Clean Energy for the Future
In the beginning, there was only clean energy. Its renewable birth from itself established the primordial duality. Over time, dirty energy then developed from the decay of the fundamental clean energy.
Today, dirty energy is a filthy goo that bleeds from beneath the earth, an undifferentiated, fleshy stuff born of corruption itself. Burned, dirty energy fills the air with soot and sulfurous vapors. Its fumes make the world hot and fiery. Dirty energy reeks of poison. It gives off clouds of dust that clog the lungs and provoke cell pathologies. Dirty energy mutates our genes. Its repulsive smell reflects its turpitude, which inflames our tissues so that they eat us alive.
Dirty energy tempts us. When the righteous stand up to walk 0.7 miles to the store, a 15-minute stroll at an easy pace, dirty energy whispers: “Why not just drive?” America is dirty energy’s seraglio. Dirty energy dupes us into selling our souls for its power, and we become remorseful fiends, imprisoned in cholesterol and shame.
But clean energy promises a new future. Clean energy issues forth eternally from a huge, pie-shaped fusion synthesizer in the sky. It is the wind, the breath of the spirit. It is the flow of the waters in an endless symmetrical cycle. The rivers flow into the sea, but the sea does not fill. Pure immaterial sunlight forms both particles and waves, a divine contradiction. We can never exhaust clean energy. Even when we waste clean energy, it forgives us. Clean energy silently flows through circular conduits of unadulterated precious metals. Clean energy promises world peace.
Dirty energy lives deep below, in oily holes. In sweltering caves, far from the light of life and knowledge, soot-caked Scots-Irish miners pick at its deposits before emerging to beat one another up in dingy bars. Soulless industrial titans and Oriental despots trade in dirty energy. Dirty energy covers the birds of the sky in its filthy black cloak. Clean energy comes from the dimensionless aether above. Dirty energy is obscure, impenetrable, mysterious. Clean energy is transparent, universal, and equitably distributed. Dirty energy sounds like a drunk driver with psychopathic personality disorder tearing through a forest on a dirt bike, emitting savagery, sexual obsessions and heavy metals. Clean energy sounds like platinum, lithium, and clean code piloting an autonomous vehicle safely through a normally-distributed environment to the tune of a euphonious ambient hum.
Dirty energy has infected the souls of the weak for generations. During the benighted epochs of the past, nature was red in tooth and claw. It was a war of each against all. Life was a series of cigarettes, beers, and beatings, ending early in cardiac arrest. The world was a den of iniquity, soot, domestic abuse, sodium, canned food. Office work consisted of nothing more than institutionalized white-collar crime. Pot-bellied bosses with suspenders and cufflinks and round red faces bellowed orders at their cringing vassals while they sucked cancer sticks and harassed the typists, who also smoked while they typed, the cigarette fumes soaking deep into the carpets, upholstery, and formica countertops. People ate oysters at lunch. There was pink carpeting around the toilets. People smoked while they shat. Bosses enforced rigid schedules, because they never stretched. Seedy boosters invoked the grimoires of “self improvement.” All the clothing smelled of cigarettes. A stream of tobacco-smelling wastewater drained out of the back of every laundromat, mixed with detergent and fake lavender scents, straight into rivers of molten slag. Such was life in the kingdom of dirty energy.
The radio never ceased to squawk baseball, huge gatherings of indolent people drinking beer and watching schlubby men dip chaw in the dust. Whenever the announcer wasn’t calling plays, he would start in on a litany of crass insinuations. Everyone would laugh with their mouths open while they chewed sausage, spewing clouds of bacteria and viruses. Environmental impurities deteriorated infants’ brain stems, provoking the development of mental pathology. People threw their peanut shells everywhere, spit on the ground, and used racial slurs. Geriatric drunks outside the stadium would piss between gasoline-powered cars. Nitrogen, sulfur, ozone, tire dust, hair spray and saturated fat drove the denizens of American cities mad with lust, anger, spite and mendacity. The vileness of dirty energy ruled.
