Should the focus of our efforts become lost, strayed, or stolen, let's get
back together on what the point is to our presence. We're into a verified
climate destabilization caused by air pollution. We have put too much carbon
into the air and have heated up the world. Last year we unarguably felt some
preliminary results of destabilizing the existing climate regime: alternating
El Nino and La Nina ocean current diversions, shifting jetstream patterns,
world record sustained heat, increased hurricane numbers and severity, rise
in sea level, and temperature increases at both poles creating breakup
situations in the polar ice caps. Is something wrong with this picture?

For those of us who feel a destabilized climate is something to worry about,
the constantly increasing release of carbon compounds into the air is a very
negative feature of our society. We don't like it. That is why we tune in
newsgroups like sci.energy.hydrogen, in hopes answers will emerge which will
make a quantitative difference in the mass of carbon released into the
atmosphere by industrial society. Most people who work on this problem make
the assumption that this is like previous pollution issues which have been
resolved in a leisurely fashion, by predictable social mechanisms. They
expect public pressure will eventually force government to decree standards
and limits, to force corporations to gradually cut down carbon emissions from
industry, until at last even private motorcars will be introduced as options
to run on Hydrogen.

Excuse me, I don't think it will work out quite that way this time. The
leadership of the industrial economy, and the leadership of government, just
don't get the picture. This is a very different story, because the reaction
of the mass public is severely underestimated. This pollution crisis is not
like an obscure theoretical health hazard, we're talking about the daily
weather. When people start to make the association that every weather
catastrophe is linked intimately to carbon emission (regardless of its
abstract truth value) they are going to demand instant action. Decide for
yourselves the probability of this public reaction. Then prepare to rethink
your plans for a gradual changeover of the economy.

What I'm asking you to do is to imagine the potential strength and urgency of
public reaction to the greenhouse crisis. If this year's weather is bad, it
could start this year. If next year's weather is worse, it could get worse
next year. The gradual social mechanisms you have been counting on will be
swamped. Everybody keeps talking about the weather, but nobody does anything
about it. Well, the time is just about up. Somebody had better do something
about the weather pretty damn quick, or else the leadership of our industrial
society will be tossed out on its ear by the pressure of the public demand
for action.

Again, the driving force to reduce carbon emissions will not be the progress
of scientific curves. It will not be the affordable charts of economic planning. It will not be the schedules set by government regulations. It will
be the people in the street, sweating in the heat, who suddenly decide the
situation is intolerable. Then we in sci.energy.hydrogen had better have some
practical plans worked up to convert factories from coal to hydrogen, and
some sketches for hydrogen cryostats to replace their gas tanks.

Prophetically,
Johnny Thunderbird
http://fly.to/heavyLight
http://www.dejanews.com/~liteage

The Goal of no Carbon Emissions sci.energy.hydrogen 990111