New Moon Edition with a bonus Ring of Fire solar eclipse added
Since you’re probably looking skyward Saturday anyhow, have you seen the Milky Way? Of course you have, right? You’re looking at a photograph of it here. Satellites are the tool of astronomy today, seeing the universe from above our atmosphere. A picture may indeed be worth a thousand words, but seeing something with your own eyes may be worth a thousand pictures. Virtual is just that, after all.
Have you gone out on a dark night at 10,000 feet in the mountains of Colorado, or perhaps far into a wheat field in the center of Kansas, or any other place dark enough to see the Milky Way in all its glory with your very own eyes? Very few of us have.
It is estimated 100 billion people have lived on this earth, of whom slightly less than ten percent are alive today. Very few of them in the Northern Hemisphere have ever seen our home galaxy. Very few of their parents have either. Artificial light obscures virtually all the cosmos from our view. It’s a fundamental disconnect from the natural orientation of those who’ve gone before us. We should find a way to take a look.
Pollution today is what we used to call progress and, oh yes, the mess it made. A fire to warm the cave, mining flint to make weapons with which to hunt the game, tilling the earth for the abundance a little dust and disturbance will allow, all that labor vesting value and repercussion, right up to the industrial age and the productivity it brought the soot-shrouded citizens gathering in the cities.
Those consequences accumulate over time. The population grows, the engines of enterprise hum, innovation makes one nifty new thing after another that we absolutely must have, and all of it unfortunately leaves a residue. No one argued against artificial light when coal first generated electricity to illuminate the darkness, nor natural gas when it warmed our homes and cooked our food. The benefits outweighed the expense. So we thought. And went about it rather carelessly.
Now that we’ve begun to price in the true cost of all our comforts and conveniences, the life cycle of these myriad inventions that drive our economy, we’ve changed our tune. We sing a green song. Energy from sun and wind, how can we argue with that? That the devices are produced, transported, and installed with hydrocarbon power we ignore. That the life cycle cost of these new sources of power is nowhere calculated nor their state of eventual detritus imagined, we are not yet concerned. It’s the new thing that’s said to be better than the old thing and that for now is enough.
It’s our nature as humans to want certainty in our beliefs and our actions. No maybes or half-ways when we take the leap. We decide and we do. If enough of us buy in, it becomes a social movement. Inspired or lemming-like, we’re all in. I don’t know or I’m not sure is not the way to build a following. We need affirmation.
Take automobiles, for example. We want to be rid of the internal combustion engine. Why? Because it burns hydrocarbons. The product of all those messy oil and gas wells that are littering the landscape. Is the engine the problem or is it the fuel? Maybe there’s a better use for all that hardware than scrapping it. Maybe there are other fuels that are worth a thought. No matter. Out goes the baby with the bath.
There are a number of things that recommend electric vehicles as a solution and we are in a rush to convert our personal transportation to them. Build a fleet, torque them until they’re moderately affordable, with government subsidies certainly because the USG has to do something, after all. What we don’t want to do, though, in our rush to do something is replace one problem with another .
For now don’t talk about the life cycle cost of electric cars, because the time will come when its battery will fail and when it does, you will not f**king believe what it costs to replace. Can you swallow five figures? Oh, and we don’t yet know of any green way to dispose of it either. But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Meanwhile, we be stylin’!
Big change should start with the big picture. A holistic look at the problem and the solution. Electric cars may be the pathway to a cleaner future, or they may not be. There may be other ways to go about it. Whatever else we know about them, know they are not without significant problems.