A New Inconvienent Truth
To: Vice President Albert Gore 312 Lynnwood Boulevard Nashville, TN 37205 info@carthagegroup.com
Dear Vice President Gore:
Your Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was released in 2006. The documentary received an Academy Award, and you and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for alerting the planet to the dangers of human-caused climate change. And while the years have been accumulating, so has the scientific evidence for climate change caused by human activity.
In fact, the IPCC, which currently includes 195 countries, has just issued its Sixth Assessment Report, which concluded (unanimously!) that humans are “unequivocally” to blame for global warming. As summarized by a Reuters report, unless large-scale action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the average global temperature is likely to increase 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit within 20 years. The United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, after referring to the report as a “code red for humanity,” stated “this report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”
It does not take a scientific assessment to underscore our changing climate. Those of us who live in Minnesota realize that our climate has changed dramatically; winter temperatures have risen more than in any other state over the past 40 years. July was the hottest month in recorded history. Athens has become so hot some experts predict that it will become Europe’s first uninhabitable city, and it has now appointed Europe’s first chief heat officer.
Fires have ravaged our Western states. No fire in history had burned from one side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range to the other; this summer, it happened twice. The Los Angeles Times in an editorial called for radical action to phase out fossil fuels and slash carbon emissions to prevent even greater devastation from megafires in the future.
Climate change driven by human activities affects the pattern of precipitation, which causes widespread drought but also unusual rainfall. We bless the rains down in Africa, but in total, we should take note when it rains at the summit of Greenland. That’s what just happened. And two months ago, 3.15 inches of rain fell in one hour in Central Park in New York City; at least 13 people died in the ensuing flash floods.
The inconvenient truth revealed by the documentary was that human activity resulting in increased greenhouse gas emissions was irrevocably damaging our planet through climate change. But there is another inconvenient truth that must be faced.
People refuse to believe what is right in front of them, if inconvenient.
Just as climate change is all around us, so too is the Covid virus. People see their neighbors and relatives being hospitalized, or worse, because of infection. Yet only 64 percent of Americans are vaccinated. States that have a low vaccination rate have a correspondingly high infection and hospitalization rate. Hospitals in Texas, Florida, and Utah are once again experiencing fatal overcrowding. And still, a sizable minority of our political establishment and citizenry refuses to take the necessary steps to bring this virus to heel. If one cannot persuade our “leaders” or a large number of their “followers” to confront that which is clearly visible—lack of vaccination—what hope is there that these same people will take the necessary steps to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions? That is the new inconvenient truth; the answer is, they will not.
But there still may be a path forward.
What we know about government is that it likes to spend money. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the cost of our post-9/11 wars have exceeded $8 trillion. Total Covid relief spending, to date, according to Government Accountability Office figures, amounts to $5.9 trillion ($1.3 trillion remains unspent). The most recent legislative initiatives for additional funding proposals total $4.7 trillion. Clearly, our polity will follow the advice of John Keynes: “If you can actually do it, you can afford it.”
As a society we like grand governmental programs with catchy titles: the Manhattan Project or Operation Warp Speed. Both of these governmental programs were huge successes, achieving their goals and in record time.
What we need, what will capture the people’s attention and involve a great deal of favorable government expenditure, is a crash program to develop nuclear fusion (call it “free power”). Nuclear fusion produces no greenhouse gas emissions, nor does it produce large quantities of hard-to-store nuclear waste.
At the same time the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report was being issued, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion. Nuclear scientists view their report as a “Wright Brothers” moment. There will be more developments in the near future as fusion experiments ramp up. But the point is that people seriously concerned about solving the problem of global warming and resultant climate change should push for a massive research project with unlimited funding to accomplish the goal of successful fusion electrical power generation. The adoption of that technology would free the planet from its reliance on fossil fuels.
So that’s the inconvenient truth: People refuse to believe what is right in front of them, if inconvenient. But if heavily funded and given a catchy name, these efforts can be successful. Let’s leave finding a second-home planet to Messrs. Bezos and Musk while we perfect power generation on this planet.
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Sincerely yours,
Vance K. Opperman
Yours for Free Power
