Fuel and Power

While vehicular exhausts are commonly thought to be the largest producer of air pollution, in the United States, the generation of electricity actually causes “more carbon dioxide air pollution than all the cars and trucks on the road combined.” So, obviously, power generation methods other than the burning of fossil fuel need to be adopted as soon as possible.

U.S. Representative Roscoe Bartlett, citing remarkably prescient predictions by Admiral Hyman Rickover (“Father of the Nuclear Navy”) in the 1950’s, has stated that we’ve largely squandered the great natural gift of fossil fuels, and that in the relatively near future, they will essentially run out.

And while overall, it has been very safe, nuclear power can create its own problems due to the possibility of accidents and the need for disposal of radioactive wastes.

But there are many promising “alternative” energy technologies which will be able to provide power without having destructive effects on nature. And in some ways, we’ve already made progress – after all, in the not-too-distant past most of the lamps that lighted homes across North America were fueled by whale oil! Just as there was a shift from whale oil to fossil fuel-generated electricity, there must now be a shift to sustainable and non-polluting sources of electricity. At least we’ve gotten past slaughtering the largest creatures on Earth just to light our homes at night, and we can do much better in the future.

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