Playing with fire, indeed.
It really gets my goat when I read articles like this one from Wired News about using natural gas trapped under the oceans as a source of energy. With fossil fuels on the way out sooner or later, energy is a big issue. But I don’t think that this is the solution.
For starters, I find it hard to believe that mining it could be an environmentally friendly project. But even more than that is the attitude implied by comments like “[it] could power the world for decades to come”. It speaks of a short sighted view of our future and our energy requirements. Maybe it gives us power for another 50 years, but then what? We’re back to square one, and we still haven’t developed a renewable power source, and we’ve used up yet another natural resource.
The usual argument is that technology will come to our rescue, and that scientists will come up with a solution to the energy crisis - we just need to buy them time. A lot of conservationists dismiss that idea, and think that we’re risking the future of our planet if we rely on it. I have to confess that I do belive, up to a point - technology will continue to advance and with the appropriate support science can produce solutions, provided we act quick enough. The problem is that instead of developing new solar cells, we just spent US$23 million on researching the possibility of mining our oceans. And I can’t help but be afraid that by the time politicians decide global warming is a real issue, it will be too late for science to change anything.
What we need is an attitude change now. It doesn’t have to mean switching to solar cells overnight, but it does mean governments should be investing big time in renewable energy rather than stop gap solutions. It means educating people and encourage solar hot water heaters and fuel efficient cars. Governments should be seriously considering how to cut green house emissions, and everyone tries to do their bit. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a fanatic (hey, I don’t belong to Greenpeace because I don’t agree with a lot of their ideas or how they implement them) but I am a concerned scientist and citizen, who thinks we need to act sooner rather than later.
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki had a brilliant idea in that we research very durable, cheap solar cells and replace all our asphalt roads with them. Australia receives a lot of sunlight that goes to waste. Having our road networks double as both a power production *and* distribution network is just ingenious. Again, these things take research dollars, but you know, we have more sexy things to drop money into, like terrorism and politicians’ superannuation…
Why bother putting money into a possible saving AND investment, when you’ve got more immediate, short term goals?
Honestly, I’d like to see some of the astronomical amount of money that biomedical research has siphoned off into renewable energy research. I mean, you can’t cure cancer in the dark…
The only troublesome thing is that if you prioritize research based on global need, then things like mathematics or theoretical physics end up getting the short straw. I guess you can’t have it both ways…