The Way the Future Blogs

(Snow, I mean.)

Illustration by George Alfred Williams from the 1905 edition of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

When Dickens was writing his novels, the London winters were different. Then urchins threw snowballs to knock men’s top hats off their heads, and grown men slid their way across ice patches in the sidewalks for fun, and that’s what Dickens showed them doing in his books.

They don’t do much of that any more. The color of winter isn’t white anymore, it’s now soggy brown.

And, from where I sit, it looks like New York and Chicago followed that same muddy path again this year. That’s bad news for, among others, farmers and people who get their stored summer water from streams and springs fed by the winter snowpack.

In some winters to come there may not be a snowpack. In others, paradoxically, there may be more than ever because warmer air can carry more moisture. Although the annual northern hemisphere snow cover in 2012 was 0.3 million sq. km less than the 43-year average reported by the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University, ranking 2012 as having the 12th least extensive cover on record, the snow cover for this past December was the highest since 1966.

But there’s one rule that all water users should follow:

Don’t waste it!

 

If you’re driving a People’s Gas truck and the fuel tank is running low, head for the North Side of Chicago. There the first of three filling stations has been operating for a year, turning waste cow dung into truck fuel with the help of an Obama Administration grant. An anerobic converter changes half a million gallons of cow manure into clean fuel a day, enough to drive a truck 20,000 miles, with the help of live bacteria.

A recent Pulse — the Union of Concerned Scientists’ bulletin warning civilians about new threats to their life, liberty or good health — reports some alarming scientific findings about ground-level ozone pollution levels and what they are doing to our ability to breathe freely. The numbers are scary. By 2020, millions of people will develop smog-related asthma and other breathing illnesses, and thousands of them will be overloading our hospitals.

That’s really bad news, but —

It has at least one good aspect. The same measures that will be essential to trying to save people from new breathing problems are the ones that will slow down the far worse consequences of unrestrained global warning. If we can’t persuade the unbelievers that global warming is a certain deadly consequence of our enslavement to the burning of fossil fuels, maybe they’ll be willing to do what needs to be done for the survival of the human race as long as that is also what needs to be done for the ability to breathe easy.

Barack Obama.

When an election is near, politicians do their best to avoid doing or saying anything unusually evil or asinine because they know that people are watching. At times like the present, though, they know that most voters are sick of the subject and aren’t paying much attention any more.

So let’s fool them and pay attention. What I am doing, for example, is writing a letter, essentially the same letter to each individual politician in an office I voted on — from President and U. S. Senator down to local councils. It goes like this:

Dear President Obama:

First, let me congratulate you on your victory in the 2012 election, and I wish you the best of luck in your task of trying to fix some of the things that are wrong with areas of our government. I know there are many important questions that must be resolved, but there is one — in many ways, the most important of all — that has fallen through the cracks. It threatens the future of our whole world. And yet in all the debate, almost everywhere in our country, it was hardly mentioned.

If we don’t find some way of lessening the violent storms, droughts, floods and other consequences of our reckless tampering with the very air we breathe we endanger everything we attempt. Nearly every legitimate scientific organization in the world has joined in the warning that the inhabitability of the Earth cannot survive our forever increasing the carbon load in the atmosphere.

May I ask, then, what new steps or plans you will offer to slow the endless burning of fossil fuels?

Yours sincerely,

Frederik Pohl

Well, definitely a lot less in recoverable natural gas than the gas billionaires were telling us just a few months ago. Their claim then was that there was that there were 827 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. This brought about a lot more drilling, which gave more accurate numbers for the supply. The Energy Information Administration’s 2012 estimate was down to 482 trillion cubic feet, a decrease of 40-odd percent. Some experts think it’s even less.

The most attractive source, the so-called Marcellus pool, which stretches from West Virginia to New York State and is a favorite of drillers because the product is available right next to the energy-greedy Northeast U.S., had its numbers reduced even more sharply, from 410 to 141 trillion cubic feet of gas, this a drop of more than 65 percent.

 

Dear pals and other people, is that not one hellishly handsome birthday cake? It was delivered at Windycon, a gift from Malcolm Phifer, and the only thing that isn’t exactly right about it is that I won’t actually turn 93 until the 26th of this month. But better early than never is what I always say — or more accurately, I’ve never said it before, but now for the sake of gratitude for a kind thought I’ll say it loud and clear. Thank you, Malcolm!

In fact, I’ll go further than Malcolm or anyone at Windycon may have intended. I take this cake to be a testimonial to the fact that people who live a long time and don’t lose the ability to recognize bunkum when somebody tries to sell it to them deserve to be listened to now and then.

Me, for instance.

Through this blog and every other way I have to communicate an opinion, I’ve been urging you guys to sniff what the employees of the Koch brothers have been handing you before you swallow any of it. They spent fortune after fortune on TV ads and hired “commentators” to try to make you and the rest of the American people believe that tax cuts equal prosperity. That’s not true, and anybody who has tried to understand our country’s history knows it isn’t true.

One of the most prosperous periods our country ever had was in the years just after WWII. There were a lot of reasons for that prosperity, but cutting taxes wasn’t one of them. Our highest tax rate now is 30%. The highest tax rate then was three times that — 90%! — and the prosperity sailed on.

Does anybody really believe in such other fictions as that making drastic tax cuts for the extremely wealthy helps anyone but the same extremely wealthy? Can you imagine that Mrs. Romney would have tripped down the White House stairs to where her husband was chuckling over the latest Wall Street Journal and said, “Oh, darling, thank you for that new tax cut. Now I can afford that fourth Cadillac, and maybe you won’t have to put Detroit in bankruptcy!”

Well, it isn’t good form to kick people when they’re down, although with all that money I can’t feel real sorry for the man. It’s an enjoyable sport, but I’m going to turn to other subjects, including a few ideas that I’ve been turning over in my mind.

For instance, there are a few hundred people scattered around the world who get up early every morning to try to save some of our wildlife. They check the ground around every skyscraper to take away the dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bodies of songbirds that have committed suicide during the night by flying head-on into the banks of fiercely bright lights aimed at the sky in almost every tall building. (If the seekers are very lucky, they may find a few birds that can be saved.)

So what do we do about it? We (1) create a tax on high-up lighting above a certain brightness which (2) gets more expensive every year, thus giving landlords time to make changes to lower the tax, at the same time (3) making our cities less deadly to wildlife as well as (4) slowing down the yearly increase in burning oil, coal and natural gas to generate electricity that has been increasing the carbon loading on the atmosphere and currently getting worse every year, and — oh, yeah (5), giving our mayors, governors and presidents what they’ve all been looking for so desperately, something new to tax.

You’re welcome,

Fred