Would you believe a technological approach to global warming?
Global climate change is probably real, I accept that. I don’t think it is yet an absolute, just a probable theory. I do accept that we’ve dumped a whole load of CO2 into the atmosphere, and that laboratory experiments have indicated that the greenhouse effect is real.
However, I also think that our leaders in politics (and many scientists) have the solution completely wrong.
Who was the idiot who came up with the idea of Carbon Tax, and the latest effort from Cancun, where they’re going to give Carbon Subsidies to China, as a developing country. They’ll be producing more CO2 than any other nation on Earth by the end of the decade.
It’s this type of mentality that gave us Prohibition and the “War against Drugs”. This problem needs incentives, not punishment by taxes.
What would have happened in Industrialising Britain in the 19th Century. Sorry, you can’t burn any coal. Use water power, or horse power, or man power. That would not have led to a pleasant world to live in.
Instead of legislating against CO2 and other greenhouse gases, we should be investigating technological solutions. If we took all of the money being syphoned off in Carbon taxes and made it available as a huge $Billion prize for the most innovative solution to the Climate problems, then we would be much better off.
Here are a few ideas to start you off.
Technological Solutions:
Solar Power: This will greatly reduce the CO2 emissions. Not the half-assed earth based power plants. Get a major solar array in orbit, and beam the power down. The energy flux is incredibly higher above the atmosphere. The bloody environmentalists will complain that the power download will be harmful to the receiver location. Stick it in Death Valley. If a few cacti or lizards fry; tough.
Albedo Reflection: If we are absorbing too much solar energy, causing the heating on the surface, fling up a few thousand tonnes of Nano-particulate reflective particles. They will float very high in the atmosphere, reflecting a proportion of the incident solar infra-red back into space, so allowing for a global cooling-down. These particles would float up there for extended periods, just like the dust clouds produced when Krakatoa blew it’s top. That had a cooling effect as well.
Biological Carbon Fixing: Two main possibilities here. Using our genetic engineering abilities, we could fairly simply engineer sea-borne algae, with its energy cycle tailored to high efficiency carbon scavenging. It would have the extra benefit in producing sugars, starches or even alcohol as a an extra carbon source for our food or plastics industries.
Using a similar methodology, we could genengineer siliceous diatoms to become airborne. Splice in genes for hydrogen gas production (occurs naturally in clostridium acetobutylicum), so the entire diatom becomes airborne. The height of its biosphere could be adjusted as conditions allow. It would be designed to reproduce asexually and fix carbon directly from the atmosphere. Make the exterior shiny and you’d get a partial reduced albedo effect as well. As the carbon load each one carries increases, it would sink down, back to ground level, where its carbon could be fixed in the earth by natural processes, or collected as extra carbon source feedstock.
Humans have never allowed nature to dictate how we live. We have created our own environments, or changed the local conditions. If we let our fears restrict our growth, we’ll end up back in medieval conditions, with no technology to change anything. Don’t let the Green Nazis push us around. Fight back with Science and Technology.
If the USA, which produced such awesome programs as the Manhattan Project, The Apollo Program and The Human Genome Project gets this in its sights, then I would bet success would be quickly forthcoming.
And it would cost a damn site less than pouring money into the Carbon Tax Fraud.
Robert, lots of great ideas with potiential. I would like to add another technology that has promise for relatively quick implementation technically.
That would be something called LFTR or Liquid Fluorine Thorium Reactors. I did a post about it a good while back but there is lots of information about it online.
https://madmikesamerica.com/2010/06/lftr-energy-too-cheap-to-meter-part-1/
Excellent post Robert and I agree that it is way past time that we addressed the issue. The problem is that it is the same old problem one has when discussing human kind. Wheres is the most profitable route. Right now the money to make the changes you suggest rest primarily in the hands of those who see a major profit margin in fossil fuels. T. Boone Pickens, an old oilman has been pushing wind power as a long term solution but he is also pushing natural gas as a short term solution. But in every case that I am aware of there is always a bottom line issue.
One thing I have curious about is why we do not capitalize more on water power. We have access to two great oceans with a constant tidal flow. We know from a few limited experiments that we can build underwater generators that can produce energy from the tidal flows in and out. Like wind power and solar power they are constant and I believe they would ultimately generate as much energy as the oil that is being drilled for with the deep water wells.
I agree,
Water power should be used a lot more. Down here in NZ, there’s been discussions on putting tidal flow turbines in the Cook Strait, the gap between the North and South Islands. There’s a huge water flow, almost continuous, through this channel. Last thing I heard, the Greens were objecting because it might upset the whales that also use the strait. Go figure.
The problem we are facing is the same problem that every great, and fallen, civilization has had to deal with. The advances we have made as a cultural since the end of the middle ages are mostly due to fossil fuels. The Roman Empire’s energy source was wood. They ran out of available wood supplies and we had the dark ages as a result. I hope we can do better.
We should be able to do a lot better. We have the technology now to move to non-fossil fuel based energy. I wonder if we’ll ever manage to get real fusion power plants in my lifetime.
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Brilliant, Robert. I admire your statement of a terrible catastrophy and foreboding but, more importantly, your ability to provide solutions.
Thanks Stella, but please remember that the possible solutions I mentioned are just the starting points. It would need some real brainpower(and lots of money) to complete them.
In California, Governor-elect Jerry Brown (~applause~) is already fixing wind turbines in Altamont and investigating alternative energy sources. Although he stated that California’s fiscal mess is far worse than he thought, and plans to cut the state budget by 25%, the environment and education has always been his primary concerns.
I believe he is already aware of some of these starting points: and some starting point is far better than none.
Again, many thanks.
This is a great post which brings me to another question about climate change and the possible use of technology to offset the inevitable droughts.
Climatologists are predicting that within ten years we will start to run out of water. A friend of mine (Holte) and I were having a conversation the other day and he wondered out loud why we couldn’t use desalination plants like we do oil platforms. In other words why can’t we build hundreds of desalination platforms and place them strategically along our coastal waters and use the desalinized water to offset the droughts?
All thoughts are appreciated and a post on this subject from someone who knows about these things from a technological viewpoint (pros/cons) would really be appreciated and no doubt most informative.
Thanks Mike. As far as the desalination goes, I would ask the following questions.
Where is the power coming from. It takes 226133 kJ to boil 100 kg of water. That’s about 3kWh/ cubic metre. To produce a reasonable flow of pure water, say 60 million litres/day, then you would need 180000 kWh.
What are you going to do with the salts extracted?
What about the marine environmental impact?
If you used just solar and/or wind power, it wouldn’t be enough, so you have to create either nuclear power plants, perhaps mini ones on each desalinator, but each would then need to be guarded. Or you build coal using palnts onshore and transmit the power to the desalination rigs.
Why rigs? It would be much easier and cheaper to just bulid the plants onshore, and pump/suck the water into them. It would also make distribution of the pure water, the power supply and labour much easier.
There are mny more factors to be considered, and while I have a surface knowledge of the technology and the science required, there amy well be one of our readers who could contribute at a greater level.
Thanks Robert.