love to participate and there are enough show-biz people who 'get it' and would jump at the chance to produce it.  At least I think so.  We don't even have to concoct dramatic futures.  Haiti and Pakistan are just warm-ups.  We need to connect them as they happen and explain why they are happening in simple language, with pictures. Make connections people can understand. Make the invisible visible and interesting.  Not like boiling frogs. Explain that corn in the worst possible basis for ethanol...explain that humans are not carbon-neutral.  There is so much to explain and it's so hard to make it simple.  But some of you can!

Science alone will not be sufficiently convincing, even with a hugely charismatic presenter.  We would have to present it religion-neutral and not make enemies.  I'll just stay home, then?

I rest my case.  And I am finished shotgunning to the list.  Please reply to me individually if you wish and we can engage.

a hui hou

T

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