Well, we’re at it again: still arguing about climate change. Is it real? What’s causing it? What are we going to do about it? It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or listen to the news without having all sorts of opposing opinions and ideas presented with religious zeal.
In the last decade new players have taken the field. Ten years ago fracking was a word that most of the world had never spoken. Now it’s being promoted as the next great step in making the United States free from foreign oil dependency. Opponents are convinced that it will be the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. The issue is far too complex to be reduced to simple answers.
That set me to thinking, haven’t we been through this before? The production and safe use of energy has been around since the discovery of fire. That was the only way to survive in cold climates for tens of thousands of years. Inedibles were transformed by cooking. That untold damage was done to the environment, to say nothing of humans destroyed by it, was the price paid for survival. Of course, there was no discussion about the dangers and evils of fire; it was a necessity.
When fire was contained and controlled it was used for illumination in addition to heating and cooking. Can we imagine the marvel of the first portable light source? It was called a candle.
Densely compressed carbon was discovered and the coal industry ushered in the industrial revolution. When fluids trapped in the earth were found to be flammable, then civilization took a quantum leap. In no time at all fortunes were being made, vast beyond anything heretofore seen, by pumping petroleum from lakes thousands of feet below the earth’s surface.
Additionally seams of methane gas, highly combustible and extremely lethal, were being tapped for fuel. Electricity was discovered to be more than a magician’s trick and methods of transporting it to remote places became feasible. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki the idea of nuclear power as an inexhaustible supply of energy caught the public’s imagination. Now we have wind power, solar power, and geothermal power.
During the relatively short period of time all these sources of energy were developed no attention was paid to the problems brought about by their use. The words environmental impact was not in the lexicon until our lifetime. The major concern was how much money could be made from energy deployment and that led to massive fortunes for a tiny group of people but the population in general reaped the benefit of their utilities.
Then the wake up calls began to come and it became apparent that we were fouling our own nest with the use of fossil fuels. Industry and automobiles were forced to pay attention to emissions. Nuclear energy turned out not to be nearly as safe as had been predicted. The use of water in the generation of electricity changed the face of agriculture. The transportation of petrochemicals by pipelines became a concern. Oil spills and seabed drilling wrought huge damage. Now there are three pipelines from thousands of fracking sites that may traverse our area. It is understandably the classic “not-in-my-backyard” scenario.
The problems have become so severe that they can no longer be ignored. None of them will be solved by pretending they don’t exist or somehow industry will make the investment to correct them. It may put a different perspective on it when we realize that all the problems associated with energy production have been faced before and solutions have been found.
Few realize that household electricity was deemed at its earliest inception to be entirely too dangerous to ever be practical. The great hue and cry about North Slope oil in Alaska sounding the death knell for the tundra turned out to be hyperbole. The problems that arise can be solved if thoughtful attention is paid in advance of implementation.
No rational person would argue that human activity has not contributed to climate change and we must do what we can to control it. A reasoned approach that avoids opinions being elevated to the level of fact is critical just as facts that are unpleasant cannot be ignored. If sensible cooperation finds a foot hold both of those pitfalls can be avoided.
Solutions must overcome unreasonable fear. We must be willing to accept the inconvenience and risks of new technologies rather than rejecting them out of hand. We have faced these concerns before and we can do it again, but everyone needs to be informed so no single interest group controls the outcome.
– Hayden Hollingsworth
