Give your Children a Free Trip to TEOTWAWKI! You need do Nothing: NO ACTION is Required! Read the Following for Details: Coal makes 40% of Earth’s electricity and 70% of Earth’s steel. Petroleum (gasoline, oil, diesel, and jet fuel) powers 99% of Earth’s transport. Natural Gas makes 23% of Earth’s electricity and heats 51% of U.S. homes. Coal, Petroleum, and Natural Gas are all FOSSIL FUELS 86% of Earth’s total energy supply comes from FOSSIL FUELS. Fossil Fuels are Earth’s biggest industry – worth many TRILLIONS of dollars – and this industry is aggressively adept at protecting its interests – it does whatever it takes – right or wrong - to defend those interests. When we burn fossil fuels, we ALWAYS get energy and CARBON DIOXIDE (CO2) One cannot get energy from a fossil fuel without making CO2. More than 99% of that carbon dioxide escapes into our atmosphere. Starting with the industrial revolution, we humans have continuously increased our burning of fossil fuels, and thus increased our production of carbon dioxide at an ever increasing rate. (A mathematician would say the increase has been exponential and a physicist or engineer would say the increase has been accelerating.) When rational people have taken the trouble to look at the changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide content over the past few hundred years, they have seen that the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere matches the rise in fossil fuel CO2 production quite nicely. That production is accelerating upward, and the atmospheric content is doing the same thing.1 The rising percentage of atmospheric CARBON DIOXIDE (CO2) has TWO (2) spectacularly catastrophic consequences. 1. It is heating up the earth 2. It is making the ocean acidic. CO2 is heating up the earth because it is a greenhouse gas. (Greenhouse gases let sunlight IN to warm the earth, but they also act as insulation and keep some of the heat from escaping.) Earth’s glaciers and polar ice caps are already melting and the sea level is already rising. If our “business as usual” CO2 increase continues, it is conservatively predicted that by the year 2100 or possibly earlier, sea level will rise by as much as one to two meters (3.2 to 6.5 feet). Dry regions such as Australia and California will get dryer and wet regions will get wetter; millions of trees will die and forests will catch on fire. Agricultural regions will shift away from the equator and Millions of people and animals will be migrating away from intolerably hot equatorial regions. Powerful nations will collapse and chaos will rule the earth. Increasing CO2 is making the ocean acidic. When CO2 dissolves in water, it makes carbonic acid. The ocean’s coral reefs are already dissolving. If “business as usual” continues, by 2100 or possibly earlier, one-third of the ocean’s fish and other animal species will be dead from ocean acidification. 1 I have the matching graphs to back this up –and much more- at http://aneutronics.org/ The fossil fuel industry has paid a few dishonest scientists millions of dollars to testify and write papers denying the existence of climate change. It has spent hundreds of millions2 to bribe hundreds of members of congress and the media as well. This campaign has created much confusion between Americans but climate change evidence is still obvious to anyone who will take the trouble to look: the summer Arctic icecap is but a ghost of its former self, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has collapsed, and Greenland’s glaciers are collapsing into icebergs at ten times the rate of ten years ago. No matter how many hundreds of millions the fossil fuel industry spends, the very survival of human civilization and Earth as we know it will continue to mandate that fossil fuels must be replaced as an energy source and “business as usual” must come to an end. STARTING NOW. Our first priority must be rapid development of viable replacement energy sources such as fusion energy. Energy sources such as wind, solar, and tidal energy can make a significant contribution, but none of them can be a primary energy source because none of them can be relied upon to operate 24/7. All three of these “renewable sources” require backup energy sources, which at present, typically burn fossil fuels. Conventional nuclear FISSION power plants DO operate 24/7, but they are dangerous. Nuclear fission fuel processing is dangerous, nuclear fission waste disposal is dangerous, and the fission power plants themselves are dangerous. For proof it is quite sufficient to recall the ongoing nuclear waste problems at Hanford and the catastrophic destruction of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima Daiichi. However, nuclear FUSION need NOT be dangerous. There is at least one fusion reaction (called p-B11) that emits NO harmful radiation; the fuel is harmless Boron 11 which can be extracted from “Twenty Mule Team” Borax ®; and the only product is commercially useful helium (typically used in children’s balloons). The reactor (called the Polywell3) was under development by the EMC2 Corporation under contract from the US Navy for about 20 years and then dropped. However there was never enough funding to build a full-scale demonstration reactor. Smaller reactors (such as the WB-6, WB-7, and WB-8) have repeatedly and successfully proven the viability of such a device. The experiments have been peer-reviewed by independent teams of physicists knowledgeable in the field; and appropriate papers have been published and reviewed. However, construction of a full-scale demonstration reactor would apparently be too expensive and too speculative for venture capitalists. The U.S. Department of Energy –the only federal agency qualified to take on such a project- has refused to be involved. Even a brief and superficial internet investigation of recent U.S. Department of Energy projects will reveal the multi-hundred million dollar level of involvement between that department and the fossil fuel industry; and every Energy Department project that is NOT involved with the fossil fuel industry is either inadequate as a fossil fuel replacement (wind, solar) or is a demonstrable boondoggle such as the ITER fusion project in France and corn ethanol. “Business as usual” must come to an end. WE MUST CONVINCE OUR Federal Government to instead aggressively pursue rapid development of all promising fusion technologies, including the above p-B11 reaction and the Polywell. Or -if you wish- YOU can do NOTHING, let “business as usual” continue, and give your children that free trip to TEOTWAWKI4 2 One hundred million is peanuts to a trillion dollar industry. 100 million/1 trillion = 100,000,000/1,000,000,000,000 = 1/10,000 or 1 ten thousandth of their assets! 3 Go to www.polywellnuclearfusion.com 4 TEOTWAWKI = the end of the world as we know it