May 13, 2017
It’s official: the world is in trouble. A sampling (see the links at the bottom of this website) of scientific, governmental and commercial websites concerned with various pressing issues, including anthropogenic climate change and its progeny –ocean acidification, severe water scarcity, sea level rise, and the current mass extinction on a scale not seen in 65 million years- revealed that many researchers treat their fields of expertise as unrelated domains. Thus the oceanographer –while not unaware of the root cause of the bleaching of coral reefs- does not venture outside his/her field of expertise to opine, much less prescribe, which specific economic and political steps should be taken to wean humanity from its addiction to fossil fuels and fission. Similarly, physicists, chemists and engineers seek more efficient ways to produce hydrogen fuel but ignore its unexplored and unused potential to conquer drought. And elite decision-makers –preoccupied with loss of absolute control over the international financial system as a result of the dollar’s dwindling role as the reserve currency of the world- continue to prescribe perpetual economic growth but fail to acknowledge the limitations of a finite world.
Meanwhile the inequality gap –already abysmal- continues to expand unabated everywhere, round the clock. The middle and working classes –bereft of job security, burdened with unaffordable medical care premiums and deductibles, unprecedented student debt, and median incomes that are not keeping pace with real estate prices- are increasingly unable to buy single family homes or save for retirement. Worse, the unrelenting frenzy to reduce labor costs and increase profits combined with new technologies means that robots, computers and online commerce will inevitably erode the demand for domestic low-skilled workers. That will only exacerbate the decline in household formation among young adults, of white non-Hispanics –who by 2060 are projected to transition from an absolute majority to the second-largest ethnic group– and an unprecedented increase in the morbidity and mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites only, a demographic time bomb.
It’s no surprise that people voted against the establishment in 2016. They need, demanded and expected real permanent relief, but it’s not coming. No government that we know of has announced a feasible plan designed specifically to simultaneously halt –much less reverse- the growth of inequality, the fast-approaching water crisis that will culminate when the great aquifers of the world are finally depleted and the food supply collapses, the ongoing sea level rise that will eventually flood Florida’s mansions, Manhattan’s skyscrapers and vast swaths of low-lying nations, or the cutthroat competition for supremacy among the world’s elites before it erupts into a terminal war. Instead, despite President Eisenhower’s heartfelt warning and the obvious need to decisively address the aforementioned problems, our leaders have opted to do the exact opposite of what he advised –and to pay for it by recklessly charging it ad infinitum to the national credit card.
With the exception of the Espejo de Tarapacá (Mirror of Tarapacá) project in Chile’s Atacama Desert, none of the other reviewed websites –shown below this article- consider the possibility of using ocean water and gravity to generate a net surplus of electricity. Yet like all the rest, even Tarapacá is not designed to simultaneously produce a surplus of energy and potable water. Clearly it is a step in the right direction, but it does not apply in inland deserts hundreds or thousands of kilometers from the nearest ocean.
On the surface Plan A and its front door, California Template, border on being delusions of a deranged mind. The response to that thought is simple. Had our forefathers been aware of the catastrophic environmental consequences that would follow the introduction of the steam engine –and proceeded anyway- they might have been charged with something akin to crimes against the Earth, taboo doctrine even today. No, Plan A is not lunacy. It is immense in scope and magnitude simply because the problems it attempts to address are overwhelmingly vast. In fact, it is the only one that posits using solar energy, sea water, hydrogen and gravity solely to simultaneously ameliorate the aforementioned problems on a global scale. For that reason, decision makers who truly care more about the planet than the interests of their big campaign donors –a tall order- should appoint a task force of luminaries in all the related disciplines to (a) analyze it thoroughly and (b) make its findings public.