Drill, Baby, Drill?

The ongoing spill in the Gulf of Mexico and its potential calamitous environmental consequences have caused some, for the moment, including the President of the United States, to reexamine the advisability of lifting the prohibition on expanded offshore drilling. But this current disaster will soon fade from our collective consciouness, as did the Exxon Valdez, from which we are still cleaning up 21 years later. Then the clarion call will again resound from sea to shining sea: "Drill, Baby, drill!" We Americans have miopic worldviews, short attention spans, rapacious appetites, and are hellbent on immediate gratification: we want what we want when we want it, and damn the longterm consequences (not least of which are the lethal and prohibitively expensive military misadventures increasingly required to ensure our own oil supplies). No matter that fossil fuels befoul the biosphere--and no matter that reserves are finite and exhaustible (remember that Pennsylvania once, before it was pumped dry, was America's primary source of oil)--we love our internal combustion engines and we demand cheap gasoline!
Guardians of the public welfare also seem to have forgotten, or choose to ignore, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and are now proposing an increased reliance on nuclear energy. The U.S. already has 104 functioning nuclear power plants. None has been commissioned since the 1970s. Now President Obama, in search of cleaner and more sustainable energy sources, plans to dramatically increase our nuclear capability. The gorilla in the room, however, that receives scant attention in the political spin, is the conundrum of radioactive waste disposal. Nuclear waste deteriorates over time--a lot of time! Plutonium-239, for example, has a half-life of 24,000 years-- that means that only half of its original radioactivity will have dissipated after two-dozen millennia; to ensure the survivability of future generations, experts caution that nuclear waste must be contained in leakproof vessels for up to 100,000 years! By way of contrast, the earliest Egyption pyramid was built less than 5000 years ago. The "General Sherman," a Sequoya thought to be the oldest living thing on Earth, is about 2000 years old. And the crumbling containment vessel at Chernobyl, which must already be replaced, is 24 years old. The Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada is optimistically expected to remain sound for 10,000 years; by then, planners are assuming future advanced technologies will provide a permanent solution. So, we are being asked, depending on one's predilection, to bet on the beneficence of god or the cleverness of the alchemists to save us from ourselves. Either way, I say that's a foolhardy (and dangerous) wager!
We developed the atomic bomb (and landed men on the moon)--quickly, once our national resolve had been steeled. We now need a new Manhattan Project to develop safe, practical, renewable alternative energy sources. But even a concerted global energy initiative would not address other man-made doomsday threats: deforestation, pollution of our waterways and depletion of fisheries, desertification with disappearance of arable farmlands, etc. Ten thousand years ago, there were fewer than five million human beings inhabiting/plundering Planet Earth; a hundred years ago there were 1.75 billion (a 350-fold population increase); today, we are about seven billion; and, unchecked, by 2050 we are projected to number ten billion--each occupying a parcel of precious land, each consuming a portion of dwindling natural resources, each generating tons of noxious refuse. We must, before it is too late, confront the disquieting fact that the pervasive problem underlying all others is us--too many of us!