Radon - Leave it in the Ground

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A lot of the stuff we bring up out of the ground ought to be left there where it can exist at its highest level of safety. Humans have the propensity for picking up whatever we find as useful and using it without considering what dangers are associated with that stuff. Probably the first example of such a use-danger couple is that of lead. It was soft and easily formed into plates and bowls for serving and eating of food. It was easily flattened into sheets then rolled into long tubes for the transport of water that we drank. All the while we had no idea of the toxic nature of our exposure to lead.

We went even further with lead and mixed small quantities of the metal with glass to make exquisitely clear crystal glassware. Tin mixed with lead created the first alloys of pewter that was also popular in the preparation and consumption of food and drink. Early "tin" cans were soldered along the seams with lead and even until the latter part of the 20th century we were still soldering copper water pipes with lead. It took a lot of legislation to stop corporations from using lead in house paint and as an anti-knock additive to our gasoline.

We dig coal of varying grades out of the earth and burn it with great abandon. Although we have eliminated the burning of coal for residential heat in our urban areas, we still burn millions of tons of it for the generation of electricity. The fourfold negative impacts of using coal for energy are the waste heat that must be dissipated by dilution in the environment, CO2 which contribute to atmospheric heat retention and oceanic acidification, the coal leaves behind tons of ash that contains all the impurities that had been laid down with the vegetation hundreds of millions of years ago, and lastly, the mines leach their toxins into waterways that we depend on for potable water.

Oil is also one of those items that today ought to be left in the ground. When the first commercial oil well was drilled in 1850 in Oil City, Pennsylvania there were no cross country roads and only a few novel automobiles on the roads. The need for oil was minuscule by comparison to today but the legacy of death and damage done by our close association with the crude is long and storied. Referring to Oil City:

"The city was partially destroyed by flood in 1865 and by both flood and fire in 1866 and again in 1892; on this last occasion, several oil tanks that were struck by lightning gave way, and Oil Creek carried a mass of burning oil into the city, where some 60 lives were lost and property valued at more than $1 million was destroyed." ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_City,_Pennsylvania

The energy paradigm of the 20th century cannot carry us through this 21st century. The billions of barrels of oil used each year add CO2 to the environment at a faster rate than other natural process can neutralize it. The atmosphere stores heat and the oceans warn and acidify. The well sites are dirty, toxic and prone to failures of a magnitude far beyond our meager human means to fix the damage.

Natural gas also presents its dangers. The biggest acute dangers appear to be in the transmission lines that send large volumes of extremely highly pressurize gas through the country side, our towns and cities leaving everyone who is nearby at risk for incineration not much different than those 60 people in oil City in 1892. The methods of extracting the gas from the ground brings up all sorts of toxic substances that lay long buried. Mercury, lead, arsenic, and radon all emerge from the well bore during the natural and properly operated drilling process. The newer horizontal drilling with the hydraulic fracturing have added a new layer of risk and damage as the result of the gas production process.

The deep rock layers are shattered in order to get the gas to flow more freely. While this is great for the backers of the gas well, each of those fractures also make it possible for methane and radon to leak more freely to the surface outside the purview of the drilling company. While radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas, its presence is exacerbated by the drilling and fracturing processes. It is one of those negatives that cannot be mitigated by more sophisticated drilling and fracturing.

Even our most "modern" electricity generation method, nuclear reactors, pose the huge problem of what to do with the spent fuel. First we dug the Uranium out of the ground. Then we concentrated it to make it fissionable. It in turn created massive amounts of even higher radioactive elements that we will have to store somewhere on the order of 10,000 years. I suspect that every rational scientist says, at least to himself, "The way we are going we won't be around long enough to have to worry about THAT."

In this 21st Century we have developed energy technologies that were not possible even a decade or two ago. Dozens of wind turbine systems exist today. Tidal energy capture, PV solar panels and heat concentrating methods make the sun a viable source of energy. It is possible to stop just finding resources somewhere in the ground and devise methods of creating what we need.

