If I Had a Billion Dollars

If you had 1 billion dollars, your could explore for gas or oil or even open a coal mining operation with your investment. In doing so you would be investing in an 18th century energy source that certainly has a deleterious impact on the environment. Your meager contribution to the warming of the planet may in and of itself be minimal, but with all the other investors doing the same, the effect is cumulative. The Laws of Thermodynamics are absolute. You cannot break them. They will break you. Or brake you.

with your 1 billion dollars you could also invest in a massive wind turbine farm or a PV solar array that generates electricity without adding carbon dioxide to the air or massive amounts of previously stored heat. You would earn your profits with a non-polluting 21st century technology. The decision would be yours to make as the owner of the capital.

Whether or not the activities of 307 million Americans are altering the planet is not as big a deal as the activities of 3 billon people who reside on the India subcontinent and in China. Everyone is adding his small contribution to the alteration of the planet.

"The biggest peril that humans face is not war. It is not hurricanes. It's not a pandemic disease. It's not even sea level rise due to Arctic ice melt. What it is is the change in weather patterns that impact the availability of fresh water and the growing of food crops. The summer of 2012 brought with it a US Heartland drought that decimated the crop yields. The East Coast received more than its share of precipitation as the weather patterns had shifted a thousand miles eastward. So far the world has only been inconvenienced by Supply and Demand price increases. Two or three years of this shifted weather pattern could make the total amount of food produced be too little to feed everyone." Source

Sao Paulo, Brazil has not gotten nearly enough rainfall to maintain reservoir levels in light of the 20 million people who live there and rely on that rain. The Summer of 2015 will be critical for the lives of those people as the water faucets slow to a drip. In a similar vein, Los Angeles and the California farm land are facing the same drought conditions with a Summer 2016 doom-date.

"Let's put Global climate Change in its proper perspective. What ever the causes, whatever the magnitude, we humans need to figure out how we will live in the New Equilibrium." Source

We human beings have the ingenuity and intelligence to solve our environment problems and distribute fresh water to every city and population center on the planet. We have the capacity to design other ways to do what we do without consuming massive amounts of water. We only need the will to do it.

Maybe you groused at my suggestion that "if you had $1 billion to invest." While you and I don't have that level of wealth, there are many people who do. It is they who need to be influenced and convinced to make their profits in way that do not hurt the rest of us (and themselves.)