The Great Leap Backward

Donald Trump has promised to make America great again. He is doing this in several ways. He just announced a funding cut (over a billion dollars) to the National Institutes of Health. We can go back to the days when if you get sick, the doctors won’t know what to do, and you can just go home and die.

Another way Trump is making America great again is by sending us back several decades to the time when all of our energy requirements come from coal and oil. I am sure that the massive campaign contributions from coal and oil companies is simply a coincidence. Most industry and most people want clean energy, but the coal and oil companies do not. America is one of the leaders in developing new clean energy technology. This is about to end, and doesn’t China know it. China is actually happy about Trump’s decision because it means that China will become the supreme leader in the energy of the future. It is almost like a president saying that we will resist this new internal combustion technology and focus our regulations to ensure that horses continue to dominate our transportation sector.

But clean energy technology has an irreversible momentum. There is no way to stop it, no matter how much Trump tells us that solar and wind energy are from the Devil. People want it, industry will continue to invest in it despite federal government threats. In addition to being good for the Earth, it is superior technology. This point was made in an article published in Science by someone you’ve all heard of.

The climate denialists—among whom there are very few scientists—will now have a meeting at which they will proclaim that all scientists who study global warming are traitors to America. The meeting will be chaired by Texas Republican representative Lamar Smith, who is famous for having said that he saw no evidence for global warming. The democratic staffers piled up papers of evidence in front of him, but he didn’t even look in that direction, so he still has not seen the evidence. Just about the only scientist they can find to defend the denialist theory is John Christy, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Christy has made it clear that his opposition to global warming science is based on his reading of the Bible—which, by the way, he is reading incorrectly. Here is a report from Science magazine about this upcoming meeting.

Thank you, President Trump, for leading us boldly into the twentieth century. Next up, the nineteenth century!

Oklahoma, the New Earthquake Capital of America?

See the previous essays about the Climate Workshop for educators sponsored by Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education. One of the messages that we all took away is that America and the world are too dependent on petroleum. There is plenty of money to be made in energy resources that do not contribute, or not contribute as much, to global warming. But as it turns out global warming is far from being the only danger associated with our continued dependence on fossil fuels.

According to several recent studies, Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California, a trend beginning in 2010. And these are not all small quakes; the 2011 quake near Prague, Oklahoma, had a magnitude of 5.7.

Everyone reading blogs such as this one probably knows why California has so many earthquakes. California, despite its beauty, has its faults. The Pacific Plate and the North American Plate rub up against one another in California while they slowly move, making earthquakes inevitable. But Oklahoma is right in the middle of the North American Plate. Why, then, does Oklahoma have earthquakes?

Many millions of years ago, what is now the North American Plate was (as I understand it) separate plates, which have now crushed themselves together into a single unit. One of the focal points of the crush was what is now the Arbuckle Mountains in south central Oklahoma; another is the Mississippi River bottom in the vicinity of New Madrid, Missouri, where a huge earthquake occurred in 1811.

But this does not account for why there has been a sudden increase in earthquake activity in Oklahoma starting in 2010. A new study published in the July 25, 2014 issue of Science documents that this ongoing cluster of earthquakes has occurred just at the same time and place, and at the same depth, as the new frenzy of fracking activity, where corporations use high-pressure water (containing other chemicals as well) is used to push fossil fuel out of the sedimentary rocks. The authors could not provide proof, the reason being that corporations are unwilling to disclose the details of their fracking activity. But they used all the geological and seismological information that was available to them to associate the earthquakes with fracking. While many of the fluid injection wells appear to produce no earthquakes, there are four big fracking wells that account for about 20 percent of the earthquakes. The authors did not name the corporation that owns these wells.

Since this article was published, northern California had a big earthquake that, I presume, put it back ahead of Oklahoma in the earthquake sweepstakes.

In Oklahoma we endure wild swings of weather, including tornadoes. But at least, we think, we do not have earthquakes like California. Our patriotic fossil fuel corporations have now corrected this omission. According to Figure 1 in the article (unfortunately this figure is available only to subscribers), Oklahoma now surpasses California in the number of earthquakes per 1000 square kilometers.

There are two things we can learn from this. First, if we want to continue our frenzy of fossil fuel dependence, to continue wasting energy and producing carbon emissions that are harmful to the rest of the world, we have a steep price to pay—among many other things, earthquakes. But the second point is that fossil fuel corporations can earn enormous private profits while passing many of the expenses—which includes earthquakes—off onto everybody else at public expense. I have not heard that these corporations have donated money sufficient to clean up earthquake damage that their operations have caused. This is just one more example of how large corporations, even though they boast about being the beacons of free enterprise, earn their profits in large measure at public expense.

