K.E. Lanning's Blog, page 5

It’s Going to be a Bumpy Night…

Recently, I was watching the movie, All About Eve, and loving the high drama of stage life full of back-stabbing and theatrics. Then I thought about the election year… damn… what a parallel. A few juicy quotes from that film tell the tale of the insane politics we’re living through.

Politics is always nuts, but how did we get this out of whack? Fear and anger have pushed not only the country but the world into dangerous ground. Fear and anger born of economic instability brewing for decades and now coming home to roost. The cocks are crowing and the eggs have been laid for foment. World War II sprang from the Great Depression; can we control the instability of the world so the ominous specter of another world war doesn’t rise? Is the turmoil in the Middle East the fire or the match?

The rise of anger has been manipulated by Trump for pure self-interest but he did not create it. He hides his flaws while exposing the weaknesses of his opponents. Bette Davis’ character, Margo Channing eloquently says, “In this rat race, everybody’s guilty until they’re proved innocent.”

Hillary is no angel either. Maybe she’s channeling Bette Davis… “The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster.” Clinton has experience and is probably as nasty as any other world leader; perhaps she deserves to be president. After all, “Everyone has a heart—except some people.”

And bizarrely, the populist breeze creates an atmosphere where the candidates trot across the stage expounding on how they ‘know your pain’ as if they were average folks. In a paraphrased line from All About Eve from the theater critic character, “This ignores the fact that their greatest attraction to the public is their complete lack of resemblance to normal human beings.”

It’s been a slimy presidential race to the bottom. God, I’ll be glad when election evening is here. But fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night…

K.E. Lanning

 

Your soul doesn't know what color you are

Your soul doesn’t know what color you are.

Nor does it know if you’re female or male. It just is. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Your soul is precious and needs to be fed, watered and protected. Don’t do things which damage your soul—don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t lie, don’t needlessly hurt someone, including yourself. In other words, follow the golden rule: do unto others what you would want others to do unto you. It’s really that simple.

Do not blame your parents for problems with your soul. They are human, too, so perhaps they weren’t the best at that difficult job—forgive them—it’s good for your soul.

I once read that our personalities consist of three parts: Adult, Parent, and Child. Three aspects of our personalities, but we only have one soul.

Adult:  Show self-restrain, put others above your childish interests and you will thrive.

Parent:  Exponential of the above and your children will thrive.

Child:  Have fun, learn something and you will thrive.

Your soul needs you to let it bloom into the beautiful flower it was meant to be—always grab opportunities to grow. If you feel stifled, you need to move to better soil.

Even if the epiphany of acknowledging your soul comes late, it doesn’t matter—your soul doesn’t age.

Your soul doesn’t know how old you are, either.

 

K.E. Lanning

 

Let's Start Dreaming Again.....

I’m a scientist, I am a thinker, and a lover of art and nature. I have worked in the energy biz for thirty-five years, seeing the peaks and valleys of the volatile petroleum industry, as I mapped the peaks and valleys beneath the surface. I tell people that what I do are jigsaw puzzles with no picture on the front.          

Petroleum is a natural deposit of stored potential energy from carbon based plants which nature has already cooked and stored for us. An odd fact is, because petroleum became available to burn lamps, whaling stopped and so ironically, the oil industry saved the whales. Petroleum energy has carried us from horse and buggy into the industrial and computer ages, but the caveat to it is the pollution it causes, which must be controlled. And though using corn or other carbon based crops, augments our supply of gasoline, it is far from being a “green” energy source, since it must be planted and cultivated with heavy diesel equipment, then energy used to process it to turn into fuel. In addition, it takes land away from crops and sucks corn, a major feed crop, into the volatile price gyrations of the oil market. Not a smart idea, in my opinion, to add instability into our food sources.

Specifically, I work in the natural gas industry, but being an objective scientist, I believe that of the petroleum energy choices we have for electric power generation: coal, oil, and natural gas, that natural gas is the least polluting of these energy sources. It simply has fewer molecules to break off during the burning process than heavier oil and coal. And until we find that energy source to take the place of the magnitude of power that Mother Nature gave us, I feel that natural gas is the best choice of the petroleum products for electric power production, at this time. Intelligent regulation of fracking and water use could serve to mitigate problems in the process of natural gas extraction. And understand there is no energy source that is without issues and risks - we must act like adults and not shut out one source, to then cause another, more polluting source, to be used.  In the power plant game, it’s primarily a choice of fracking or would you prefer to have acid rain and coal ash pollution?

If the United States wants to be a world power, with strong manufacturing and enough energy to fuel our economy, alternative energy, as yet, cannot fill the need of our country.  However, the magnitude of power produced from solar and wind would be a perfect match to augment smaller power needs such as homes, small businesses, and vehicles. So instead of having huge fields of solar panels and vast areas of wind turbines, which have unintended environmental issues, why not push the intelligent use of solar capturing roofs and windows and wind turbines designed into the buildings themselves?

So this brings me to the future of energy for this country. We desperately need an energy source that does not pollute, nor produce long term nuclear waste, and yet has enough power to fuel the world, without the need of costly and deadly wars. The energy source I refer to is the ultimate solar power: nuclear fusion. It is the opposite of nuclear fission, our current system of nuclear power--it is the fusing of two hydrogen atoms into a helium atom, with the release of a gorgeous amount of energy. There is no dangerous nuclear waste, taking thousands of years to decay and which, by the way, is currently piling up at nuclear fission plants around the country. The exciting part is that there is a world consortium www.iter.org and other groups, which are working towards developing a working nuclear fusion reactor in Europe. The hope is, that within fifty years, power from nuclear fusion may become a reality.  We need to support this work with our voices and votes, and focus politicians and industry to strive towards this goal of energy independence.

In addition, I believe we must plan ahead and build better energy grids, figure out whether electric or hydrogen fuel vehicles make the most sense (or both), in other words, let’s be thinking ahead and dream of a world without smog, with clean water, and no more global wars over petroleum energy.

 

K.E. Lanning