Wednesday, January 20, 2010
2010 - 05 Is there a pro-active approach to global warming?
The worldwide struggle concerning how to deal with global warming could have a result that would be devastating for Wyoming’s economy.
We are like bystanders watching our destiny being determined at a high stakes poker game in which we do not have any cards to play.
If the folks like Barack Obama, Al Gore and legions of international scientists prevail, it could be a death knell to our state’s coal industry. Ripples of this scientific belief have already killed off dozens of coal-fired power plants across the country, which would have used Wyoming coal.
Development of coal and coal-powered plants has been dealt a deathblow similar to that which derailed the nuclear power industry in 1979 with the Three Mile Island incident.
After setting yearly records for coal mining, Wyoming saw its first down year in 2009, when production dropped seven percent from 2008.
This cost a few jobs and tax money to the people of our state.
Wyoming leads the country is the production of coal and is second in natural gas, a much cleaner fossil fuel.
And despite promotion by energy leaders like T. Boone Pickens, these global warming opponents often do not even view natural gas as salvation, either.
All fossil fuels emit carbon dioxide when they are processed to create energy. These environmental-oriented scientists’ goal is to cut these emissions to as low a level as possible. Rather than fossil fuels, these folks prefer wind, solar, perhaps nuclear and lots of conservation.
Two major sets of questions come into play when this giant poker game is being played:
First, is global warming really occurring or not? Even a few non-members of the environmental community agree that some kind of worldwide cycle is occurring. There is lots of debate over the severity of it and what kind of prognosis you can draw from the apparent facts being quoted.
Second, how much of it is man-caused? And can this be reversed? How much and how soon and by what system can it be curtailed?
You have our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledging $100 billion at a recent Copenhagen summit on this issue. Prior to her presentation, you also saw our president speaking about global warming to that worldwide group with all the certainty of experienced scientist.
Counter that scene with an international rejection in Copenhagen by the other biggest polluters (China and India) and the exposé of some false science reports by some of the leading exponents of extreme activism toward global warming by some English scientists. Embarrassing, indeed, to that cause.
Meanwhile leaders of a small state with a tiny population look on with worried looks on their faces. We have a dog in this fight, a very big dog to us, but barely a blip (or a chip) on the international radar (or international poker table).
While watching all this, the one approach that seems to be missing would be the typically old-fashioned, American “can-do” approach.
Could global warming be fixed without destroying a trillion dollars of the international economy?
Into the fray steps one of the smartest guys in the world with a stable of Noble Prize winners backing him up.
In Seattle there is a guy who says he can fix global warming by artificially duplicating what a small volcano would do – squirt sulphur into the atmosphere.
Nathan Myhrvold and his crew want to spend a quarter of a billion dollars creating a long hose suspended by huge helium balloons that would spray a limited amount of sulphur into the high atmosphere. This would cool world temperatures by one degree.
What is uniquely American about his plan is that he says hardly anyone has been proactive instead of reactive. His proactive plan imitates nature in attempting to solve the problem.
When scientists get hysterical with him about “tampering with the atmosphere,” he responds that we “have been tampering with the atmosphere” and “that is why we are where we are at today.”
Calling his project “a string of pearls,” he is not the crackpot a person might suspect. He is the former chief technology officer at Microsoft and has been featured on National Public Radio. His theory is a mainstay in the best selling book Super Freakonomics. Look him up.
Although Wyoming is almost a helpless bystander in watching this worldwide poker game concerning global warming, it behooves us to keep informed.
Check our Mr. Myhrvold’s spectacular idea. It may make you feel better about our state’s energy future.
|
