first published in weblog five on Thursday 5th January 2006

I didn’t plan it this way...life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans...but over the next two days I will be driving my daughter’s Peugeot 106 well over a hundred miles. Today I did half of them going in and out of Cardigan twice. And tomorrow’s monthly Carmarthen day will do the rest. All this to-ing and fro-ing will leave me some ten pounds out of pocket. But goodness knows what it will cost the planet. The real planetary burden comes embedded in what Ivan Illich refers to as a structural monopoly. The planet needs a complete energy infrastructure make-over.

Mind you I am a little more optimistic than most about our energy futures. Buckminster Fuller assured me that the world economy went into surplus in the fifties making the classical economics of scarcity of our ruling elites redundant. This was more by luck than judgement. The bottom line is that modern scarcities are man-made. So why not peace crime tribunals to deal with the criminals who create them?

The developed world has been quietly switching from coal to oil to natural gas. The journey from a carbon to a hydrogen economy continues as the car-makers bring out their hydrogen vehicles...see my Energy Wars article. We need energy for three things: heating space, rushing ourselves and our stuff about and winding things up. Space seldom needs to be warmer than one hundred degrees celsius...the first nonsense of the nuclear kettle technology. And electricity demands will be coming down over the next few decades as the world gets smarter at doing more with less...which is the next bit of nuclear nonsense. The $100 wind-up lap-top computer unveiled by Nicholas Negroponte recently is a good example of the trend.

In just half an hour Earth’s very own nuclear reactor ninety three million miles away showers our back gardens with enough power to keep ‘us and ours’ going for a whole year. In the best of all possible energy worlds, grids and cables would be taxed until the pipes squeak and households (not companies) would be paid in local money for any surplus power they could donate to the village or parish pool. As long as the fifty year old technology...formerly known as cheap atomic power...is kept in business by massive public subsidies, the whole energy cost and price structure will be so distorted that it will be well-nigh impossible for a sane, humane, ecological (SHE) energy infrastructure to emerge.

Nuclear fission is a mug’s game and hot fusion is not much better. But don’t get me wrong. The power of atoms and molecules is well worth exploring. But the most promising effects takes place at room temperature. The science of colloids is interesting. Goethe is where it’s at...and Rudolf Steiner was first and foremost a Goethe scholar who spent his formative years pouring over the great man’s scribblings.

Check out The Secret Life of Plants and Secrets of The Soil by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird before dismissing me as a complete nutter. And if you feel really inspired go google your way through searches for scientific papers by the likes of Henri Coanda, Patrick Flanagan, Olof Alexanderson, Alex Podolinsky, Philip Callahan and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. You could also do worse than download my article Megaliths, Meis & Miners.

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