Our solutions to our population and environmental demand problems can be elegant instead of catastrophic.  We don’t have to go to war to control petrol reserves, [1] we could re-tool our fuel economy to run on fuels we can develop, capture, and benefit from without bombing anyone, intelligent or otherwise, on the small blue planet.

[2] Methane Gas Capture

The way that we bring the planet into balance is through elegant thinking, elegant being.  We currently have a problem with the buildup of certain gases in the atmosphere that are causing the planet to heat up with disastrous consequence for many living things.  An elegant approach to this problem is to look at the capture of one of these gases, methane, and it’s use as a relatively clean fuel.  It burns much more cleanly than gasoline or coal in terms of other greenhouse gases, so the capture of methane is a twofer.  We reduce the atmospheric buildup of a powerful greenhouse gas and we burn it in place of less clean fuels, thereby producing less other greenhouse gases as combustion byproduct when we burn methane instead of gas, diesel, or coal.

This is happening.  At various places around the small blue planet methane is being captured as a fuel instead of being emitted as a potent greenhouse gas.  Here are some examples:

•  [3] Environomics - Waste2Profits.com - feedlot waste digesters
•  [4] Great Lakes Biomass Partnership 
• [5] Harvard University study on methane capture from landfills
• [6] San Antonio Waste Water Methane Recapture Contract

The solution to our environmental problems is to find the solution within the problem somehow.    Here is a thought from a great thinker and problem-solver:

[7] When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

R. Buckminster Fuller