Disasters

What is it about disasters that people seem unable to understand? No matter how bad things happen people just continue on as if nothing of importance did happen. At the moment the terrible disaster in Japan occupies the news, as it should. And make no mistake it, it is a disaster of monumental proportions and will probably just continue to get worse as the days go by. Obviously there was little they could do about the massive earthquake and the equally devastating Tsunami. They could, however, have done something about the nuclear plants that are melting down. They could, for example, have not built them in the first place, but, having built them they could have taken better precautions knowing they live in an active earthquake area. Nuclear energy should simply not be allowed. The first deaths attributed to nuclear energy occurred as early as 1961 in Idaho. Three young men were so overexposed to radiation they had to be buried in lead coffins with their hands apparently buried separately. That was a least a strong hint that things might go wrong. Then there was Three Mile Island in 1979 in which a truly monumental disaster was barely avoided. Then Chernobyl in 1986, a disaster so great the effects are still being felt to this day. You might think people would begin to understand there are gigantic problems associated with nuclear energy plants, possible disasters so great they should by all means be avoided. But, no, at this very moment President Obama is offering billions of dollars in incentives for the building of more nuclear energy plants. Some people seem unable to come to grips with the scale of these disasters. One person I heard on the news today suggested that all forms of energy production involve dangers, he said that, after all, coal miners die sometimes. Another one said we don’t stop flying just because a plane crashes once in a while, and we don’t stop riding in cars because there are accidents. Brilliant analogies, there is really no difference between what happened in Chernobyl or what is happening in Japan now and a few coal miner deaths, or car and plane crashes! With minds like these in charge you know we are in good hands. There are 104 nuclear plants in the U.S., some of them built right on fault lines that could spawn massive earthquakes that would also probably result in Tsunamis like the current one in Japan. We are apparently going to build more of these dangerous plants under the delusion (or the pretense) they are safe. Of course at the same time we are going to build them we are paying lip service (and not much more) to wind, wave, and solar energy (but along with nuclear, of course, and some mysterious entity called clean coal) so we can wean ourselves from foreign oil.

And speaking of oil, don’t forget the Exxon Valdez disastrous oil spill in Alaska in 1989, the results of which are still with us. And of course we recently experienced the even more disastrous Deepwater accident in the Gulf of Mexico. The same company that produced that monumental disaster that is going to take years to clean up, has recently been awarded license to drill still another deepwater facility. Our madness for oil, just like our madness for nuclear energy, leads to the slow but sure destruction of our tiny planet. And while we talk about alternative sources of energy we do relatively little about it. Energy, we must have it, of course, but do we really need as much as we think we do? One sure way of beginning to wean ourselves of foreign oil and nuclear energy would be to cut our consumption. While there are efforts in that direction they do not seem to me very serious. You don’t notice the lights in all of our skyscrapers going off at night, do you? And, yes, mileage standards for autos and trucks are supposed to change for the better but that is more talk than action and it certainly won’t happen overnight. As far as I know, no one talks seriously about cutting the amount of energy we consume. It’s as if that is an idea inconceivable to anyone. But why should we not have a program designed to produce more with less energy, and reward companies and people who manage to do that? Quite a few years ago a couple of anthropologists argued that the measure of “civilization” had to do with how much energy they used. I should think a better measure these days would be how little energy they used. This could be done I am sure if anyone had the will and determination to do it, but we can’t even get people interested in high-speed railroads and public transportation. And who wants to give up their own personal vehicle? Of course we would have to make important changes in our current life styles that are wasteful and inefficient beyond belief, but are our current life styles the only alternative for living? We could even take some really extreme (science fiction) measures, like giving up plastics and the internal combustion engine (horrors, how unthinkable).

Of course nothing of this magnitude will happen. No one will want to give up anything, let alone their own wasteful use of energy. We will almost certainly continue to go on fouling our nest until we either drown in our own filth or blow ourselves up (seems to be a toss-up at the moment). It is, I regret to say, the human way. Apparently we were given the power of reason but neither the motivation nor good sense to use it. Repeat after me, greed is good, shit happens, you only live once.