Time Out From Petty Conflicts Could Save Us

The current scientific consensus is that we face a gradually escalating climate disaster that could wipe out the human race. Chances of preventing this disaster would improve if we take a timeout from the comparatively petty conflicts — wars, religious strife, economic rivalry — simmering or raging around today's world.

Why the hurry to kill each other off? If we don't save the planet, even the "victors" in the current battles will be losers.

For a few Christmas hours in December 1914 a number of soldiers fighting against each other in World War I laid down their weapons, exchanged gifts, played impromptu games, and took photographs. This demonstrated the possibility of timeouts even among soldiers in the thick of battle.

Few people now alive experienced the panic in 1938 when a radio play about an alien invasion was taken for the real thing. But imagine how we would all pull together if actually attacked by aliens swooping down in flying saucers!

Our mutual interest in survival would make our conflicts with each other seem petty by comparison.

The impending climate disaster could pose an equal threat to human survival. Although this disaster's gradual arrival is less dramatic, we should remember the frog supposedly boiled alive because its puddle was heated up slowly.

Surely human beings are smarter than frogs. One can hope!

A truce to save the planet would need to last several dozen years, but long truces have not been unknown in the past.

In 1389 a truce between England and France "was originally negotiated by representatives of the kings to last three years, but the two kings met in person at Leulinghem, near the English fortress of Calais, and agreed to extend the truce to a twenty-seven years' period."

The end of the Korean War in 1953 — 70 years ago — was in effect a truce, since there was never any agreement to end the war.

A long truce would allow the time, talent, and resources currently devoted to wars and other conflicts to be invested, instead, in building a worldwide electrical grid that would rapidly put the age of carbon fuels — threatening an overheated world — behind us.

A universal grid would allow total reliance on solar energy without the need for large scale storage for nighttime, bad weather, and low local solar availability during winters (which are summers in the other hemisphere).

The PV panels on my roof produce only one fifth as much monthly electricity in winter as they do in the summer. There is no economical way to store enough electricity to get through a winter. We need the universal grid!

There are presently many serious proposals to build solar energy facilities. But too many of these projects are on hold because the current grid lacks the capacity to transmit their output to where it is needed.

Given the many different political jurisdictions controlling the areas through which the worldwide grid would need to run, it will take intensive political work to expedite grid-building. Political leaders freed for the moment from the need to run wars could devote their talents to this vital job.

Wars are expensive. The huge amount of money saved by a long truce could be invested in additional PV panels and electrical grid.

Of course I have an ulterior motive for proposing a long truce. It is my hope that conditions during the truce might be so habit-forming that good sense would prevail and the general war of all against all that we presently "enjoy" would never be resumed.

As Alfred, Lord Tennyson put it it Locksley Hall (1835), I would like to see the day come when:

".... the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
in the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
Here the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
and the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law."