The phone rang and woke me from an impromptu nap in front of my computer. It was Max. He asked, “Do you see how much confidence Exxon is placing on the Copenhagen meeting to reduce carbon emissions?”

Groggily, I answered, “What are you talking about?”

Max laughed. “While the politicians and the liberals and those poor benighted Europeans are causing a hullabaloo and demanding impossible-to-keep promises, Exxon is still operating in the real world and has ponied up $31 billion to purchase an outfit called XTO Energy.”

“Who is XTO Energy?”

“XTO develops natural gas trapped in dense rock formations around the globe? You remember, the technology has gotten good in only the last ten years or so.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “The Bakken shale and all that stuff. So, they are going into the natural gas business?”

“Big time,” Max answered. “And you know the reason?”

“Gas gives off only half the CO2 that oil does?”

“That’s part of it,” he replied. “I was surprised to learn something else. Back in 2000, oil accounted for 36% of the world’s energy mix. But in 2007, oil accounted for 34% of the global mix while natural gas held constant at 21%. Over the next 20 years, the experts calculate that the demand for natural gas is going to grow by 1.5% a year and oil demand will be in a slow decline. Glomming up XTO makes Exxon into what will probably be the biggest producer of natural gas in the good ol’ US of A.”

“It’s already the biggest oil company,” I said.

“Ta da!” Max chuckled. “No one ever said those guys were stupid. We both know it’s probably one of the best run companies if not the best run on the planet.”

“Wait a minute, Max. Gas is superabundant right now and the price is low. Is this going to improve their profit picture?”

“They aren’t worried about that, I understand. This one is for the long haul. You know ol’ T. Boone has been after the government to phase into natural gas for transportation. It looks like Exxon is going to back him up.”

I said, “Ha! Someone finally listened to me! I kept saying there ain’t goin’ to be any practical non-carbon-based transportation fuel for decades.”

“You should be proud,” Max laughed. “The mighty Exxon listened to you.”

“That’s why I buy their stock,” I replied.

Max and I were sitting at my breakfast bar looking out the window at a dull, gray, misty day where the temperature had dropped into the low forties. It was one of those days when old lady’s joints ache and old vets feel the rheumatiz in their wounds. I told Max about an Army chopper pilot I worked with in DC who said he was wounded seven times in Viet Nam and he had arthritis in six of those places.

“Six places?” Max asked. How about the seventh one?”

“That’s were he was hit in the head. He never got arthritis there,” I told him.

Max chuckled and shook his head, remembering, I think, other old friends that had wounds. Suddenly his mien changed and he looked serious.

“What if the Russkies are right?”

“Huh?” I grunted. “Bout what?”

“Global cooling,” he replied. “The Russkie scientists believe the sun is entering a quiet period and the Earth will cool instead of heat. The Russian Academy of Sciences astronomical observatory says that the Earth is entering a period of global cooling which will peak between 2055 and 2060.

“Yep, that’s what I undestand,” I replied. “I have no way of knowing if they are right. I know only what I read about it. But I do remember some Aussie scientists found that the climate models being used by the UN people didn’t have all the answers; that they left something out. The implication was they were too thin on solar activity.”

“I remember that,” Max said. “I have been doing some reading on the Dark Ages and The Little Ice Age. It sure as hell was not a pretty picture, pretty scary in fact. One of the researchers, I think it was Fagan, said, ‘It was not a good time to be alive on Planet Earth.’ The title of his book was The Little Ice Age: How climate change made history. What made it so bad was the world had just come off the Medieval Warming Period. For hundreds of years there had been warm weather, rain, more than enough food, some populations had doubled, there was plenty of wealth and the whole world was having a high old time. Then bang! In only 23 years, the Little Ice Age came on the world and all hell broke loose. There was drought, famine, depopulation, war and rampant disease. In the second half of the 18th century, people in New York could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice. One of the researchers said he believed that the crop failures in Europe caused the famines that led to the French Revolution. The Chinese were forced to abandon fruit orchards that had produced for hundreds of years.”

“What’s your conclusion?” I asked.

“If history is any indicator, my conclusion is that cooling, if it gets that bad, is going to be a hell of a lot worse than heating,” Max said, shaking his head sadly. “And, if all this is due to the sun, we have absolutely no choice. There’s nothing we can do about it except lay in a few decades worth of firewood.”

“I don’t think the EPA will allow that,” I said. “Burning all that biomass will probably be illegal. They’ll probably order your chimney plugged.”

“Well, in that case, I’ll lay in a couple decades worth of brandy and coffee and we’ll gut it out.”

I laughed and asked, “Something to look forward to, isn’t it? We have either Algorian heating of the planet and while we sizzle in our own juices, drowned baby polar bears wash up on the beach at Malibu . The other choice is, since we won’t be able to emit carbon dioxide, we’ll just freeze to death in the dark.”

