Heres something crazy: Weve had enough energy all along to power the majority of our needs without burning fossil fuels. Weve known for a long time now that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that it very efficiently captures and holds heat. Aside from that, weve known for a long time that burning fossil fuels creates nasty byproducts. Not that the stuff is ever healthy. But—fossil fuels are a controllable resource, whereas anyone who can develop a way to utilize sunlight can just do so. Nobodys fighting wars over sunlight, you know? So, now were in this position where fossil fuels are really damaging things. Train derailments, pipes bursting, coal ash polluting rivers, tar sand exploitation destroying landscapes, cutting the tops of mountains, injecting chemicals into the rocks and spoiling the water. Everywhere you look, you see it. And theres really a small group of people who are just raking in the money we pay for them to do all this, just so we can get around like we need to do in order to maintain our lives. And all the time, the sun has continued to just pour energy on us. Every day. Enough to meet our basic needs without a problem. Enough, actually, to power cities day and night. Innovators are proving the viability of a solar-powered lifestyle. It is within reach. It is happening. But we have these people lobbying to keep fossil fuels in the foreground, to ensure the massively wealthy companies that provide them are not made obsolete in their present form, to make sure we continue to need them. This fight of theirs is blindly self-serving, because what we know is that fossil fuels—for all the good they ever did—are now clearly at the center of a problem that will hurt us all, one way and another. But greed has never been an ally of good sense. Its something we must remember, especially when we vote, but really—all the time, now. We have to outsmart the dumb but dangerous giant. We have to buy smarter. We have to demand options. We have to insist on our place in the sun and get out from under the smoky shadow of the giant. Eventually, well have to make sure the giant falls, for all our sakes. We have a better alternative. Its been there all along.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 05:15:20 +0000
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