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Sustainable Populations

Like many students in the 1960's, my perspectives of the global picture was shaped in part by Paul Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb, and its dire predictions of the near term consequences of not forcibly constraining world populations. While the premises and conclusions of his work were overly "enthusiastic" and did not bring about the demise of any civilization anywhere in the world in the 40 years since their publication, the conditions that he wrote about have been notched up to a higher level of potential failure.

Ehrlich's error was in not being able to predict technological advances which would make it possible for food production to increase at a rate greater than the rate of population growth. On the other hand, he also did not account for the aging of the populations that [then] currently produced all of the Manufactured, Mined and Farmed production of the world. Population economists have not been able to devise a projection method that accurately predicts population sizes over any long period of time. One can use simple curve-fitting to show what will probably happen over a few years, but economic, environmental, and political factors act to influence the actual growth rates in was that cannot, as yet, be modeled. Cohort-component methods look at the age and gender composition of the population in sub-areas to "better" predict the population growth, with only marginal improvements in the accuracy of the predictions.

Whether or not we can make long-term projections of population size with a high degree of confidence, we can look into the near future and see what is going to happen to the composition of our population barring any massive events or social and cultural changes that might occur.

While this planet may be able to sustain a population of 8 to 10 billion of us, the question is should it be burdened with such a load. Although the damage we inflict on this planet may not look pretty, the earth has no eyes to see it. We are the ones with eyes and a consciousness to appreciate beauty and offer scorn at the damage we are doing. Our survivability is not predicated on a beautiful landscape, but it does depend on us not creating collateral toxicity that will lead to our demise. Surely, whatever we do in the next few decades there will be humans inhabiting this planet in some level of what we loosely refer to as civilization. There may be 7 or 8 billion of us or maybe only 3 or 4. It is up to us. It is our decision to make whether we exist in a comfortable world or the one Paul Ehrlich refers to as the battery-chicken world.

There is a finite quantity of fuel in the ground for us to exploit. Burning as much of it as we have to date has resulted in the environmental damage we have already seen. That damage was not just an event-based occurrence, it is a process that continues to react and continued to produce the damage. Even if we all stopped putting any carbon into the atmosphere, the degradation may not stop, because there is a multitude of natural sources of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that result in climate alterations. Lake Lyos in Cameroon spews CO2 into the atmosphere via a man-made effervescent vent for the built-up CO2 gases in the lake water. We are not adding any CO2 to the air there that wouldn’t end up there due to periodic gas eruptions. Anhydrite deposits along the continental shelves all around the planet erratically and intermittently erupt massive quantities of methane. Other volcanoes erupt CO2 and other noxious gases. Forest fires and the clearing of rainforest plots of land all add to the greenhouse gas load of the atmosphere. Even though humans are not the sole perpetrators of carbon loading of the air, we are the only ones who can do anything about it.

It is up to us to first decide what we want the future to be, then we have to develop strategies that will move us in that direction. It is up to us to develop a Sustainable Geometry that includes all the equations and all the variables. We may only be able to address a few of them at a time, but we can use what we already know to begin the plan and start moving toward the solution.

Solar and wind power will not be a dominant source of energy in the next ten years, or even 20. But we can start now to get a few percentages on the total and by the time a new technology surfaces to take it place, we will have accomplished something.

Curitiba, Brazil made a commitment to public transportation as the dominant mode for trips to work. They started in the late 1960s and build up their systems with then existing vehicles and new ideas of how to deploy transportation. As new vehicle types and urban landscapes were built, they included the mass transportation modes as the primary one. Today, they have a 60% share of trip to work on their bus and rail systems.

In the US, we do not need to invent the most efficient wind turbine or the most efficient photo-voltaic solar panels before putting one in on the grid. We can use what we have until someone invents a better one.

The future has an annoying habit of arriving too early. We are far from being ready to embrace the new geometry that will force us to comply. Either we shape a more sustainable future or nature will shape a more sustainable population of man. Again from the mind of Paul Ehrlich, the stabilization of population size will come from either a controlled birth rate or a higher death rate. More than likely it will be a combination of the two. Since I am moving along the age-cohort chart along with the rest of us, I would rather see a reductions in births rather than an increase in deaths.