[GJM] Urgent Message from former astronaut Brian O'Leary, Ph.D.

[robert searle]

Dear All,

       With Transfinancial Economics radical but
"credible" new sustainable technologies would always
be funded even if they represent "out-of-the-box"
thinking. 

R.Searle.


--- marguerite hampton <ecopilgrim at aabol.com> wrote:

>  
>  Please distribute this far and wide.
>  We must act now. 
>  
> marguerite hampton
> Founder/Director Turtle Island Institute 
> 
> 
>  
> Call for a New Energy Revolution
>                                                     
>                 
> Brian O’Leary, Ph.D., November 2006, 
> www.brianoleary.com
>                                                     
>              
> Prepared for:
> Scientific Discovery, World Innovation Foundation
>  
> “The resistance to a new idea increases as the
> square of its 
> importance.”
>  
>                            -Bertrand Russell
>  
> The world is at an energy crossroads.  The alarming
> new information coming
> out of the climate science community confirms the
> unprecedented danger faced
> by all of humanity and nature by mankind’s routine
> burning of
> hydrocarbons—oil, coal and natural gas.  The
> resulting emissions of carbon
> dioxide and carcinogens into the Earth’s atmosphere
> spell almost certain
> doom not only for the environment, but for human
> systems of government and
> commerce as we know them.  Human survivability
> itself is in question,
> especially against the backdrop of vast
> deforestation, marine habitat
> destruction, accelerating species extinctions, and
> the threat from weapons
> of mass destruction on Earth, and, perhaps soon, in
> space.
>  
> Nature is fighting back with heat waves, super
> storms, rising oceans,
> desertification, species and disease vector
> migrations, and weakening of the
> Gulf Stream, in response to warming caused by
> injection of record amounts of
> carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases
> into the atmosphere.
> Despite this, and in the face of dwindling supplies
> of hydrocarbons, humans
> still consume as if there were no tomorrow.  Even
> modest international
> agreements such as the Kyoto Protocols are ignored
> by the most polluting
> nations, especially the United States government,
> which seems to be more
> interested in going to war for oil than transforming
> its energy
> infrastructure to cleaner sources.
>  
> This multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel juggernaut is
> the largest economic
> engine ever made in human history.  We see record
> profits for the petroleum
> industry while innovation is stifled and largely
> ignored by established
> scientists, leadership and media.  Yet innovation in
> our energy systems may
> be the single most important factor for our
> survival.
>  
> Significant solutions using conventional technology
> have proven to be
> elusive, prompting some scientists and
> environmentalists such as James
> Lovelock, Stewart Brand, John Holdren, Nathan Lewis,
> Richard Heinberg and
> myself to conclude that even the traditional
> renewables such as solar, wind,
> biofuels and hydrogen are not adequate to replace
> hydrocarbon combustion.
> Solar, wind, waves, tides, ocean-thermal,
> geothermal, hydropower and
> satellite solar power can suffer from intermittency,
> site unsuitability,
> diffuseness, limited availability and materials- and
> land-intensity.
> Biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel compete with
> agriculture for land and
> still inject carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
> albeit not as much as
> hydrocarbon combustion.  Hydrogen is expensive to
> produce.  It most often
> requires more energy to extract hydrogen than you
> get out of it, making this
> fuel an energy carrier but not an energy source. 
> Typical methods of
> production (reformation of methane and electrolysis
> of water) still consume
> fossil fuels, emit carbon dioxide and can deplete
> atmospheric oxygen.
>  
> These fundamental physical limitations have led
> James Lovelock, Stewart
> Brand and others to reluctantly conclude that we
> should construct
> centralized nuclear power stations throughout the
> globe to produce
> electricity through grids in an electric economy. 
> But because of limited
> supplies of uranium, high costs, hazardous fuel
> cycles and nuclear
> proliferation concerns, many of us in the scientific
> community (e.g., Union
> of Concerned Scientists, Bulletin of the Atomic
> Scientists, Federation of
> Amercian Scientists) believe this is a very poor
> choice for our future.
> First, the questionable safety of nuclear power
> plants, especially in the
> age of terrorism, presents grave dangers to us all. 
> The Chernobyl accident
> of twenty years ago should provide us ample warning.
>  Moreover, no safe
> long-term method has yet been found for disposing of
> high-level, long-lived
> radioactive waste—an inevitable byproduct of the
> nuclear fuel cycle.
> Finally, the proliferation of the technology
> throughout the world, would
> inevitably lead to acquisition of doomsday nuclear
> weapons by numerous
> irresponsible parties.
>  
> The prospects for “hot” nuclear fusion are equally
> dim.  In spite of tens of
> billions of dollars over decades being spent on
> trying to achieve energy
> “breakeven” using gigantic Tokomak reactors, the
> results have thus far been
> negative.  Moreover, nuclear fusion plants would
> constitute oversized,
> vulnerable facilities necessitating the continued
> use of ugly, antiquated
> centralized grid systems.
>  
> When full life-cycle environmental costs are
> considered, none of the above
> technologies appear to meet the criteria of
> sustainability--absent a
> breakthrough.  By choosing any or some of them, we
> could only hope for
> incremental changes in our energy supply in the face
> of accelerating global
> demand.  More importantly, these alternatives do not
> address the urgent time
> factor requirements for clean energy needed to
> mitigate global warming.
>  
> On the other hand, many new energy technologies have
> already been proven in
> hundreds of demonstrations in laboratories scattered
> throughout the world.
> Any one or some of these approaches, if properly
> developed, could end our
> dangerous dependence on hydrocarbons and uranium. 
> Clearly the traditional
> technologies keep us mired in the nineteenth and 
> twentieth centuries rather
> than launching us forward into the twenty-first
> century.  Nevertheless, this
> conventional thinking continues to dominate the news
> these days. Despite the
> great need, suppression of new energy has been
> historically documented in
> great detail by those who have taken the time to
> investigate.  Inventors
> have suffered funding cuts, threats, sabotage and
> even assassination ever
> since the time of Nicola Tesla more than one century
> ago.
>  
> We define “new energy” to generally mean innovative
> technologies with the
> potential of providing a quantum leap in our ability
> to tap cheap, clean,
> safe and decentralized energy for producing fuels
> and electricity.  These
> may or may not be recognized by mainstream science. 
> The technologies
> include:
>  
> ADVANCED HYDROGEN TECHNOLOGIES (1) catalytic water
> molecule manipulation and
> dissociation through cheap electrolysis, and (2)
> manipulation 
=== message truncated ===>
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