Yes, Aisha, There Is a Future

It is not that the modern left lacks imagination—they can always imagine an impending disaster requiring government intervention. But when it comes to possible good news, or the possibility of an individual making a difference, they sure lack imagination.

Witness a piece from NPR I came across recently, pronouncing the Alberta Tar Sands doomed. Why? The first problem is that treating the bitumen releases—their words—“dangerous gases.” These “dangerous gases” are of course carbon dioxide, produced by the burning of natural gas to fuel the extraction process. Carbon dioxide--harmless to humans, essential to plant life, common as air, but now reclassified as poison. Dangerous if you believe in the conventional theories about global warming and greenhouse gases.

The second problem dooming the Tar Sands and the world’s energy supply, is the worry that the natural gas, needed to refine the oil, will itself run out. Because natural gas is no more renewable than oil.

But the entire story miraculously avoids two simple words: nuclear power. Is it really inconceivable that a nuclear plant could be built in Ft. McMurray, far from major population centres, close to one of the world’s largest uranium deposits, to run the process? Producing, among other things, unlimited fuel and zero CO2 emissions?

Apparently so.

Similarly, I have been told by science teachers since I was in knee-pants—well, jeans--that the world was about to run out of fresh water. Never mind that this is one of the most renewable resources—renewed at every rain. Never mind that access to potable water, according to UN figures, is actually increasing worldwide every year, and has been since I was in those knee-pants. No, within a few decades—by now, in fact--everyone would be killing everyone else fighting over the next water hole.

It’s apparently an appealing image. Because, even though it hasn’t come true yet, exactly the same claim is currently being made loudly and hourly on CNN, that “the next wars will be over water,” to advertise their new (typically neutral, as the title suggests) series called “Earth in Peril.”

Hard to believe they’ve actually missed the fact that the surface of the world is over two-thirds water. It would be very hard for any species living on the remaining one-third of the earths surface to ever use it up.

Yes, that water is salty, and so unsuitable for drinking. No chance it could ever be useful, I suppose—this is the same thing they were saying about the Alberta Tar Sands for decades, in fact. But is desalinization such an unthinkable technology? A technology already supplying all the water for irrigation and drinking in several countries, including the one in which I currently reside?

Yes, it is still fairly expensive—at least compared to how cheap water is elsewhere. But are we really at the limits of what we can do with desalinization technology? And would we really end up killing each other, not due to any real shortage, but just to save a few bucks?

Now comes news that an Ottawa Valley student, Asha Suppiah, now 20, managed, as a science project when in grade school, using everyday materials, to literally double the efficiency of current solar desalination techniques. Just a kid working at her kitchen table. Because she is using common, everyday materials—cotton and wire mesh—her process ought to be accessible to just about anyone in the Third World. Because it is solar powered, the cost is only the purchase cost—it needs no fuel.

That’s some indication of just how primitive our desalination technology still is. We’ve just gotten started. We’re still at the Wright Brothers work-in-your-garage stage.

It’s also a good indication that we need is fewer teachers filling kids like Asha Suppiah with helpless, hopeless doom and gloom, and more encouraging them to innovate.