People would set up grills on the backs of their trucks and cook huge chunks of pork over lumps of smoldering carbon. Their hams were big cubes of compressed slime scraped from slaughterhouse floors and mixed with nitrates. Then people would coat the meat with iodized salt and cane sugar imported from dictatorships, and eat it with their hands, making loud smacking noises and drinking caustic soda and lagers that clogged their arteries and exhausted their insulin response. Because of all the sausage they were always constipated, and they voted accordingly. After their cookouts they’d litter all the beer cans and butcher paper and pour grease down the man holes. Then they’d smoke cigarettes, complain, harass young female relatives, and yell at their radios.
No one wore seatbelts or sunscreen, so people’s faces dripped with moles, sunspots, cancerous lesions, and wrinkles. When men sunned their chests at tailgate parties, their sagging flesh would hang out covered in ingrown hair, clogged pores, warts, fading tattoos, and other testaments to pollution, unprocessed trauma, toxic opinions and body shame. Ammonium sludge crystallized into distortions such as jeri curls and frosted tips. People’s teeth were crooked and stained because of cousin marriage, grits, dibenzofuran ingestion, rickets and fundamentalism. All the cigarette smoking, hazelnut creamer, styrofoam cups, pomade, 10-karat gold, bouillon cubes, hypopituitary dwarves, body spray, and petrochemicals combined in highly oxidative reactions to destroy the extracellular matrix, government transparency, and the intelligibility of history.
The past was nothing but a dog’s breakfast of gas-guzzling muscle cars, sexual misconduct, political backlash, coal mining, corn beer, lead paint, second-hand smoke, drunk driving, chain smoking, asbestos, slave driving, dive bars, pink slime, endosulfan, narcissism, unsorted recycling, corn syrup, perversion, speeding, baseball, inappropriate language, head injuries, conventional produce, patriarchy, coal, hydrogenated soybean oil, hair spray, and hard-boiled fiction. All these ignominies lie forever obscured behind the thick veil of cigarette smoke that clouds our origins. And they were all predicated on the reign of dirty energy: on coal, crude oil, dealings with Arabs, on dictatorships, on Arab dictatorships, on Greek oil tankers, going Greek, oil spills, methane emissions, gaslighting, bathrobes, hair curlers, codependency and dysfunctional families.
The past stank of ashtrays, aerosols, rancid seed oils, tanneries, cow manure, gunpowder, oiled jack-boots and sjamboks. Women’s faces were caked in arsenic and smelled like methyl carbylamine. Teenage couples engaged in unprotected sex and then smoked in bed. Their homes smelled of gas-station coffee, deep fried chicken, halitosis, black mold, acetone, burning plastic, Seagram’s 7, Colgate toothpaste and bug spray. Baby formula contained butanone. Dentists held clown shows before filling teeth with prussic acid. People wore polyester. All the infectious diseases and tainted vaccines destroyed nuance and empathy.
Men’s brains were so damaged from cadmium smoke and microwaved food that they hardly spoke at all. They exhibited traits of schizotypal disorder, evangelism and bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Most of them only grunted, farted, cursed, berated one another with unspeakable epithets, and brawled. Their long-suffering wives slept on lumpy furniture and filled their homes with the smell of burning hair, formaldehyde, cyclosiloxanes, sodium hydroxide, borderline, diethanolamine and racist commentary. Every night they served their families one variation or another of cornstarch gravy from a lead can. The fusion of tuberculosis and radioactive quackery in the thymus caused the working class to become convinced that they were historically situated. Latrines spawned epidemics of “corn cob fever,” killing up to half of children born due to poverty. Because of all the paraquat and stress eating, people began to develop neurasthenia, rationalization, cultural chauvinism, sexual cathexis and epistemological psychosis. The children of toxic couples were often born underweight, with low self-esteem and susceptible to political paranoia.
But that was all in the past, a past that our ancestors somehow survived long enough to bring us into being. Their suffering is almost impossible to imagine. They deserve pity. But they also deserved their lot, because of their superstitions, their hypocrisies, their prejudices, their addictive personalities, their dependence on oil, their iconoclasm, their idiotic enthusiasm for baseball. It will take billions of dollars of clean energy investment to remediate their memory.
Clean energy demands sacrifice. It demands the sacrifice of naivete, the sacrifice of comfort, and the sacrifice of the partisans of dirty energy. The wanton assume that clean energy will save them, and they go on eating Chilean sea bass, huffing 5G electrosmog, doom scrolling, and living in Michigan. We cannot exhaust clean energy’s benevolence, but it will forsake those who tempt it. Humanity will no longer tolerate the malingering and hostile silence of dirty energy’s apologists.
