A visiting professor at Shenyang Aerospace University from Shandong province asked me to consider tutoring advanced engineering students in talking about solar energy in English.  Being a strong proponent of alternative energy and power to fossil fuel, I said "Yes!"

 

Oil fields off China Sea's continental shelf are privilege terrain of foreign oil companies who used to only play a minimal fee.  In some recent arrangement, 45 percent of an exploration is owned by a transnational corporation, the other 45 percent belongs to a Chinese company like PetroChina listed in the Stock Exchange, and the remaining 10 percent owned by a government body. 

 

Our doggedly hopeful card sees the drilling of oil to eventually taper down to non-reliance as China fends off opportunism and intrusion on its sovereignty over the China Seas, while it pursues hydro, wind, solar, natural gas, biofuel, and nuclear alternatives to fossil fuel.  Let us be clear about the issues of sovereignty in the China Seas; it is all about access to oil, even as we watch the same issue disintegrate South Sudan, and roil the normally passive folks of Myanmar.

 

We saw mini-hydro in the Zichuan's autonomous Zang country, and the practice is encouraging.  Small-scale hydro, like those in Japan, can handle requirements of southwest China.

 

Meanwhile, Nanjing's haze looks like Sherlock Holmes' London, not of inland fog but of mei-fired (coal) smog.  The obvious task of developing alternative energy is most urgent in China.  I live in Shenyang that straddles the low end of the Manchurian plain, a trough between two mountain ranges, which keeps the smog perpetually in between, so I am resigned to a respiratory ailment as I stay here longer.

 

Late November this year in Qingdao, a Sinopec oil refinery pipeline exploded on what is blamed as human error, i.e., poor planning of pipe laying in an urban area, lackluster maintenance procedure, and susceptibility to danger through the city sewage system.  When a leak was discovered, the area was not immediately sealed and evacuated; the ensuing explosion cost 55 lives and many injuries.  Ironically, this was almost a replay of a similar incident in 1988.

 

In 2011, ConocoPhillips oil platforms had three leaks that polluted waters six times the size of Singapore on Bohai Bay north of Shandong (kept from news for a month until it slipped out in a blog).  The third leak coincidentally occurred on the same day as a refinery at the Daya Bay Economic and Technical Development zone in Guangdong exploded.  The alarm was not only on the flammable material in the refinery but also of its proximity to the Nuclear plant situated close to the urban center of Hong Kong.

 

We now know that 40 hours of solar energy reaching the earth is enough to power the whole planet's current annual requirement.  The energy is free and the hustles on photovoltaic catchments are now easily a walk in the park, or, a drive through in unpopulated wide-open spaces like the grassland, or, on the sides and tops of city buildings. The technology is available at cost par to coal, gas, and oil fired power generation. 

 

So, why are we not doing it?  Like any addiction, dependence on oil is like alcohol fume to the intoxicated.  It is not easy to curtail.  Production structures around the world that harness fossil fuel, and the financial instruments that sustain them, hold legislative power protecting turf as they guide global economic growth.

 

Popular wisdom is still wary on why we would want a rapid change.  We are still on denial on the extent of human participation in climate change presently experienced around the planet, no small thanks to oil money for distorting the science that feeds illusions.   We keep to the comfort of the familiar.

 

"Those who walk in darkness have seen a great light," is a metaphor from the Prophet Isaiah used during the Yuletide season.  The light source Ra (sun) ruled in Egypt for centuries, and a mythical journey of a nightly trip into Nile's nether lands to emerge again in the light of dawn, influenced the theme of exodus in the Torah and the resurrected image of the Christian faith.  The experience of clear blue sea in the Aegean where depth is seen from great distance above adds to the European philosophical metaphors of lucidity, enlightenment, and liberation.

 

The big lie is the inevitability of polluting earth's atmosphere; we would rather trigger Armageddon over oilfields to ensure corporate bottom lines than move away with determination from an addiction.  But individuals can raise cane to demand that communal resource be used to avert a natural catastrophe already at our doorsteps.  Or, more quietly, like my brother's house in Oahu's Ewa Beach, and of my classmate in Oakland, CA, go photovoltaic!  Self-interest can be enlightened.

 

The arenga pinnata, a tropical sugar palm tree that grows in Saipan and the rest of Micronesia also traps sunshine that converts into biofuel.  The resource is there.  We only need to decide.  Let's go solar.

 

May your darkness see the light of day!