Some people are complaining about the scant attention being paid to climate change in the current election. I'm not among them, and it's not because I am unconcerned with the outcome of the dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste into the planetary atmosphere, where it kills and otherwise threatens not only humanity, but many other organisms as well. My failure to complain is more involved with my understanding that the situation is irretrievable. In a democracy, citizens get what they deserve. In an oligarchy or in a dictatorship citizens may claim, to some extent, varying degrees of innocence but the the sun bakes the innocent and the deserving alike.
We live, more or less, in a democracy, and we Americans - who are the second worst (in absolute, mass burned terms) dumpers of dangerous fossil fuel waste on the planet, after China, an oligarchy - are getting what we deserve. (Note two that we are very close to matching the Chinese for waste dumping even though China has roughly four times as many people as we do.)
Here on the left, many people, as I perceive it, wish to blame this state of affairs on the political right. I consider myself, in most ways, more comfortable with the ideas of the left, but I am not inclined to believe that the right owns the onus of our failing atmosphere to the extent that it involves the United States, which was, for many decades until recently being surpassed by China, the worst destroyer of the atmosphere on the planet. It's pretty clear - to me at least - that many people on the left are way out to lunch where issues of energy and environment are concerned, since they have engaged in much faith based posturing about how whirlygigs and glass coated with toxic metals would save the day.
They, um, didn't.
I don't write diaries here all that much anymore, but for the hell of it, for old time's sake, I'm writing this one. I still do significant literature based research on energy, but I seldom write about it public forums as I once did: In this space I wrote almost 400 diaries over a period of a little more than seven years, more than 60 a year on average. It's very unlikely that I will keep up that rate.
From September of 2006, when I wrote my first diary here, until last month, September of 2012, the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere (measured at the Mauna Loa observatory) rose by 12.13 ppm. In the previous six years, from September of 2000 to September of 2006, the the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere rose by 9.67 ppm.
More than a coincidence?
This may be taken as evidence that NNadir diaries at DKos are useless in addressing climate change, but - irrespective of anyone who might think me a megalomaniac - I always knew that.
Cute stuff aside, this is a diary, about imagining making gasoline via the hydrogenation of the carbon dioxide now being dumped annually by a particular plant, one of the 5 worst carbon dioxide dumping power plants on the planet, as identified by CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) think tank, this being the aptly named Belchatow coal plant in Bełchatów, Łódź Voivodeship.
No such carbon dioxide will, of course, be so hydrogenated to make gasoline (nor any of the cleaner alternatives to gasoline) but imagine...
Imagine.
