This commentary is by Greg Pierce of St. Albans, a lifelong Vermonter, a retired civil engineer, a former reserve Army officer in the Corps of Engineers, and author of five novels. He favors an embargo on carbon-based fuel and views hydrogen as the planet’s only viable clean fuel option.
Dustin Lang’s commentary Feb. 26 has provoked, in my psyche, an interesting “mind test.”
General background: I unexpectedly become the victim in a home invasion. My assailants elect to immobilize me by chaining me up in my own garage. Wanting to leave no evidential trail of their evil deed, my assailants close the garage up tight. Before leaving the garage to burgle my home, they start the engine of my motor vehicle.
Next scene, option one: My vehicle runs on carbon-based motor fuel and my garage soon fills with exhaust fumes. Outcome — I die.
Next scene, option two: My vehicle runs on hydrogen and my garage soon fills with an excess of pure water vapor. Outcome — I live.
Now expand the foregoing “mind test.” You’re inadvertently trapped on a planet that enjoys a very thin and quite fragile atmosphere which you are dependent on to be able to breathe and experience a meaningful life experience — except you’re faced with a particularly vexing problem which is likely to cause your premature demise.
Wealthy overlords of the planet have chosen to enrich themselves with a business scheme that involves maintaining and perpetuating the use of pernicious fuel sources which are continuously increasing the content of the planet’s atmosphere with poisonous exhaust gases. On the planet there is a very contentious, ongoing debate about whether the poisonous exhaust gases have any impact, whatsoever, on life forms such as yourself, and others like you, who are also trapped on the planet.
Will the life forms eventually die out, leaving behind a planet devoid of all life forms, or is that contention just idle rumor-mongering by ill-informed, simplistic do-gooders, amusing themselves with baseless, idle, trouble-making speculation?
But there may be an upside. A few free-thinkers, unaffected by the continuous barrage of propaganda pushed on them by the wealthy overlords, who champion continued use of fuels that give off poisonous gases that pollute the atmosphere, begin to reason out the issues. The free-thinkers soon arrive at what they believe are a few unassailable truths.
The planet they are trapped on is heated by a powerful sun. The sun’s energy can be captured and converted to electricity in photovoltaic cells and this electricity can, in turn, be used to convert the planet’s practically inexhaustible supply of water into its basic constituents of hydrogen and oxygen. Further, the free-thinkers conclude that the hydrogen can be recombined with oxygen in fuel cells to produce electric energy and the only exhaust product is pure water.
With such a powerful, utilitarian, inexhaustible, simplistic fuel source, why not embargo and abandon fuels that continue to pollute the planet’s precious atmosphere? Why, indeed?
Astounded by their conclusions, the free-thinkers begin to try to push back against the wealthy overlords, mostly to little avail. But, alas, the great masses of inhabitants of the troubled planet are in thrall of the wealthy overlords and pay little heed to the free-thinkers. Soon the planet is awash in rising waters of oceans filled with new water from melting glaciers and icecaps at its poles.
Well, folks, my little mind test has to wind up here. Will common sense and sound logic prevail on the troubled planet and lead its occupants out of harm’s way, or will greed, in the end, drag the planet and its occupants down to a sorry, calamitous conclusion? Each occupant of the planet will have to arrive at their own conclusion to this mind test. One final, sad conclusion is that none of the planet’s occupants will ever know the answer — but their posterity will.
