1.From Malthusian catastrophe to today’s Dire Climate Change fears
Who hasn’t heard of the dire warnings about climate change as THE potentially catastrophic crisis ahead of our world? The most radically dangerous version of a “climate” solution that we have heard is a reported ruling by the Netherlands to their farmers to stop growing food.
Two important events of this week may have a positive impact on this “crisis”. The second event was the bold declaration by Vivek Ramaswamy in this week’s Republican debate:
- “The climate change agenda is a hoax. And we have to declare independence from it. And the reality is the anti-carbon agenda is the wet blanket on our economy. And so, the reality is, more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”
That made us think back to a scare campaign launched by a British guy named Malthus more than 200 years ago. That scare was called the Malthusian catastrophe, the Malthusian trap or the population trap. He preached that the earth will run of food because population growth would exceed the food our world can grow. And the Brit-Nazis tried to implement their pre-Hitler solution on India by means that don’t need to be discussed here.
What happened? Technology proved Malthus to be totally wrong. Today’s population is several times larger but we humans can feed it well, if not equally well. There are so many other smaller versions of Malthus-Climate Change like shrill warnings. For example, “experts” bemoaned about the grim future of India because India would never be able to afford to build telephone towers & stretch copper wire across India to bring telephone services to all of India. Their calculations were right but they didn’t see cellphones coming.
Just recently, India’s Reliance launched a $12 cellphone with data in India, a phone that just about every Indian can afford to buy. The Indians who can afford to buy Apple’s iPhone won’t buy that but a vast majority of Indians can & will buy it.
Remember how long they kept telling us that America is in major geopolitical trouble because our appetite for oil is far far greater than the small quantities of oil we can drill in America. Then the American industry developed “fracking” technology and America quickly became the largest producer of energy in the world.
That brings us to the stark & racist poverty-creating demands repeated by candidate Nicki Haley in this week’s Republican debate. She said, in a neo-Malthusian way, that she would pressure India & China to “stop polluting“. The reality is both China & India are increasing the use of coal to fire electricity generation plants in India; not an ideal solution but the only one they can afford given the huge demands of their populations (see Malthus keeps coming back!).
2. India’s landing on the Moon’s South Pole
That brings us to technology, not merely on our planet but on our satellite planet. Apparently, the best fuel to make electricity in large qualities & without any residue byproduct is to use Helium 3 in a nuclear reactor.
As Wikipedia writes:
- “Unlike most nuclear fusion reactions, the fusion of helium-3 atoms releases large amounts of energy without causing the surrounding material to become radioactive.”
Unfortunately, the earth does not have much Helium 3. So why bring up Helium 3?
Because of the “first event” we alluded to above. That event was the successful landing & exploration by India’s Chandra-Yaan-3 on the South Pole of the Moon – the first such landing by any country in the world. India won this in competition with Russia which launched its own craft after India’s Chandra-Yaan was launched & tried to land their craft before India’s Chandra-Yaan was to land. Unfortunately Russia’s craft crashed on the Moon’s south pole surface.
In contrast, India’s Space Agency (ISRO) methodically & patiently landed their “Vikram” lander on the Moon’s south pole. And now the rover of the Craft is also moving around the Moon’s south pole surface & collecting stuff.
Why is the Moon’s South Pole so critical? Because, as India’s Chandra-Yaan-1 discovered in 2008, the South Pole of the Moon “has water, in the form of molecules formed by hydrogen & oxygen” and “the moon’s surface could have more treasures Iron, Titanium, Aluminium, Magnesium, even silicon“. And, the clip below (released before the landing of Chandra-Yaan-3) points out that “NASA thinks there is ample supply (of Helium 3) on the moon; as much as 1 million tons if estimates turn out to be right“.
The fact that India is the first country to land its spacecraft on Moon’s South Pole may prove really important. And not just for India but even for America. Because both India & USA are signatories of the Artemis Accord while Russia & China are a part of a competing group. But what about the Outer Space Treaty of 1966 that states that no country can claim sovereignty over the Moon? Well, as the above clip points out, the Treaty is silent on whether a country or a group of countries can claim sovereign status over a “part of the moon“!
It is great that there are a million tons of Helium 3 on the south pole of the Moon; we can also see facilities built on Moon Space Stations to mine Helium 3 or generate electricity. But how could that Helium 3 or the generated electricity be brought back to earth? Guess what? At least one country has thought about bringing back Helium 3 to earth! Yes, China said back in 2014 that “Mining Helium (He-3) from our Moon may help Solve the World’s Energy Crisis in Fusion Reactors“.
*If you scoff at the below as being too futuristic & irrelevant, think how the notion of shipping oil in supertankers might have seemed to Malthus & other scare-mongers inspired by his ilk.
Is it possible that use of Helium 3 from the South Pole of the Moon could provide a clean solution to our earth’s necessity of generating affordable electricity for us humans? We think that the above or other better space driven solutions would be far superior to the poverty-creating climate change policies marketed by verbose mega-rich donors that are actually hurting common people as Vivek Ramaswamy pointed out above.
We hope candidate Nicki Haley recognizes that. If she does, then she can go campaign for the job she seems to want fervently – to be the President of Ukraine!
Editor’s PS – If you want to read about India’s Chandra-Yaan & what its success means to India & what ramifications it has for future space exploration, watch the clip below from DW News of Germany:
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