The Chinese are eating our lunch on a bunch of things, and I could not be happier. They are selling electric vehicles that can travel almost a thousand miles on a charge for less than $20,000. They have developed very high speed recharging stations. They have even developed batteries that use sodium instead of lithium. Google has made a deal for a fifth-generation nuclear reactor that will eventually produce one-half a gigawatt of power if it is ever built. China is installing solar farms that produce a gigawatt of power EVERY DAY. They are pushing solar cell technology ever closer to 30% efficiency.
In the EU, people hang solar cells off their balcony rails without any bureaucracy at all, reducing their energy grid consumption by more than half. If they have houses, they just buy solar panels and put them up. The electric grids have vastly reduced peak usage — a very important thing in summers seeing 110-plus-degree days. Wind power is everywhere; it is even starting to penetrate South America. All that power without putting one molecule of CO2 into our atmosphere.
Here at home, our president has forbidden the installation of wind turbines. He has canceled all subsidies for non-fossil-fuel-produced power. He has actually demanded that we burn more coal. The rest of the world will eventually force us to join them just to be competitive in the world market.
We have known about the greenhouse effect since Joseph Fourier proposed the concept in 1824. In 1988, environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote about the consequences in a book called “The End of Nature.” Big oil attacked the book immediately.
Remember how long it took to get tobacco companies to be responsible for cancer? Petroleum companies have copied those strategies about global warming. Now we are in the Pyrocene age. The world is aflame. Our glaciers are melting. Fortunately, the rest of the world is trying to fight this catastrophe. We will be forced to follow pretty fast, though, because the USA is the second largest carbon dioxide producer in the world, after China. It is predicted that in less than eighteen months, China will have cut their emissions in half, and we will lead the world.
The US Department of Energy has just published a report challenging the risks of CO2 production. Scientists from all over the country have pointed out errors or misrepresentations in almost every part of that report. Happily, our major oil companies have seen the writing on the wall and are our leading drivers of technology for CO2-free energy production. In the past 150 years, what big oil wanted, big oil got. Let us hope that holds true for this, for the sake of us all.
Bill Gillmore
Columbus
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