Recently, in The Windsor Star, there was a statement that $1 trillion have been spent on the Iraq war over the last seven years. One trillion dollars are one million times $1 million. By Klaus Dohring

At an average cost of $8,000 for a solar thermal water heating system, this amount could have paid for 125 million solar water heating systems, enough to put one solar system on each and every American house.

 

A seven-year time frame would have been enough to accomplish this task.

 

Each and every American home and house being equipped with a solar water heating system today, this would save the U.S. about five per cent of its total annual fossil energy usage, right there and here and now.

 

A solar system has a useful life of about 35 to 40 years, and it would save the same amount of energy each and every year. The annual operating costs are negligible and it is perfectly clean and quiet and the cost of solar energy is free. No bullets fired, no pollution caused.

 

I question that the Iraq oil that the U.S. imports today amounts to five per cent of U.S. annual energy consumption and I question the energy supply security of Iraq oil for the next 35 to 40 years.

 

If we now consider the cost in human life, the consequential cost of treating the many traumatized people, the destruction in Iraq, etc., then it becomes very clear that it was a very bad mistake to send the army to try to solve the oil energy dependence issue.

 

The same amount of money spent more wisely by investing in solar and clean technology at home would have had a much more effective and positive and long-term effect at home, versus doing all the damage in a far away place that did nothing to alleviate the core issue, the dependence on fossil energies which need to be imported.

 

Carbon-impact is another support point in favour of solar and clean tech.

The main point is, sending the army to far away places is not the solution to our fossil energy predicament. Drilling more holes in deeper and deeper places is not the right answer either, as we should have learned in the last few months.

 

Canada, with its big investments into the dirty tarsands, is making a similar mistake as the U.S. did with the Iraq war. For the same amount of money being invested to extract X amounts of nasty heavy crude energy from the tarsands, we can harvest the same amount of clean energy every year here in southern Ontario if we were to invest the same amount of money into solar and other renewable energy technologies.

 

The big difference being, that the solar energy is clean, it comes to us, and it is perfectly reliable.

 

If we were to consider the consequential costs of the environmental disaster that the tarsand industry is causing, the picture would become even more favourable for solar and renewables and clean tech.

 

When are we going to realize this and start changing our ways about energy and the health of this planet?

KLAUS DOHRING 2010

Green Sun Rising Inc. 2010

Windsor Star 2010