Beyond Fossil Fuels
I read this editorial by Robert Semple Jr, a member of the NYT Editorial Board. The article is unfortunately behind the pay wall. But this article is too good not to share and I will do so for educational purposes. It is too chock full of good information put together in a not overly dense manner and is sourced with a bevy of outbound links.
So here it is in its entirety. An excerpt:
Explore posts in the same categories: Activism, Construction, Environment, Must Read, Science…Just in the last few weeks, a group of NASA scientists, headed by climate specialist James E. Hansen, argued that global warming has been more rapid over the last 30 years than anyone thought — about 0.2 degrees Celsius over each of the past three decades. If the trend continues unchecked, the group asserts, 60 percent of species around the world could die by the end of the 21st century and sea levels could rise several feet, enough to completely transform coastlines.
Many scientists regard Mr. Hansen's conclusions (although not his data on warming) as far too alarmist. But there are few mainstream scientists left who dispute the need for moving quickly to slow, stabilize, then reduce the human contributions to the accumulated carbon load that already exists in the atmosphere. And what they usually mean by "moving quickly" is to begin making major changes in the way we use energy in the next ten years.
It is in this context of early action that alternative fuels — by which we mean, largely, renewable fuels — must be viewed. There are all sorts of marvelous, futuristic (and plausible-sounding) ideas out there, including space-based solar systems, advanced biomass, worldwide electricity grids, and the like, nicely summarized by Marty Hoffert of New York University in a paper for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. But these are huge, enormously expensive projects, requiring a global budget, and none is likely to do much good in the near term.
There is, however, a lot that we can and should be doing right now.