Michael’s Blog

I’ve been listening to “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” by Elizabeth Kolbert. Quite a contrast to “State of Fear” and somewhat more convincing. The question of CO2 in the atmosphere is definitely looking like the biggest problem that has ever faced mankind and it isn’t just going to go away.
It strikes me that convincing the world not to use fossil fuels is going to be really tough. If you want to achieve something like this a better, for whatever reason, alternative has to be presented. Having travelled in the deserts of the U.S. south west I cannot believe that all that solar energy that beats down on that huge area almost every day is not the solution to the atmospheric carbon accumulation problem. Not to mention all the other hot deserts in the world.
Just considering Arizona for example. I figure (and I could be wrong) that sunlight in that part of the world produces an average of almost 5Mw/ square meter/year. The area of Arizona is 114,000 sq miles or 2,589,990 sq meters so the energy falling on Arizona is something like 12.95 Terawatt hours (12,950,000,000 kilowatt hours) which, as I figure it, is about 60% of the total energy used in the US annually. That’s all the energy not just the electricity.  Now I have gone over the math but would appreciate anyone pointing out any errors.
So all we have to do is cover most of the south west with 100% efficient solar cells and the problem is solved with energy to burn so to speak. Of course there could be a few issues, like how to make photovoltaic cells more than the 24.7% efficiency the best of them are now (most are less than 10%) but for heavens sake the U.S. has spent something like $100 billion…yes billion on the Star Wars Missile Defense System and it still doesn’t work.  If they just could figure out how to spend that sort of money on solving the greenhouse gas problems we just might come up with a solution.
Here’s an idea …….what if everyone in the world paid a 5% premium to purchase fossil fuel generated electricity or to purchase fossil derived fuels. Just 5%, that’s not much like $0.04 on a liter of gas, everyone, no exceptions. Heck the U.S. spends $3,000,000,000,000 per year on oil imports…$3 TRILLION with a “T”.  5% of that would be $150 billion and that’s just the imported oil. Wave that sort of money in front of industry and see what they can come up with.

6 Comments »