The future belongs to clean energy. In the circular, neverending economies of the future, we will transform the toxic into the wholesome using pure sunlight and technology. For example, imagine a sewer pipe coming out of an underserved neighborhood, some chaotic place full of buzzword coinage and censoriousness. Disadvantaged sewage is saturated with microplastics, albumins, behavioral poverty, free radicals, wegovy, coronavirus, amoxicillin, glycophosphates, rat poison, burnout, threadworms, bologna, radium, toxoplasma, teflon, nail polish, spandex, wet wipes, trans fat and cortisol. In the clean energy future, these wastes will all flow into a wind-powered, robotic processing plant, run on self-correcting computer code, that will cleanse the water of its impurities. Bisphenol-free drip irrigation networks will deploy these resources according to globally-accepted standards, which are developed according to international best practices for the development of procedures. The purified water will then be used to grow organic, vegan produce for equitable distribution, whose wholesomeness will improve humankind in a virtuous circle. Heirloom draft animals and farm workers with college degrees will deploy genetically-engineered mycelium nanobots to cleanse the soils of phytotoxins, peanuts, polyvinyl chloride, prozac, fluoride, hentai, Tide pods, unsorted recycling, invasive species, long covid, manifest destiny, mutagens, heavy water, bosons, poppers, obscenity, ethanol, imposter syndrome, crack cocaine, human remains, infectious proteins, disinfectants, hate speech, Swisher Sweets Banana Smash, nacho cheese sauce, and residues of Dior Sauvage.
Using mere drops of water per plant, next-generation sequencing, artificial intelligence and a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, we will transform all the dross of the past into robust vegetables high in micronutrients whose consumption as part of a balanced diet can promote world-class performance, clear brain fog, improve self-esteem, and overcome historical barriers to vegetable access. Healthy diets will nurture the development of healthy relationships, critical thinking, and healthy food choices. The clean energy boom will eliminate the national debt and lift the sentence of condemnation we suffer for our transgressions in the time of dirty energy.
In the world of clean energy, humankind will finally know peace and establish lasting sustainability. Geothermal power will fill public spaces with newly inspired communities engaged in spontaneous folk dancing. Wind-powered dating applications will seamlessly integrate the satisfying relationship pipeline. Solar farms will power new cities of consultants using AI to optimize relationship management in consumer finance projects. Their workstations will be holographic and their decoration so minimalist that it will be hard to tell whether they’re still corporeal. Self-disinfecting surfaces and HEPA filters will scan for and eliminate pollen, mycotoxins, legionella, pigeons, fire ants, brain-eating amoebas, deer flies, horse flies, warthog flies, snake mites, rat fleas, flatulence, climate dread, locusts, killer bees, giant hornets, piranhas, colossal squid, cockroaches on steroids, surströmming, the unemployed, diabolical ironclad beetles, purple drink, and bats.
With mental hygiene and a language finally cleared of rampant euphemism, we will heal our contagious hate, transcend status anxiety, lift the weight of depression, achieve appetite control, increase productivity, restore our sexual function, find humility, eliminate age-related disease by 2060, and accept reality.
Clean energy will bring ever more cleanliness. Statistical models will eliminate bias in our interpretation of the human condition. Clean energy technology will lay the groundwork for accelerated development of clean energy technology. Circular economies will create new ways to recycle.
But we will always have more work to do to contain the spread of outdated futures. Dirty energy can pose as clean energy, sowing political quadriplegia. Such corruption can occur when clean energy comes into contact with its counterpart by theoretical implication. Solar-powered criteria for the evaluation of energy cleanliness can themselves become tainted. The protean nature of the absurdity-nonsense dialectic contaminates clean-dirty narratives. But by drawing on the lessons of history, we will overcome new historical constraints. The fight against dirty energy and the enemies of humanity is a movement behind which all humanity can unite, for a future finally free of the past. Its sustainability will renew itself and its novelty will sustain itself.
The best thing about it, though, is that we will finally end the muckraking and trash obsessions of pollution’s most wicked devotees, the archeologists.
(To be continued.)