I've written a few articles about things I'm concerned with that might be a little bit controversial, but I generally try to avoid any overt expression of opinion in my articles. I'm going to deviate a bit in this article. The path we are taking in this country, regardless of whichever ideology wins, will not solve our basic problems. Compromise, apparently, will not either.
What provoked this column is a quote by prominent chemist Daniel G. Nocera. It was quoted on page 1 of the February 7, 2011 Chemical and Engineering News. "In our hearts we care about the poor, but in our actions, we don't." C&E News editor Rudy M. Baum (a controversial figure throughout his editorship) expands upon the theme in his page 3 column. A major thrust of the article is that solving population growth is crucial to the future viability of the planet Earth. A different but related opinion, expressed at the same conference from which the Nocera quote comes is that if we solve our energy problem, everything else becomes manageable. All this got me thinking.
First, we don't seem to solve basic problems anymore. We figure out how to manage them, very poorly and very expensively, but we don't often actually fix core problems. What are the problems of the world? Energy, society's lifeblood, is expensive and becoming more so. We are trying to solve the problem, but not with Manhattan Project earnestness. The benefits of finding better energy solutions are incontestable. Renewable sources, chosen wisely, would free us from the spectre of declining lifestyles as oil inevitably runs out. Such a discovery would allow us to stop paying huge sums to those morally bankrupt regimes across the world that control the oil. Much of the world's strife becomes unnecessary. Living, worldwide, for rich and poor, becomes easier with inexpensive, renewable energy. The trillion dollars plus we have spent in recent Middle East fighting would have been sufficient to explore this solution. Instead, it went down war's insatiable rathole.
The crisis of medical care is another case in point. There is a network of industries that depend on extracting money to keep people at a minimum, alive, and at best, healthy. Figuring out how to continue this for an ever larger population of even older people becomes an exercise in despair, especially when our network of companies is interested in maximizing its profits. At its worst, the future will become an exercise in coldhearted "fiscal responsibility." As a nation - as the denizens of a fragile planet - we must break this paradigm. Costs will continue to escalate - if we accept the status quo as our future. Pick four maladies you fear you may suffer in your future. Apply part of those trillion dollars we spent in Iraq/Afghanistan to solving them, even one of them. How much would a low-cost cure for diabetes reduce our future medical expenses? Better low-cost management options, or even cures, for cancer and heart disease, asthma, Alzheimers disease, stroke, autoimmune diseases, addictions and the myriad afflictions that humans suffer from would wipe out much of this future health care debacle that we so fear. Private industry can be relied upon to work on these problems, but don't expect "low-cost" to be part of their solution. This is a role for the government. It won't come from anywhere else.
Solving these problems, of course, would create other problems. Let's say we found a source of essentially free limitless energy. How long would it be until someone decided that it was time to heat or air condition an entire state - or an entire country? What would be the ecological consequences of such a goofy project? Some would scoff at this notion, but ridiculously counterproductive schemes are expressed to our problems on a daily basis these days. Solve the top five causes of death in human beings and what happens next? Do five new ones appear? Do we live to be significantly older? How many people, given the opportunity to live healthy, comfortable lives to say 150 years old would actually do so? Could the planet support a doubling of the human life span? Still, better to have these problems to solve than the problems of frightfully expensive energy and unaffordable health care.
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Catbar - Brain Candy #159 - Solving the World's Problems from a Soapbox / Brian Rock / Tue Jun 07 19:04:40 EDT 2011
