World Peace in Four Easy Steps

OK!  Maybe the following aren’t easy steps, but compared to the money and effort that have gone into weapons, wars, and stock market manipulation, these should be child’s play.

First, invest heavily in the development and deployment of alternative energy, both small-scale and large-scale.  The main benefits are reducing poverty, slowing global warming, and reducing the power of petro-dictators.  This investment is already happening in many places and at many levels.

You don’t have to look hard to find news about a large array of solar panels, a new purchase of wind turbines, or some large-scale energy savings.  Germany gets over ten percent of its energy from wind, and some German states get half from wind.  Overall, Europe gets about eight percent of its electricity from wind, up from seven percent in 2012. I won’t bore you with a long list of statistics, but you can easily find many sites that describe the deployment of wind energy.

Energy is being generated many places on a small scale.  Last week’s Reader had an article from the Christian Science Monitor about Greenlight Planet, a company that is making low-cost solar lamps.  If the article is to be believed, Greenlight Planet’s Sun King lights do better than my solar shed light for our outhouse.  The Sun King light supposedly lasts 30 hours without recharging.  If I leave my shed light on overnight, the batteries drain to the point that they won’t even recharge!  Unfortunately, according to the Greenlight Planet website, you can only buy a sample if you live in India.  Otherwise, you have to find a dealer.

And some renewable energy projects start even smaller.  William Kamkwamba, age 14, of Malawi started creating windmills just to have a light to read by at night, he then provided light for all in his village, and then a water pump.

Second, invest heavily in moving water to where it is needed, either by rain or by moving desalinated seawater.

One of the problems Kamkwamba’s village faced was periodic droughts, some of them deadly.  With his windmills, he was able to pump water from a dug well.  This also saved women from making long treks to water sources.

But we know that we can stress our water sources, from overusing wells to draining lakes.  Remember the Aral Sea that almost dried up.  It is coming back, slowly.

China is working on some huge desalination projects, but these will meet only some of the demand of its large cities.  Israel depends on desalination for half of its fresh water.

Desalination (also called desalinization) works best near oceans and can cost a lot to move inland or to higher elevations.  I don’t know what moving water inland costs, but consider that desalination can cost three dollars for one thousand gallons, but the same amount of bottled water would cost nearly eight thousand dollars!

I often wonder if spraying seawater into offshore winds could induce rain inland.  Will the evaporation drop out the salt sufficiently that it won’t harm the land?  If a lot of moisture is introduced this way, will it cause damaging thunderstorms?  Will we sow the wind and reap the whirlwind?

Third, invest heavily in soil building either by using natural fertilizers or by planting more trees.  Increasing the amount of fresh water doesn’t do us much good if it only washes the soil away.  Dumping lots of chemicals on soil is only ruining it over the long term.  Clear-cutting larger and larger tracts of land is allowing more soil to be blown away.

Animal waste can either be a contaminant or a sustainable fertilizer.  Dairy operations and feedlots can either let the wastes infiltrate our fresh water or improve the soil for other farmers. Even human wastes can be used to improve soil.  The Western Lake Superior Solid Waste District (WLSSD) processes garden waste, food waste and human waste into fertilizer.  The first two are made into garden fertilizer; the second into farm fertilizer.  WLSSD produces over 30,000 tons of the latter every year.  What would our drinking water be like without that treatment?  What would our health be like?  Too many people in the world find these answers the hard way.  How do we ensure that these techniques are scalable all around the world?

The fourth step is that we could probably pay for all these improvements all over the world just with what the United States spends for all kinds of military equipment.  The Nuclear Threat Initiative estimates that the United States could spend one trillion dollars to upgrade its nuclear arsenal.  My guess that such upgrades in other countries combined would be half as much.  Let’s put that in numerals.  My guess of worldwide upgrades would be $1,500,000,000,000!!  Some readers would like to have savings of $15,000; others would be glad to have $150 in savings.  That $1,500,000,000,000 is over $200 for every man, woman, and child in the world.  Some of them would like to have that $200 just to survive for a year.

So, what are our world leaders doing about this over-abundance of killing equipment?  Dithering about cutting back what they have and posturing with it whenever they don’t like what others are doing.  Do we have any grown-ups around to get these big kids to stop playing games with other people’s lives?  This is the hardest step of the four steps to world peace!

Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/04/24/3274_world_peace_in_four_easy_steps





You can find more of my thoughts at
http://magree.blogspot.com

A couple notes on green jobs

Many pooh-pooh the idea of green jobs. However, in 2008, there were more jobs in wind power than there were in coal mining. - "Wind Jobs Outstrip Coal Mining", Fortune, 2009-01-23.

And as a follow-on to my blog "Nuclear weapons and climate change - is there a connection?"
see "Texas site to harness ocean for power, water" about using wave/tidal pumps a company will start bottling water from sea water. When they scale the project up, they plan to provide millions a gallons of fresh water for a city.

Does "green energy" use too much water?

Today's Star Tribune Business section had an opinion article, "Saving droplets but losing gallons" by Samuel Lieberman.

He writes that ethanol and nuclear power consume too much water.

"[E]nergy production accounts for 39 percent of freshwater use, or 190 billion gallons per day."

and

"When it comes to thirsty energy, ethanol (2,000 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline) and nuclear power (millions of gallons of water per day) are the most prodigious users. Ethanol should be eliminated and nuclear power should be downsized, and the money and water should be reallocated to more efficient options, such as natural gas and geothermal energy."

I would assume water consumption would apply to any biomass fuel. It needs the water to grow.

But would any biofuel be that much a water consumer, whether ethanol or any other carbohydrate-based fuel. When these are burned they are converted into carbon dioxide and water. Both would be put into the atmosphere and in turn consumed by plants again. Would there be a balance point that plants would consume all the carbon dioxide that humans created and the water would turn into sufficient rain for all uses? That would make an interesting equation.

Then too the water used to cool nuclear plants would also be put back into the entire system. Would the water used in this way be hotter or cooler than the water given all in burning hydrocarbons or carbohydrates?

Possibly the problem is that the recycling is not occurring fast enough. How quickly does the water that we use get back into the watersheds that it came from? And how pure will it be?

An example of the recycling not occurring fast enough is the Himalayas. The snows of the Himalayas were once adequate to provide water to Tibet and other mountain countries as well as India and China. But no longer. Lieberman writes:
"China's recent clash with Tibet was incorrectly ascribed to human rights issues. It was about rights -- water rights. China needs access to Tibet's formerly ample surplus. Tibet's water, which comes from the Himalayas, is waning, so it is unwilling to help its thirsty neighbor."

Maybe the greatest peace activity that the U. S. can do is to have a crash project to find cheap ways to desalinate ocean water and move it far inland. If the Romans with their technology could move water from the mountains to Rome; is it such a far reach for modern technology to move water from the oceans to the mountains? I think the total human cost of not doing something like this is greater than the cost of doing it.

Peace in the middle east?

Daniel Terdiman thinks that cheaper desalinization might be the most pressing problem to solve (What innovations are most important to world's future?, CNET News, 2008-11-14). He also suggests that water access may be a more important issue between Israel and Syria.

If Israel could desalinate water and sell it cheaply to Syria, Jordan, and Palestine, it may make itself indispensible to the supposed enemies.

See also his Space Station residents to drink recycled urine", CNET News, 2008-11-14.