Recognition of the true nature of the world’s physical and spiritual problems requires the awareness of both where we are, and where we believe that we can be, in both realms. Light from the sun has been the center of early religions. Light from within has been a growing feature of many beliefs as levels of communication have developed. Life cannot exist on Earth, should the sun no longer shine. And, love would not exist, were it not that inherent existence of an Inner Light that tells us to value highly our neighbor.
We are now at the point in the road where the road divides. The choice of whether we choose a path that will sustain life, or one that leads to destruction, must soon be made. In the physical realm, the use of the renewable energy of the sun can be chosen. The human intellect has made possible the needed devices for accepting, transmitting, and storing solar energy, in the form of hydrogen. We have had over the past century the use of stored energy of the sun in the forms of petroleum, coal, and wood. The combustion process, the burning of those fuels, has been wasteful and inefficient, with damaging by-products that have increasingly despoiled our atmosphere and our hydrosphere. Continuing along that path, for our country, requires that we obtain or retain control of foreign petroleum resources.
Each of us contributes to that demand, as we use our automobiles or the energy from our electric power systems. Thus we are jointly responsible for the exploitation of those countries that keep our energy demand supplied. The Mideastern countries have responded, and with their demonstration of resistance to the control of their petroleum resources, have made terrorist attacks upon both major economic and military centers. By choosing this means, they have bypassed the superior technological capability to provide homeland security. By losing the energy security, in the event that the source of one-half of our petroleum supplies should be cut off, the specter of World War III emerges.
Two prior world wars have demonstrated that war is obsolete. Choosing to lose WWIII, before starting it (remembering Vietnam) could save millions of lives, as well as trillions of dollars. As Mahatma Gandhi has aptly observed, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
The engineering and the technology for building a sustainable world now exists. The will to utilize these concepts can still be capable of demonstrating that an alternate road can be taken. Educating people in all of this country must combine the physical with the spiritual awareness of the fact that there is still hope. This alternative, "win-win," peaceful, face-saving solution is the real possibility, which must be urged upon our governmental leaders. It requires a human concern for every other person. Call it concern, compassion, or love, it must be conceived within the hearts of all who wish to continue to exist.
This alternative can begin now. Jointly, the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union can initiate a new Marshall Plan-like system to build and install—and pay for—windmills in each of the nations that may be currently responsible for terrorism.
Our deliberate choice can be the building of the infrastructure for the conversion from a petroleum- to a hydrogen-based economy, all over the world. Harnessing the winds, the solar-produced forces available over land or sea, has been abundantly demonstrated to be a most economic system for the generation of electrical power. Converting this electric power, with modern diodes to rectify the alternating current to direct current, is the ideal way to manufacture hydrogen. This becomes evident when evaluating the
hidden costs of all other means of producing electricity.
Fortunately, the reversal of both global warming and global warfare can be made possible by embarking upon the solar hydrogen economy, and building it into the solar hydrogen civilization in the years immediately ahead.
Curtis Johnson
Medford, N.J.