Since I live in Japan, I am not privy to a lot of current US news. I did however get to keep track of the recent Californian power crisis. I don’t know the current status of the their power grid, but I hope that you were all scared shitless by it.

I argued earlier that humanity has messed up the environment so bad that we are not going to be able to pull ourselves out of the tailspin we have gone into. I don’t think that the end is entirely inevitable, but since there is not a massive immediate effort to switch into a sustainable mode of living and producing, I am pretty sure that we will end up running the system into the ground.

Opponents of my first article claimed that human ingenuity would bail us out. Humans are incredibly adaptive and technologically adept, they said, and therefore will be able to surmount any challenges that may arrive. My contention is that the types of solutions needed in the current situation cannot be remedied overnight. Fundamentally our energy use is destructive and finite. We are quickly approaching the end of this finite limit. When that day arrives, there is no more power, anywhere. As California illustrated, new energy cannot be quickly produced.

California serves as a perfect example. When they began to run out of energy, they couldn’t just flip a switch and start generating solar power or geothermal energy. Even traditional power plants take time to build. California was able to survive by leeching power from neighboring regions, and still had to have rolling blackouts. What happens when the neighboring regions cannot fill in the gap?

The West is a bit better off than the East because of nuclear and hydroelectric power. The East is primarily coal-fueled, as far as I know. When the coal runs out, they are screwed.

The answer is to begin building a new renewable energy infrastructure RIGHT NOW. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening. People seem to think that we can just wait until the last minute and then begin to develop these alternative energy sources. Hell, even if we don’t go solar or geothermal, it still takes a long time to build new dams or nuclear power plants.

It is also disturbing to me to hear the Bush administration blaming environmental policy for the Californian energy crisis. It seems that they are going to use that as an excuse to relax some of the environmental limitations on energy procurement, in effects polluting the whole system even more while doing nothing to remedy the inevitable crash. Pure capitalistic irresponsibility.

In 1997 (I think), there was an international conference in Kyoto, Japan about global warming and emissions. The United States agreed to reduce emissions to something along the lines of 10% below 1991 levels. Since that time, emissions have increased by 4% or so. The European Union has decreased their emissions, but the U.S. has actually increased their amount of pollution. My details may be wrong here, but the gist is correct. (By the way, the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but uses 25% of the world’s energy.)

It has been argued that it would be economically impossible to achieve these levels of emissions in the United States. My perspective on it is that if we were really committed to cleaning up the environment, reducing global warming risks and developing a sustainable energy base, we would have at least began a concerted effort to develop alternative renewable non-polluting energy sources. But we didn’t. And with Dubya in the Oval Office, we won’t. That’s at least another 4 years of fiddling while Rome burns.

Unless the whole world immediately begins the switch to renewable/ sustainable energy sources, there is a very ugly crunch waiting in the future, probably in the next few decades. Rising population, global warming, and decreasing resources all point in the same direction.

I don’t relish the idea of having our entire energy grid collapse, but I really think that it will. California showed us that it can. Unfortunately, I suspect that utility companies will not seek to improve the quality of the energy they produce, but rather seek to increase quantity by whatever means possible. The problem with this is that it generally contributes to global warming and depends on resources that are fast dwindling. Pouring gasoline on the fire, can’t you see? They will temporarily reduce the pressure on the energy grid, but this remedy is doomed to fail sooner rather than later because it hastens the overall speed of pollution and consumption of non-renewable resources. A responsible solution would be to force modern society to live within current energy production while we develop and build clean renewable energy sources.

There will not be time to play catch up when the system starts to fail.

I am not predicting the end of humanity; people will survive. There will be a lot of pain, suffering, and death, but people will endure. Current society will not.