From the Earth to the Moon with Clean Energy

American ingenuity has swept over the last century like Genghis Khan through technological hurdles.

What was science fiction just decades ago can now be held in the palm of a hand or on the tip of a pinhead. While perhaps the biggest leap for humanity took place at 3:17 p.m. ET on July 20, 1969, when the Apollo 11 lunar module, the Eagle, landed on the moon, the next one may be right around the corner. from the corner.

“Nothing can amaze an American,” wrote Jules Verne prophetically in “From the Earth to the Moon” in 1865. “In America, everything is easy, everything is simple, and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they come up … .. One thing with them (the Yankees) is as soon as they say it’s done. “

Likewise, entrepreneurs in this country have had success after success. Dirty iPad note.

it’s okay. How about looking for a way to make clean energy the dominant form of electricity production?

It can’t be too early.

A study led by West Virginia University researcher Dr. Michael Hendryx found that cancer rates are twice as high in a mountaintop mining-exposed community compared to a non-city. exposed, said Jeff Biggers, a journalist and author, in an article for the Huffington Post. The study links the open-air extraction method with 60,000 additional cancer cases.

And the production of carbon and air pollution from burning fossil fuels appears destined to unleash a climate disaster that will baffle even the most jaded critics.

So we need a plan. Blogger Michael Graham Richard, like me, was obsessed with the space race of the 1960s, in which the United States hit the USSR’s efforts, for a role model.

“As in the 1960s, we will need an inspiring vision to unite our efforts, we will need to take existing technologies and quickly take them to the next level, as well as invent new ones,” Richard writes in a TreeHugger post. .com. “But most importantly, we will need to focus; keep doing the hard work and sacrifices until we reach our goals.”

Verne wrote his novel on space travel before any real work was formulated on the practical mathematics of such trajectories. However, his rough calculations and ideas proved remarkably accurate.

I use the book in this analogy mainly because I just read the previous passage and was impressed, even proud. “Hell yeah, that’s the spirit,” I thought. Mind you, this is my fifth Verne book after touring “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “The Mysterious Island”, and I’m starting to think like a long-dead translated French author.

Verne’s hero in the novel is Impey Barbicane, an industrialist outcast by the end of the Civil War. Barbicane’s comments at the beginning of the book made me realize that I am reading something akin to a pacifist satire.

“My brave colleagues, for too long a crippling peace has plunged the Gun Club members into deplorable inactivity,” says Barbicane.

Let’s apply that to today’s geopolitics. Perhaps stopping all wars, official and unofficial, will give the nation’s military industrial complex the incentive to seek, like members of the fictional Barbicane Gun Club, alternatives like clean energy.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in his famous 1961 speech that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or not, by the military-industrial complex.”

But he also said that its “total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government.” That power, harnessed for clean energy gains, could change the world.

Meanwhile, smaller companies are doing quite well on their own.

Michael Kanellos of GreentechMedia.com reports that First Solar has developed a cadmium telluride solar cell that yields a record efficiency of 17.3 percent. The advance surpasses the old record of 16.7 percent set by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory a decade ago.

And Inhabitat.com’s Timon Singh reports that startup Semprius has unveiled a solar cell half the size of a pinhead, which when combined with powerful but inexpensive lenses can concentrate sunlight more than 11,000 times and convert it in electricity.

Other advancements and cost reductions are taking place across the solar industry, bringing us closer to the day when solar will compete head-to-head, without subsidies, with fossil fuels.

For now, we wait. And I will be discovering how the protagonist Barbicane reaches the moon.