Reflections on energy and the 21st century human condition
PARIS, FRANCE – About to head home to August in Arizona, I keep mulling over the 21st century human condition: Are we out of our flipping minds?
When temperatures approach 110 degrees, you can cook a frozen pizza on a car hood in a few minutes flat, and in our new climate, 110 might soon be on the cool side.
Scripps scientists tell us there is a better-than-even chance that in a few years Lake Mead will be too low to run the Hoover Dam generators that power much of Arizona.
The Colorado River is already a pathetic trickle as it passes Yuma. Serious people in nine states have trouble believing how it can be so ridiculously oversubscribed.
Mexico, deprived of the water it needs, slips further into drug violence and crime, fed partly by simple desperation.
And yet instead of putting to work free and infinitely renewable sunbeams, people crank up fuel-powered refrigeration and seal windows against natural breezes.Tucson’s ancient aquifer may be tapped out within the decade, but people squander water on yet more golf courses and gardens without a thought to their own kids’ survival.
In Phoenix, people irrigate lawns by flooding them, cool off outdoor cafes with evaporating droplets, and build water parks complete with surf waves.
Three-quarters of Arizona’s scarce water goes to crops like cotton and alfalfa that make no sense in a desert. Rather than limit senseless agriculture we subsidize it.
And so on.
Dead-obvious solutions are not really hard to work out in a country where the people get to elect their leaders and public will is supposed to shape policy.
It takes only a simple majority of us to pause from mourning music idols or worrying about sporting events long enough to exercise the free choices we boast about.
Why should power monopolies, oil companies and other vested interests deprive us of sustainable alternatives, such as solar and wind power? Or public transportation?
Why can’t we just curb our appetites and use less?
My guess, until I see evidence to the contrary, is that we are out of our flipping minds.
Mort Rosenblum is co-editor of dispatches and a former AP bureau chief and special correspondent. He has covered stories in 200 countries over four decades.