“To whom do we go to complain about the choices?” Max asked.

“Short of doing something hysterical like praying, nothing. I don’t think anyone on Earth has the answer. But then, in a hundred years we’ll be dead and won’t know the difference and the history books, if there are any, probably will blame the Bush Administration for whatever happened. We’ll be walking golden streets and listening to angels playing their harps.”

Max raised his eyebrows. “That sounds incredibly boring! You might do that but I rather think I’ll be down in the infernal region with all the really interesting people.”

“You shouldn’t have any problem with staying warm enough.”

Note: Obama is going to Copenhagen to talk about reducing carbon levels by 83% below 2005 levels by 2050. He hopes that such noble sacrifice on our part will inspire the Chinese and Indians to follow suit. However, I have noticed that China has proposed a less impressive reduction goal and one couched in weasel words. They say they propose to reduce “carbon intensity” or the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic output,[1] by 40 to 45% compared with 2005 levels. This means less CO2 output per unit of GDP. So if GDP grows like mad, which they are counting on, that means no substantial reduction at all. It’s like a politician saying “there’s been an upturn in the downturn” or announcing that the state added “12,000 new jobs last month” without mentioning the 22,000 people that were laid off in the same period.

***********************************************************************

Max had been out of town for a few days visiting old spook friends. Yesterday, he came in the back door and called, “Hey, Mom, I’m home.”

“Oh good!” I replied. “I thought maybe the hogs had et ya.”

He sat on my couch and asked, “What’s the latest in Adventureland?”

“If you mean the US of A, Tiger Wood got in trouble and surprised everyone. However, Hugh Hefner said he was surprised that everyone else was surprised.”

Max laughed. “Old Hugh Billy Goat probably knows whereof he speaks. He knows more about monkeying around that the rest of us put together. What’s happening on the political front?”

“It appears that the Mighty Oz is still going to Copenhagen and put on his best face. I think he’s going to make some promises that the Senate wouldn’t approve in a hundred years and no one is going to believe anyway. By the way, in your last rant, you were decrying the lack of stuff that we would need to straighten out the atmosphere before 2100? I ran across an Op-Ed that actually listed all the crap we would need.”

“No kidding! According to who or whom? Whatever.”

“A fellow named Richard K. Lester, that’s whom,” I said. “He’s a professor and head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. And he’s also director of the Industrial Performance Center .”

“What the heck is that?”

“I knew you’d ask so I checked on it. It’s is an MIT-wide research unit, based in the School of Engineering, that comprises faculty members, students and research associates from the Schools of Engineering, Management, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Science, and Architecture and Planning. These egg-heads observe, analyze and report on strategic, technological, and organizational developments in a broad range of industries and examine the implications for society and the global economy. On the basis of all that, they devise training to meet the needs of the technology, or something on that order.”

“Okay, I’m impressed, so he’s brainy. What does he say?”

I reached into my In-Basket and pulled out a clipping. I said, “Since I can’t possibly remember half what he said, I’ll read it to you. He calls this a recipe, by the way. A little egg-head humor I suppose.

1. ‘Add 30,000 megawatts of new wind turbines every year between now and 2050. He adds, in an aside, that this is four times what was added in 2008 which was a record year.

2. Add another 35,000 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity annually from now to 2050. He also adds that this annual amount is more than 100 times what we added last year, a record year for solor too.

3. Then we multiply the nuclear reactor supply fivefold by midcentury.

4. Retrofit all existing coal-fired plants with carbon capture and storage technology.

5. Build twice as many new plants with carbon capture and storage, allowing the substitution of natural gas for coal as long as we used the carbon capture gimmick on them too.

All this would make the electric power system four times bigger than today.’

“Then he goes on…”

“There’s more?” Max asked, aghast.

“Sure,” I said. “Just be quiet and listen.”

‘Two-thirds of the car and truck fleet would be powered by electricity and the rest would run on advanced biofuels. As this would reduce carbon emissions by 83%.’

I put down the article and smiled at Max. “Whaddaya think?”

“But we don’t have a carbon capture and storage technology!" Max grumbled, frowning. "We don’t have advanced biofuels. We don’t have a system of wind and solar that works when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.”

“You broke the code, Max. What Dickie Lester is telling us, it can’t be done without spending several trillion bucks and getting lucky on biofuels and we're already behind schedule, not to mention we're already broke and we owe our butts to the heathen Chinee!”

Max sagged on the couch. “Do you remember the days when a billion dollars was a substantial amount of money and not just chump change?”

“I do,” I replied. “As Margaret Mitchell said, and I paraphrase, “Those days are gone with the wind.”

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[1] The Week, December 11, 2009, p.10.

P. S. Prof Lester's original data is on line at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Industrial Performance Center. Google turns it up in an instant.