(Photo: John Eckman)JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

It's a good feeling when you can drive past a gas station in an electric vehicle with little concern about the fluctuating prices of fuel, a product that is literally pushing us rapidly towards mass extinction. Yes, I know mass extinction is hard to believe—so if you don't take my word for it, read New Yorker's scientist Elizabeth Kolbert's Pulitzer-prize winning book The Sixth Extinction on how human activity (pollution) is turning our earth into a toxic mass cemetery.

It's also a good feeling to know that you're not contributing to global warming, at least not as much, and reoccurring oil disasters, if you drive an electric vehicle.

Just last week another pipeline ruptured—this time in the rainforest of Peru, contaminating Peru's rivers with thick tarry oil that immediately poisoned their fragile ecosystem of water and valuable medicinal plants.

"Thousands of residents in the northern Peruvian jungle are facing a water quality emergency following two pipeline ruptures that spilled crude oil into various waterways — including a tributary of the Amazon River — damaging a vast area known for its ecological value."

Speaking of clean water, the earth's groundwater, our fundamental water supply, is drying up. Add to that the Flint Michigan toxic water problems are far worse than what government officials have been telling Americans due to state and federal negligence or "deregulation" for the last 30 years. That's what happens when you have the worst government money can buy.

Simply put: no water, no life.

Truthout journalist, Dahr Jamail, recently wrote an article on how carbon dioxide is at the highest point in 15 million years. 15 million years?! It's hard to conceive.

Climate change is the paramount issue of our times. It's a global emergency crisis that makes ISIS look like a fool's errand, and yet, you'd never know it going by the mainstream media largely because Big Oil & Gas sponsors the networks via ads worth millions of dollars.

These are merely a few headlines that were reported over the last week or so. But if you reflect on how the rich diversity of living species are rapidly dying—that in our lifetime, we may see polar bears go extinct, tens of thousands of birds are disappearing, dolphins and whales are washing up on our shores…all these facts taken together weigh heavily on the heart.

Toxic oil and nuclear radiation disasters are turning our oceans into dead zones. Extreme weather conditions and record-breaking temperatures paint a dire picture of mass extinction. The canary in the coalmine is dead. The warning signs are everywhere.

Frankly, we're way past the tipping point of confirming that global warming is real.

Now is the critical time for dramatic solutions. What we need is a deus ex machina.

Just as I was feeling terribly depressed with the thought that life as we know it will end by 2050 if we keep relying on dirty energy, I coincidentally flipped on NPR to a fascinating interview on a show called IdeasSphere. The guest was journalist Steve LeVine, and the discussion was about his new book Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World.

The super battery is a game changer if there ever was one. There are a number of high-tech companies that have pledged their allegiance to solving the threat of global warming with sustainable energy inventions, and right now, the rechargeable battery is our ticket out of the old industrial hell.

The current development of the super battery will radically change the trajectory of geopolitics. Soon, the auto industry will phase out gas-fueled cars, now that they don't need Big Oil as a partner to earn billions of dollars. The competition is on. And the good news is that the lithium-ion battery will diminish the threat of climate change. Moreover, this new form of energy will bury the power-wealth of OPEC. Indeed, oil wars will be seen as a dark chapter of insanity in our history.

Predictably, the industrialists are doing everything they can to hold on to their polluting profits. But just as the Koch Brothers cannot put the electric car back into the bottle, the industrial guard cannot stop the emergence of super batteries from becoming the world's new energy source. The super battery is the key to saving the earth and it is also the weapon that will put fossil fuels and nuclear power out of business. This miraculous battery is our dues ex machina.

Once again, Big Oil and their investors are trying to block progress, which is the same as blocking a medication to cure cancer. They're launching a major attack campaign that is directed at Elon Musk and the electric car industry. It's an angry war cry of desperation from the old regime of industrial polluters. But even Apple is jumping on the EV bandwagon with plans to produce their first electric car by 2019 called the iCar. In addition, the Google Team is heavily investing in wind and solar technologies.

Make no mistake about it: this is a brutal war between the old guard and the new high-tech revolutionaries. As for our government, the Republican Party is the Party of the polluters. Republicans routinely rely on the fossil fuel industry to support their campaign funding. Thus Republicans will use their legislative power to block progress. But once consumers demand change through their buying power, nothing can stop companies and homeowners from getting what they want.

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois are currently working on the lithium-ion battery that will light up the world for homes and for electric vehicles. If successful, and pray that they are—it would result in a new global economy that will create millions of jobs.

China is one of the main competitors in this arena. After all, the winners will become the new multibillionaires, leaving the dirty industrial money in the ruins of a polluted past.

"LeVine is writing about a race," wrote David R. Baker, a journalist, at San Francisco Gate, "that is still very much under way. If anything, the competition seems to be heating up to create not just a better battery for electric cars, but also batteries capable of storing enough energy for entire buildings or the electric grid itself."

LeVine revealed something of a shocker in his book: Guess who invented the world's first rechargeable lithium battery in 1977? Exxon. Exxon not only knew by their own scientific research that oil was going to lead to mass extinction—i.e. global warming, they had the solution to the problem right in their hands: the lithium battery. Instead of doing the right thing, top oil execs greedily chose instant oil profits. (Hmm, wonder what the criminal punishment is for premeditated mass murder of all life on earth?)

The super rechargeable battery presents a power shakedown in the likes that we've never witnessed before in our history of geopolitics.

As LeVine explained in his book, "An electric age would puncture the demand for oil and thus rattle petroleum powers such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, Saudi Arabia's ruling family, and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as a whole, stripped of tens of billions of dollars in income. China could put its population in electric cars, shun gasoline propulsion, and clean up its air. Generally speaking, the world might spend less on oil and worry less about climate change."

There is no escape plan to the galaxies. Earth is the only planet that can sustain our diversity of life. There is no fantasy Mars to escape to. Mother Earth is our only Home. We either save ourselves with the super battery, wind and solar, or our spaceship earth will become a toxic cemetery floating through a blind cosmos. We don't have a choice between fossil fuels and clean energy.

If a patient is brought into the ER from excessive bleeding, the doctor doesn't say: there is a choice here: either we let the patient bleed out and die or we stop the bleeding. The doctor doesn't choose because there is no choice. He simply does what he can to stop the bleeding. Likewise, there is no other choice but to move on to the Electric Age of Sustainable Energy. Time is running out.

Jacqueline Marcus' new collection of poems, Summer Rains (Iris Books) is now available at Amazon.com. She is the author of Close to the Shore (Michigan State University Press), and Man Cannot Live on Oil, Alone / Time to end our dependency on oil before it ends us at Amazon/Kindle books. She taught philosophy at Cuesta College for 20 years. Marcus is the editor of ForPoetry.com and EnvironmentalPress.com.