Religious conservatives often refer to fossil fuels as a gift from God that we ought to use as much as possible. But what they don’t say is that they believe fossil fuels are a gift from God to conservative corporate leaders, and that the other 99 percent of Americans need to pay the cost. They believe, even if they do not openly say, that God blesses only rich people.

A Permian Future

On my way to and from Big Bend, as described in earlier blog entries, I drove through the Texas Permian Basin, in west Texas near Midland and Odessa, which is one of the major oil and gas deposits in North America. It has some of the thickest Permian Period sedimentary deposits in the world. I wonder what creationists think “Permian” means in this case or how so much petroleum got there.

During the recent acceleration of “domestic production,” the Permian Basin has been hopping with activity. I could not drive on any highway other than an interstate without continually encountering oil or infrastructure transport trucks. They were always in a hurry and pulled out in suddenly front of other vehicles; everyone seemed to understand this as an essential part of life in west Texas. The entire economy, aside from cotton, peanuts, and wheat, seemed to be based on fossil fuels. (The irrigation water, like the oil and gas, was extracted from the ground.) From the viewpoint of corporations, the Permian Basin is a vision of America’s productive future.

But if so, it seemed to me to be a bleak future. The corporation executives (most of whom probably lived in Dallas and Ft. Worth) were rich, but nearly every town, house, and person that I saw seemed to be middle class at best, and usually poorer. The people were running around, grateful even for employment that did not seem to pay them much. It was certainly not a cultural renaissance, unless you count the Jackalope field house for one of the high schools. Our economy seems to be racing toward greater dependence upon a limited energy source, a dependence that the local residents celebrate whenever they are not working.

And most of this oil goes to Houston, where it is exported, much of it to China. The surge in domestic production has not made gasoline cheaper or more available to Americans. The people who sing the praises of the Keystone XL pipeline talk endlessly about American energy independence, but much of the oil itself goes outside of America, thus enriching mostly the oil executives.

The Permian Basin is not, however, the complete vision of what Texas is like. On my way from the DFW area to Big Bend, I passed through the city of Sweetwater, which bills itself as the wind power capital of America. And indeed wind generators covered the low hills. Sweetwater looked to me like it was much more prosperous than the Permian Basin. (Of course, DFW was pretty prosperous too.)

Side by side in central and west Texas, there are two visions of the future: Sweetwater vs. the Permian Basin. Clearly the sustainable and prosperous future is the one Sweetwater is betting on. But natural selection, whether applied to culture or to biology, does not choose ultimate sustainability but immediate success, and I fear that the Permian Basin option will win in the short term, leaving us in an economic lurch in the only slightly longer term. I can only hope that we do not end up with our own smaller, economic version of the Permian extinction.

Fundamentalists Equate Fossil Fuel Use with Godliness

Note that today is the tentative deadline for the Evolution Road Trip. We accept registrations after today but space cannot be guaranteed.

If anyone needs yet another example of how religious zeal can lead to intellectual blindness, I here provide one. This example comes from Bryan Fischer and the American Family Association. I am not saying that Fischer is stupid, but simply that his zeal has blinded his presumably latent ability to reason. Nor am I saying that all religion leads to such blindness. However, among American fundamentalists, such blinding zeal is very common. I wish I could say that Fischer’s viewpoint was as singular and ignorable as are those of the geocentrists, but I fear that this is not the case.

Fischer said that fossil fuels are a gift from God, and that by not using these gifts, we are insulting God. Therefore the development of alternative energy systems is an insult to God, in Fischer’s view. Fischer equates those of us who support a transition away from fossil fuel dependence to the “evil servant” whose master gave him some money and he buried it. See the full story here.
So, all of you who try to conserve energy: Prepare for Hell!

Where does one begin to analyze the absurdity of his viewpoint? First, if you believe in God, would you not also say that sunshine and wind and biomass are also gifts from God? Second, there is utterly no chance that we will stop using fossil fuels. Third, it is no insult to whatever God there may be if we use his gift wisely and frugally, rather than wastefully. Suppose I were to give a large sum of money to my daughter. She would accept it, and then use it wisely. That’s the kind of person she is. But I would be disappointed in her if she blew all the money on brief pleasures. Fischer seems to think that God wants us to use all of God’s gifts in an orgiastic fashion. But apparently this does not include such gifts as sexuality and wine.

This should all be perfectly obvious to religious people, even those who do not have a particularly well developed sense of stewardship of God’s good green Earth. But Fischer’s version of religion, which is widespread and infectious, blinds its adherents to even religious reason.

Religion is as powerful as any recreational drug and should be used, if at all, cautiously.