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Copenhagen Strategies for Saving Earth from Overheating

By Klaus H Hemsath

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 21Sep2009 Word count: 748 Viewed: 404 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

The quickly advancing industrialization of China, India, and other countries is driven by the proliferation of fossil fuels combustion. Especially China depends heavily on indigenous coal reserves to power its astonishing economic ascendency.

Combustion of fossil fuels generates carbon dioxide, which subsequently accumulates irreversibly in the Earth's atmosphere. This accumulation is the manmade cause for the still modest warming of oceans and lands and is beginning to cause climate changes.

Extrapolation of data for population growth, individual energy consumption, and economic progress into the future shows that carbon dioxide emissions are bound to multiply enormously towards the second half of the twenty first century.

Politicians are comforted by the fact that the most threatening and most devastating increases of greenhouse gas emissions are still a few decades away. Unfortunately and imprudently they forget that installation of any countermeasures to first reduce and then halt global overheating will last a very, very long time.

Realistically, one can expect that world leaders will keep dickering for years and maybe decades before a workable plan for rescuing our planet from severe and irreversible devastation will emerge.

Any effective efforts to rescue our Earth must be based on a few, simple countermeasures. Implementation of the following measures is urgently needed.

- Complete and permanent cessation of all energy conversion processes based on fossil fuels combustion,

- Construction and start-up of renewable, emission free energy sources as replacements for fossil fuel based energy conversion facilities,

- Staged changeover of energy consumption to plentiful, affordable, and non-polluting energy sources in the form of electricity, transportation fuels, and heating gases,

- Continuing development of technologies for more efficiently converting renewable energies and for cleaning the Earth's atmosphere.

Developing missing energy technologies will take time. Rapid advances in information technologies have led to unrealistic expectations of time spans for other, unrelated, emerging technologies. Information technologies and energy technologies are diametrically opposed examples for exceptionally short and abnormally long development timelines.

Breadboards for testing a new phone or a new computer component can be completed within days and weeks. Designing and constructing pilot plants takes years and arriving at profitable production facilities my last more than one decade.

Exceptionally long development schedules have another, detrimental attribute. They invariably cause venture capital managers to deny development funding.

Free market economists have not yet fully acknowledged this systemic failure of the capitalistic system to generate early development funding for transformational technologies. Atomic energy utilization, nuclear fusion, space exploration, and novel energy supply technologies can only reach free markets after substantial government funding shortens timelines and reduces private financing risks.

The US must soon make a far-reaching decision. Is it going to create a mission oriented agency to become a world leader in the development and application of energy technologies or must the world wait for a country with a more agile government like China to take over this potentially highly profitable opportunity of developing exceptionally profitable energy technologies?

At present only three candidate countries seem to have the resources for developing critically needed energy conversion, energy storage, renewable energy production, and atmosphere restoration technologies. These countries are the US, the European Union, and China.

The USA is undoubtedly the most qualified based on past experience, scientific resources, and economic strength. The actual initiation and start-up costs for a mission oriented agency are very small when compared to the momentous financial aid dispensed by the US in 2008 to a wholly undeserving financial industry.

Better yet, such early funding for an independent agency will produce many benefits within a comparatively short period. Returns on investments will be huge.

What will be the early benefits of such an independent Energy Supply Development Agency?

After successful development and large scale demonstration of each of the previously listed, critically needed energy technologies, huge internal and international markets will open up. The US will have a chance to again assume its global, economic and technical leadership.

Such an agency can create millions of new manufacturing jobs in the US. New energy technologies can make the US independent of foreign petroleum imports. Exports of critical components for novel energy production and conversion facilities will strengthen the balance of payments and will facilitate the discharge of external debts. The USA can become again the undisputed leader in a world that will have a better chance of taking care of its growing population.

These opportunities may also create a better way to spread democracy. People will become anxious to follow successful examples of building wealth and democratic institutions.

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