There has been a lot of obstructions to the international efforts to begin to slow the growth of global warming. It seems hopeless to suggest that we must actually reverse the process rapidly, but nothing else will save our world. We must restructure our society so that we are fixing more carbon then we are creating and we must do this in a very short time. Obviously, it would take years to accomplish even with a World War Two level effort, so there is no time to waste. Yes, it can, and must, be done.

We must utilize public transportation extensively and end the era of cities filled with cars transporting just one person. We will never achieve ecological sustainability rapidly without creating a civilization that uses modern, effecient mass transit driven by renewable clean energy as the mainstay of transportation. We cannot shut down our coal burning power plants, replace them with sustainable electricity, and at the same time double our electric generating capacity to power electric cars for everyone. We simply do not have time for this, nor the time to wait for a way to create enough hydrogen economically and cleanly for everone to drive hydrogen cars. Natural gas driven cars could be a helpful transitional strategy as they could perhaps be affordable for most people, something that electric or plug in hybrids will not be. It takes the equvilant of 1000 gallons of gas in energy to build a single car. What a strain on the planet trying to give every family an individual car would be. Do we want a continuation of the gross inequity that we have in the world today, with only weatlhy countries having cars and making most of the pollution, or will we envision a world where everyone lives a relatively equivalent lifestyle? In the time we seem to have, only a worldwide move to fast and effecient public transportation will work. Humans are made to walk, and with everyone walking more to use public transportation, the world would be much healthier. Burning food as ethanol in a world full of hungry people is not the answer, nor is it ecological. We must make life without a car a possibility for everyone in our urban areas. The automobiles we do use should be electric or plug in hybrids, and be used much more sparingly.

We must create electricity using sustainable methods like wind, wave and solar. We have made great progress in the developement of these clean technologies and good ways to store their power. Scientific American already has a plan developed to make the transition to sustainable, mostly solar, energy. Check it out on our links page. They have a 40 year time frame, but it seems we need to figure out how to do it in 4 or 5 years. We also need to make the effeciency gains easily possible using insulation, caulking, thermal windows, more effecient homes and appliences and the like, and higher standards must be mandated.

Nuclear Power would just substitute one ecological nightmare for another. We still have no good way to deal with the millions of tons of high level waste this would produce, becasue there isn't one. Nuclear power would leave huge amounts of radioacte waste to our decendants that they would have to deal with and keep isolated, if possible, for longer than all human history. It would take much longer to build nuclear power plants or clean up coal than it would take to get sustainable energy sources on line. A world filled with nuclear power plants is a world where controling the proliforation of nuclear weapons is impossible. Nuclear power should be fazed out right after we faze out the last coal fired power plant. Clean coal might not be a hoax, but it is far from a reality now. It would also be nice to stop strip mining both of these non-renewable fuels.