Fellow Travellers In Illusion--Al Gore And The Pope

This is a highly personal sort of rant so anyone who expects the usual cooly reasoned, tightly argued piece of analysis won't find it here today. No. This time its personal.

Al Gore has long sojourned in the land of illusion. His travelogues based on his ventures in the horror filled territory of global warming replete with dead lands and brackish water, littered with the corpses of polar bears and assorted amphibians have brought him fame, fortune and the cachet of a Nobel Prize.

Apparently the global crusader for greener living feels overlooked of late as the US economy sputters, in part because of escalating food prices--prices driven to some unquantifiable extent by the Gore promoted fad for biofuels. But, you can't keep a good mouth down for long.

He's back with a headline grabbing call for the US to replace all fossil fuel electrical generation by earth-friendly technologies such as solar, wind and (unspecified) other forms of production within ten years. Notably, Gore did not mention nuclear power as an alternative.

Get a grip, Mr Gore!

The Geek knows a thing or two about alternative energy production. He has been living off the grid for ten years now. All his electricity comes from the sun--when there is sun.

Aye, that's one of the rubs. Solar power works when there is sun. Wind power works when there is wind. At night, those of us who use the sun must depend upon batteries. The few folks who live somewhere near the Geek who use the wind as their main energy prime mover must rely upon either a backup system or batteries.

The batteries are the weak point in the system. Until there is a new form of battery technology which insures longer life and greater storage capacity per pound of battery weight, there will be significant built-in limits to solar energy in particular.

Then there are the greens, particularly the deep greens who should be the loudest singers in the pro-Gore choir. Where are they?

After being significant players in the counter productive campaign for biofuels which not only hike the price of food, lower the energy potential of vehicle fuel and wreak environmental havoc in their own right, the Deep Greens, the True Believers of the environmental movement have been part of the problem. They should like solar-thermal electrical generation, right?

Wrong!

Even though the vast watelands which constitute large portions of southeastern California, southern Arizona and Nevada seem ideal for the construction of large solar powered generation facilities, the DGs are against them. The huge arrays of either mirrors or photovoltaic panels might somehow interfere with desert dwelling lizards and small mammals. Can't let that happen in the rampant human quest for energy, can we?

Wind power. The DGs ought to like that too. They don't. Spinning blades might interfere with the birdies. That's a Greeno No-No. (There's actually a practical objection to wind farms at sea as has been proposed by the New Jersey Governor among others--the radar systems used by ships can't see through the chaff-type interference caused by the blades as they revolve.)

Gore overlooked the first two sets of problems. He overlooked a third set as well. Planning, gaining approval for and constructing a large, base-load plant takes longer than ten years even with well-established, well-proven fossil fuel technology. How much longer will it take to design, gain all the legally required stamps of approval and build a base-load replacement plant using an emerging technology?

Then, what does the country do for electricity while the inevitable bugs are beaten out of the new systems?

Gore uses the analogy of the man-to-the-moon program of the Sixties. It is a totally specious analogy in both method and scope. The space program was a single thrust effort. Replacing coal and oil fired base load generation plants would be a multi-thrust effort requiring the development, integration and construction of diverse technologies welded into a single system.

In short, Gore is retailing another illusion hoping to hook his cause onto the myth of the Sixties. Get over it, Mr Gore. The Geek is also a product of the Sixties. He knows that myths and happy dreams don't buy a cup of coffee in the real world. Don't you, Al?

Now for Pope Benedict, the other person who has shown himself over the past twenty-four hours to have little or any connection to the real world.

The Pope is in Australia for World Youth Day or some such affair. Sidney is flat full of young and enthusiastic sorts. Just awaiting for the Pope to give them, not hell, but heaven.

Of course the road to heaven is paved with strict abjurations. His Popeness is willing to lay them out. It seems that Benedict thinks that the human race is ruining the globe by virtue of its collective "insatiable consumption."

It is fashionable to bash "consumption" and "consumerism." The Geek would like to join in on the fun, but his sense of intellectual integrity to say nothing of his keen appreciation of reality prevents him from so doing.

In any event the Pope has it wrong. The problem is not consumption, "insatiable" or otherwise.

No. The problem is simply that there are too many people alive and consuming. Too many people needing everything from the most basic of necessities to the most useless and frivolous of luxuries.

Consider the US. The population of the US has slightly more than doubled during the Geek's lifetime (or Al Gore's for that matter.) That's an increase from slightly less than one hundred fifty million people to some 305 million.

The US has been an also-ran in the Great Global Baby Race compared to dozens of other countries. From relatively prosperous "emerging" societies such as those in the PRC or India to countries at the bottom of the survival list, more than doubling the population in slightly more than fifty years has been the norm.

Now, Pope Benedict, that is the real problem. The questions for you and the global enterprise of which you are CEO are these: what have you done about it? What will you do about it?

The answers to both are simple. Nothing. And nothing. The response of your institution has been and, in greatest probability, will continue to be: level down the global standard of living. Take away from those who have and give to those who have not until everybody has nearly nothing.

This is the sort of human destroying logic that is expectable from a theoretically responsible adult occupying a leadership role in a very large, politically potent organisation that calls upon people to put "religion" first in their public and private lives.

That is the sort of logic that gave Europe the deepest gloom of the Dark Ages as the early Medieval Period has been correctly dubbed. That is the kind of logic that your institution showed centuries ago when it insisted on repressing thought, inquiry and expression--to say nothing of torturing and killing those who dared to question.

Your logic is the functional and ethical equivalent of the logic employed by the death oriented mullahs who issue fatwas calling for mass killing.

Pope Benedict, when you make a false parsing between "subjective" feelings and faith as you did in your speech today in Sidney, not only do you show a disastrous misunderstanding of faith which must be inherently subjective, but you substitute obedience to a specific religious dogma for faith. That, in the Geek's reading of the Message of Jesus, runs antipodal to the teachings of that wandering sage and healer.

Get a grip, Pope Benedict. It is not the secular thinkers who fail to appreciate either the nature of the problems that confront the world and its people today as well as the necessary and necessarily painful and unfair solutions to them.

It is you.