Last Friday I came across a note on a local town blog saying Let’s put utility lines underground in West Hartford. The fellow who writes the blog seems to be a good fellow (and it’s a fine blog, the sort of blog you want somebody in your town to be doing), and I generally agree with him that we should be willing, as a town, to invest money in improving our town and our lives. But when he suggested that we spend a quarter of a billion dollars over the next ten years or so to bury our electric cables underground, I had to stop for a moment. Worth the money to have a prettier city? Yes, I think so. Do it now? Now?
I don’t really know anything about electricity, or much of anything else, for that matter, but it seems to me highly likely that within 25 years or so, we will want to be converting the whole grid to be as clean as we can possibly be, and it seems conceivable to me that the conversion would involve different cables. Sure, cables are cables, and they don’t emit carbon whatnot (at least I don’t think they do), but still. Why not wait? If it turns out that the cables are fine, then bury them in twenty-five years. Let’s focus, here, people.
It reminds me of another shibboleth of mine, about how the green thing to do is to take that refrigerator, the twenty-year-old fridge that works just fine, right? The environmentally friendly thing to do is to take that fridge that’s in perfectly good shape and tip it into the landfill and buy yourself a new one. I call that counter-intuitive, but it’s true, isn’t it? Just throw the damn thing away, because it’s killing my grandchildren, and I know that throwing things away is the wrong thing to do, but it’s the right thing to do. And I think to myself that at some point, say, twenty-five years from now, we’re all going to decide that it’s time to get rid of all the old refrigerators, all the old clothes-dryers, all the old window A/C units, all the old internal combustion engines, all the old cathode ray tubes, all the old stuff-I-would-have-mentioned-if-I-knew-what-the-hell-I-was-talking-about, and get the new ones that don’t kill our grandchildren.
And we won’t be able to. We won’t have the infrastructure to do it. Think about it: if we said—today—if you have an window A/C unit that’s more than five years old, turn it in and we’ll give you a new one (like they do with mercury thermometers and handguns), could your town actually do it? Would they have the place to keep the ones they’re giving out, and the place to keep the ones they’re taking in, and a way to not have all the good ones stolen from the warehouse? No. And we know that something like that is going to happen. Not that exact thing, but something like it. And that’s the easy part to prepare for. Cheap. We know how to do it, more or less.
I’m hocking a tchaynik about this, I know, I know, but in England after the Great War they had a War Book, and the War Book didn’t tell them how to fight the war, it told them how to mobilize the populace. How to get the able bodies into the service. How to start printing up the ration books, and how to distribute them, and how to distribute the stuff that was being rationed. How to get the scientists out of the labs and universities and into different labs and universities, working on the war effort. Right? Now, I am not saying—not, really not—not saying we are going to have ration books and a Bletchley Park. It’s a different project. But we can be prepared for whatever we need to be prepared for, and the first step is getting prepared.
I don’t seem to have said this in this Tohu Bohu, yet, so I’ll go ahead and say it here, because I think it’s illustrative. If you agree with me, I hope you’ll repeat it in your own conversations, and hope it will spread, because I think that for all the Oscars and for all that John Edwards is paying for carbon offsets, we’re not really getting this.
I think that the impact of climate change over the next hundred and fifty years will be on the same scale as the first hundred and fifty years of the Little Ice Age of the Thirteenth Century, together with the Great Famine and the Black Death that followed it.And let’s be clear on that: the loss of a third to a half of the population of Europe. It may not be Europe this time that gets the worst of it. It could be much worse. It might not be nearly as bad. But if we want a model for climate change, that’s your boy. So let’s just maybe wait a bit before burying the cables, just in case we find something that helps, yes?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.