Addressing his readers as “dear” for the first time, and doing it twice in his latest column, Clifford May sought not to scare the readers about foreign enemies intent on fighting America to the death, but charm them with ideas he never deliberated previously, namely those pertaining to climate change.
You may think of the writer’s move as being a strategic
decision; one that’s designed to woo the audience to his side. In fact, as
you’ll see when you read the column, May is proceeding by playing dove while at
the same time describing his “socialist globalist foes” as being progressive
hawks. This being a reversal of the image that had been perceived by the public
during the decades, it says that Clifford May has decided to be correct and appreciated
rather that wrong and feared.
Clifford May’s column came under the title, “COP27
indictment: Americans are climate criminals and must pay,” and was published on
November 29, 2022 in The Washington Times. Calling the Americans climate criminals
in the title, is explained in the text as indicting America and other wealthy
nations for crimes committed against the climate.
To develop his argument, May relied this time on a style
of writing he seldom, if ever, used before: it is the analogy that tells the
story in a nutshell. He should be praised for that, but this does not mean I
cannot point out that the analogy is missing something—a small something to be
sure. It is that the caveman in the story had the option of lighting the fire outside
the cave in which case it would not have bothered his neighbors. Today, we all
live in one planetary cave without the luxury of an outside where those who are
bothered by the smoke and the other derivatives can escape.
To some people, that difference amounts to a small inconvenience,
but seen by an increasing number of people as potentially carrying massive
implications for the future — which is what the debate on climate change is all
about. And so, taking one side of the argument, Clifford May started to make
his point by stating realities that cannot be refuted. Here they are:
“A few millenniums
later [fossil fuels] began powering locomotives, steamships and internal
combustion engines, and new products and services were created on a scale
previously unimaginable. There is a well known link between energy and wealth.
Because Americans and Europeans first worked that out on an industrial scale,
they benefited first and foremost. If developing countries are to develop, they
must have affordable and abundant energy. There’s no other way”.
This shows that the writer is aware of the two planks
that make up the debate about climate change. One plank concerns the discomfort
of having to live with a climate that’s changing for the worse. The other plank
concerns the difficulty in prospering materially while operating in a climate
that’s deteriorating.
And this is what prompted the writer to delve into a
discussion about solutions which, in theory, could serve the two planks
simultaneously. Here is how he stated that possibility: “Can’t renewables —
wind and solar power — substitute for fossil fuels? No, not in the near term.
The wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine, and batteries
capable of storing large amounts of energy do not yet exist”.
Yes, large capacity batteries would be needed to store
energy when the wind blows and the sun shines for use when the wind does not
blow and the sun disappears. But the one ingenious thing that physics has done
is that it made energy convertible from one state to another in myriad of ways:
Mechanical, electrical, potential, hydraulic and what have you.
Believe it or not, a new idea would make use of the elevator
principle. That is, when there is sunshine and/or wind, the electricity
generated is used to raise tons of concrete hundreds of feet up in the air. This
is converting electricity into a potential energy that can later be turned back
into electricity by letting the descending (falling) concrete run an electric
generator.
A similar old idea that is actually adopted in the
Northern European countries, makes use of the excess electricity produced at
night when the country is asleep, to pump the water of the hydroelectric
station from the foot of the fall back up into the lake so that it can be reused
when the country wakes up, turns on the lights and runs the industrial machines.
More practically than all of this, and better suited to
serve the developing countries, is the idea of converting all kinds of
naturally produced energies into electricity that immediately converts itself
into a gaseous fuel. Compressed into a
fluid that can be stored as easily as the butane gas that’s powering your barbecue,
that fuel is hydrogen, hereinafter called Green Hydrogen.
And while we’re at it, the same principles, same
machinery and same installations are used to produce Green Ammonia, a valuable
commodity used to increase the production of food.
Given that most underdeveloped countries are situated in
zones where the sun shines brighter and more often than the other places, the
drive to build installations for the production of green energy, green hydrogen
and green ammonia, is in full swing.