Global Warming

My father just sent an email suggesting that to some people, global warming is blasphemous in the same way that evolution is. To those people I say, go rent Inconvenient Truth and Inherit the Wind, and watch them both until God tells you that you can stop.

Not that I do anything to limit my “carbon footprint,” (and I don’t like that term, so it’s going to stay in quotation marks) but I do believe that we’re in trouble. It’s an economic problem though, and it needs an economic solution. I read something in a Good Magazine the other day, about how the key to solving the Israeli-Palestinian clusterfuck, is to make it financially beneficial for both sides to keep things civil, i.e. they need to strike a deal where Israel shares the tourism money with Palestine, and if they scuffle, that revenue will dry up and both sides will feel the pain in their governmental wallets.

I think that the easiest way to get the ball rolling on this carbon business is to put another $0.10 (was there ever a cents symbol on the keyboard, I feel like there used to be) tax on every gallon of gas that will go straight to advanced fuel/carbon recapturing R&D. This is the immediate double edged sword that’ll generate research grant money and may (or may not, Americans are stubborn, maybe it should be $0.50 a gallon) reduce the amount of consumption.

On the corporate side, (and I’m not the first person to make this argument, but I figure that if I read it long enough ago to forget who I’m plagiarizing, than its not really plagiarism) as long as it is cheaper for factories/plants/whatever to burn carbon into the ozone (currently free) than it is to capture it (wicked expensive,) then there will be no change, because it would be corporately irresponsible to do so.

Here’s my idea, and this is going to be central to the plot of the science fiction novel I’ll probably never write, but what we need are photosynthetic cells. You may or may not have heard of photovoltaic cells, but that’s a fancy word for a solar panel. Photosynthetic cells would be made into green solar panels which, using energy from the sun (or any star really) would create both electricity and convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. I doubt I’m the first person to think of this, everyone learns about photosynthesis in elementary school. Mark my words, synthetic photosynthesis may be the answer to all our problems, it could even allow us to travel long distances through space using energy from stars we passed along the way. Now all we need is the research money to figure out photosynthesis, which must be wicked complicated or else we would already have these. Where’s it going to come from? That’s right, taxing in a way that reduces consumption/pollution, and buys time for the scientists to R&D the solution.

I should totally get a Nobel Prize.

Update: It looks like this guy is going to get my Nobel Prize.