Saving the Planet
There are many big issues that can overwhelm us and make us small, insignificant and. Probably first among those issues, alongside world peace and the need for universal fairness and equality, is climate change. What used to be a hotly debated and very politicized issue has, through our day-to-day life experiences, particularly with the changing weather patterns, become more of a foregone conclusion. What we are left with is the big question of what are we going to do about it. I’m sure everyone has heard that Elon Musk thinks we should all move to Mars, but judging by the current price point of a trip out of atmosphere, there are very few of us who will be able to afford Elon’s vision unless something changes rather dramatically. Every time someone comes up with some long-term solution like converting to EVs, some nay-sayer will put together a spreadsheet to prove that EVs consume more precious resources than they save. That creates lots of dust in the air around paths we should be taking.
A recent article that got teed up on Apple News caught my eye and I ended up giving it an unusually high degree of attention because I found it so interesting. I have been a big advocate in the past few years about infrastructure. In many ways, I think infrastructure, defined broadly enough covers something like half of the mandate that I believe government should have. It represents the projects that are so large and so long-term in their perspective that it is unreasonable to expect that normal private investment can handle it well enough. I know that infrastructure investing has come into vogue, but the type of infrastructure that I am talking about really does require collective investment that puts a higher value on the common good than on financial return on investment. It is that long-term visionary approach to growth and prosperity that I believe made this country great. It ranges from the roads, bridges and the electric grid to the satellite network and the internet/broadband system. It is all the foundational elements that make life viable and upon which a vibrant economic system can be overlaid. The very nature of it is that it cuts through the petty economic issues and focuses of public welfare, which, I might add, if done well, does, indeed, drive extreme economic benefits across the board. The article addressed five huge mega projects that have a decidedly global infrastructure aspect to them such that they need to be transnational in involvement and pretty much bought into by everyone. These are all projects that are aimed at saving the planet one way or another.
These projects are all futuristic and stretch the imagination and require some degree of suspension of disbelief. The first is a Solar Power Station in Space project. The ideas is that while we on earth look at clouds from both sides now and ponder the shapes they make that spur our imagination, they are decidedly not helpful for solar power production. Large solar power stations using the most modern form of photovoltaic cells and sheets are logical ways to gather large amounts of solar energy. The problem has always been about transmission of that power to earth, where I can be most productively used. Apparently, the science of rectennae, converters that receive electromagnetic energy on a wireless basis and convert it effectively to DC current, has improved to the point of making this more feasible than not. Of course, these rectennae are rather large affairs that would best be placed offshore in various places such that the power could be accessed most efficiently by a number of different countries. hence the need for geopolitical cooperation. The atmosphere and the oceans are common ground for the people of the world and the challenge would be to keep that commonality sacred and absent of nationalism or greed.
We have all seen the pictures of the wind farms that inhabit large parts of the North Sea and Baltics. Wind energy is much more popular in Europe than it is in America and the world has only just begun to tap this almost limitless supply of energy that regenerates eatery day and especially in specific spots. Those spots are very often in remote ocean locations, which has driven the second big mega project idea, which is to create Energy Islands that can also act as hydrogen synthesis stations. Green hydrogen (H2) and its kissing cousin, green ammonia (NH3), have technologies (I ran such a start-up for three years and am reasonably familiar with the technology) using electrochemistry that require water, air and large amounts of electricity, and are fairly efficient transporters of energy, thereby making these islands able to harness the erratic wind patterns and store the energy for regular transport by pipeline or tanker. It seems logical that if one was going to build such hubs, they might also be logical rectennae locations for the Solar Power Project as well.
The third infrastructure project of enormous proportions involves the Antarctic “Doomsday” Glacier called Thwaites, which seems to hold within it, enough water that if allowed to melt as it is doing now, will soon destroy numerous global coastal cities under 15+ feet of water that would otherwise be impossible to levy against. The ideas being examined for this stabilization project involve an underwater curtain that would keep the warmer waters away from the glacier and thereby save trillions of dollars worth of existing global coastal infrastructure. That is less about generating energy than attacking the effects of climate change, but until we find a way to reverse the warming, we need to stop the flooding.
As most of us learned in earth science, the world’s deserts were mostly very fertile and even water-covered places in millennia past. One specific region is viewed as particularly prone to reversion and that is the Sinai Peninsula. In addition being a vast underutilized area with potentially very arable land, it is also in one of the world hottest geopolitical spots and could be a beacon of hope for the growing and put-upon Muslim world. Regreening the Sinai would seem to be a very achievable and very worthy infrastructure project that would also need pan-global cooperation.
And last, but not least is the massive project being envisioned to suck 80 Megatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere to try to actually reverse the past century+ of emissions and thereby reverse the warming trend. Perhaps the best part about this sort of mega-project would be that in addition to doing what only plants have been successful at doing in large scale, the capture of the CO2 would also allow the manufacture of synthetic jet fuel and other energy intensive products that would create a win-win situation and not curtail our modern lifestyle.
These all sound like fascinating and not pie-in-the-sky ideas which man is perfectly capable of undertaking even in the grand scale that is required. We just have to see the value of getting beyond our short-term thinking, our nationalistic mindset, and our distrust of collectivism. Necessity is the mother of invention and perhaps its also the mother of cooperation. Fingers crossed.