152 June 2014 www.bahrainthismonth.com lastword Dirty Fuel, Clean Energy It’s funny how we waste time and money coming up with the most obvious of answers about our future. Like none of us know this and none of us can do anything about it anyway! The requirements are all government-based or depend upon a handful of private enterprises funded by billionaires. According to the UN a “massive shift” to renewable energy is required — and fast. While fossil fuels have made this region extremely rich, they are fast running out and heavy on emissions when utilised. The same goes for coal. While cheaper and the world’s main source of power, providing a quarter of our primary energy and more than 40 per cent of our electricity, it remains dirty and dangerous to extract and dirty to burn. Turning coal into gas or coal gasification is a possibility as gas is easier, cheaper and cleaner to transport than the solid form, yet coal gasification actually produces more CO² than a traditional coal plant and the process is heavy on water use. Coal gasification is one of the more waterintensive forms of energy production, thus ruining our other most precious resource. Of course, there are the up-and-coming new entities. Some, such as solar power, have been with us for decades and have made major inroads. Wind turbines, too, are beginning to pave the way for a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: working towards a healthy lifestyle A long-awaited UN report on how to curb climate change says the world must rapidly move away from carbon-intensive fuels. cleaner future, as too are new oil sources from corn, hydrogen and water itself. What the world needs, though, for a cleaner more efficient future are billionaires and visionaries. The world’s wealthiest man, Bill Gates, has done amazing work with his money in curing diseases such as malaria. He’s also helping poor countries seek a stable future with the health of their next generation with resources for clean drinking water and cures for simple diseases. However, by curing their ills, will this mean one day these population-rich countries, too, will become the next economies with a growing middle class. This means more cars, more electricity and more fuel of any kind. What we really need are visionaries of the ilk of billionaire Elon Musk, who has a philosophy of which he can be proud. The man behind such entities as SpaceX, PayPal, and Tesla Motors believes the future of mankind will be brighter if our global consciousness can be expanded. Musk considers the Internet, renewable energy and space exploration as the methods which have the potential to have the most impact in this sense. The Internet can serve as a global nervous system, renewable energy can expand the timeframe within which mankind can try to ask the right questions before running into economical or ecological collapse, and space exploration can serve as a backup for life itself. Musk also considers that a move to a space-faring civilisation as an important step in evolution itself. Having already brought to fruition privatised space exploration and cars running on electricity he has now hypothesised the ‘Hyperloop’ travel system. Sadly, his philosophy may take decades or centuries to come into being thanks to the stupidity and small-mindedness of a few. Before space provides our future, we must cure the ills that wrong us on Earth; before the Internet can be our nervous system we have to overcome the senseless hackers and virus instigators deploying such venom to our laptops as the Heartbleed virus. This little monster sucks out our credit card information and bleeds us dry financially while ruining the infrastructure of business and corporations. With renewable energy, Musk suggested, we can extend our timeframe; but a timeframe in which we must learn to commit, change and understand the necessity of stopping what we are so used to doing. Until we stop fighting for the rights of the individual and begin to fight for our survival as a planet, our fate is sealed. The only thing that seems to be consistent at is our renewable stupidity, waste and forgetfulness — generation after generation. We must also learn that our most valuable resources today are people such as the visionaries, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musk among others; sadly their timeframes are finite and they are not renewable.
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