Save our children
If your children were about to drown and you called to the lifeguard, "Save my children!", you wouldn't expect to have to negotiate with him. You wouldn't expect him to say, "Sorry, I'm a little busy right now; would next Tuesday work for you?"
That's what's happening to our children right now. They are begging us to save them from global warming, but we're telling them, "Don't worry, we have all the time in the world. Besides, our president doesn't believe in global warming and would rather negotiate with China over tariffs."
"But it's urgent!" we reply. "In another ten or fifteen years it may be too late to stop global warming. We will have reached a tipping point by then, and it will be too late to reverse it! The ice caps are already melting, our insects, birds and fish are disappearing, and our coral reefs have become denuded. Mass migrations of people have begun already because of lack of rain, one of the major causes of the number of immigrants coming to the US from Central America."
"Whatever," says our president. "I don't believe in it, so it doesn't exist. And neither do the other Republicans, because they all agree with everything I say."
"Wrong!" we reply, "and we have precedent to prove it. Take the atomic bomb. The US government had ignored advice to develop nuclear weapons until Albert Einstein visited FDR and told him the US should develop an atom bomb before the Germans did. Einstein was a pacifist but he knew that the outcome of the war might depend on nuclear weapons. The project to develop the first atom bombs was called the Manhattan Project. It cost about 22 billion dollars in 2016 dollars. It lasted from 1942 to 1946, and the resulting bombs greatly shortened the war against Japan."
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We are now facing a crisis as daunting as the war against Japan — global warming. Our current president doesn't believe climate change exists, which is like FDR would have been if he'd not believed Japan existed. Fortunately science and technology continue whether we have a fool for a president or not, and a number of enterprises have begun trying to harness fusion energy.
Presently, about 80% of our energy needs are met with fossil fuels — oil, coal and gas — which are causing global warming and preventing the natural interchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between plants and animals from keeping our atmosphere in equilibrium by pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
About 10% of our energy is produced by nuclear fission, which is not a popular solution, due to the nuclear accidents that happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The remaining approximately 10% of our energy comes from solar and wind power which, however, are only effective in southern climes where there is a lot of sunlight for solar energy, and in the ocean and on high exposed terrain where there are steady winds.
Fusion energy is only very minimally polluting, but so far, no one has successfully proven it to be workable. The only fuel needed to run a fusion energy plant is hydrogen, which is the most abundant element in the universe. (Our bodies are composed of 61% hydrogen.) The main problem, as we understand it, is that we need new metals that can withstand the forces created in fusion production.
The principle of nuclear fusion If the human race is to survive, we must:
- Wean ourselves from fossil fuels
- Develop environmentally friendly energy sources
- Do them both NOW
"Now" is the operative word. We spend a lot of time debating the relative merits of known energy sources — wind, solar, nuclear fission and tidal — and not enough time discussing potential energy sources.
Worldwide, 85% of our power comes from fossil fuels. Of the 15% remaining, the greatest portion is hydroelectric, which has already been developed to near capacity.
It's time to develop nuclear fusion, and it's time to make the development of nuclear fusion a national priority. It's time for the U.S. government to create a New Manhattan Project to speed its development.
What you see above is Deuterium and Tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen, fusing to create helium and in so doing, releasing the energy that powers the sun.
Who could bring fusion energy to fruition? We will not be building and testing an atom bomb. In fact, the cost is unknown. But just as the Manhattan Project was approved to spend “whatever was required” to solve the problem, so must we approach the problem of global warming, pledging to spend whatever is required to solve the problem.
It seems that the federal government must step in to accelerate the process, perhaps in coordination with some of the many talented independent entrepreneurs world-wide who have been searching for solutions, so that we can find a viable solution to the fusion problem within 4 or 5 years instead of the 10 to 15 years estimated by the entrepreneurs.
There is no time to lose! In August of 2019, the Amazon rain forest erupted in flames. The "carbon sink" which contributed 20% of the world's oxygen created by photosynthesis instead burned, sending billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
This was caused by the Brazilian dictator Jair Bolsonaro's clearing of a large percentage of the rain forest for development, giving no thought to the future of the planet nor to the millions of native people (whom he despised) nor the animals that lived there. When the flames erupted, he hadn't the resources to fight the fire.
Bolsonaro is a climate change denier, as is his friend Donald Trump, so he wasn't concerned about the ecological danger to the planet. NOW, the planet is in even a more precarious situation than before and in more urgent need than ever of the elimination of fossil fuels and the rapid development of eco-friendly energy sources such as fusion energy.
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"I'm a very stable genius," says our president, though I very much doubt that the other world leaders gathered at the recent G7 meeting in Biarritz would agree. He didn't attend the discussion of climate change, saying that it had not been on the agenda (it had been for months) and that he had another meeting to attend (with people who were in fact at the climate meeting).
We must be prepared to hit the deck running in 2021, since our present climate-change-denying president and his yes-men in the Republican party will not address the problem.