Have you seen this guy?

My volume of blogging has fallen off a cliff in the last two months. A couple of reasons  Several reasons for this– First, I’ve become enamored of the Quora website, where I serve up saucy, special commentary on dumb questions posed by users. It’s easier than coming up with original content here, and (frankly) it’s seen by more people than my work here. I had an epiphany of sorts here–I’m closing in on 600 posts over the last five years, and I’m wondering what impact I’m having. A recent post on the still-unfolding Fukushima Disaster lead one friend to ask “why are you doing this?”. I didn’t have a ready answer. I suppose it’s good in an internet statistic sort of way for lots of bloggers to cause some issues to ‘trend’. But sorting out the real from the false is getting hard.

Second, I’ve got a lot going on. If you follow this blog, you know that I have a production of PLANET HOSPICE coming up in May. What you DON’T know is that I have a bunch of other pending events that will pay money. This Blog served as a place to go when nothing else I was working on was bearing fruit. If the projects I’m working on come to fruition, I will have numerous opportunities to make some money over the summer. That is my focus because we’re in unemployment Hell at the homesite.

Third, there’s a lot happening on the Doomer front. For a couple months now, ever since I returned from a vaycay in Iceland, I’ve been thinking about how quickly the earth is warming and how little impact activism has made on that. A couple weeks ago (as a result of an article on Quora), I started doing the math on carbon sequestration, the last ‘Hail Mary’ pass in the salvation of human species. For those of you joining late, the only way to stop runaway greenhouse would be to capture the extra carbon humans are putting into the air when we burn fossil fuels. The back of the envelope calculations were astonishing. Let’s assume that tomorrow, there’s a scientific breakthrough that solves the problem of carbon sequestration on a large scale. Humans are currently putting out some forty billion tons of carbon a year by burning fossil fuels, so the only way we’d get ahead of this problem is to create a mechanism that could grab AT LEAST that much carbon from the atmosphere. Which is HALF the problem, because you have to put that 40 billion tons of captured carbon someplace. you’d have to SEQUESTER IT. Assuming you could sequester carbon at the bargain-basement price of $100 per ton, that would come out to (drum roll please)… Four trillion dollars a year. $4,000,000,000,000. That’s a bit more than what the US has spent on the War on Terror over the past ten years. The US would be responsible for at least a quarter of that number, and a tax on fossil fuels would come out to about $130 a barrel (which, once you pay for the initial refining and transportation of the oil or NG in the first place), would work out to a $5 gallon of gas before adding a single penny for highways and other state taxes. Even if you convinced the whole world that fossil fuels would be too expensive to keep a modern economy going. Anything less would probably guarantee extinction in this century. And this tax would not guarantee that other climate issues (methane release from the poles once they’re free of summer ice) wouldn’t also arise to seal our fate.

Speaking of which, some 7,000 methane bubbles have arisen in Siberia in the last few weeks. This is proof of the permafrost melt that’s going on at the North Pole, and it will unleash huge amounts of methane sufficient to raise temperatures past the point where grain grows. And this story is now embraced by ‘mainstream’ media. The Washington Post has finally acknowledged the issue, and though they don’t give it the Arctic Methane Emergency Group treatment, they’re not pretending it isn’t happening.  

So I’m not apologizing for abandoning you. There are other things to write about, certainly. But a bit of acknowledgement of earlier reporting is a hollow victory. It’s a mixed blessing when conspiracy theorists like me get affirmation.

See ya later.