It is accurate to blame the current administration for disasters like Katrina and the Iraqi War fiasco. Perhaps we are not culpable here because of the fears of 9/11 or the expectation of competency coming from our leadership.
But we can share blame for the long-term disasters either here or in the making. They are numerous, wrought by misinformation, poor planning, and pursuing personal agendas.
They include little or no technology or resource planning for global warming, ignoring the arrival of peak oil, allowing the housing bubble, perpetrating fiscal failures like yearly deficits, ignoring trade imbalances – the latter, all bringing the devaluation of our currency.
The failures of long-term scope should also be shared by past administrations, but Bush administration incompetencies, lies, and distortions have contributed to both the short-term and the long-term debacles.
For long-term problems, one of the most daunting is global warming. Though BushCo has done its best to cover up the evidence of global warming while pandering to conventional energy suppliers, the last several administrations are not blame-free.
All should have seen the perils of an energy policy which fed a growing reliance on foreign energy sources.
One exciting solution to our power needs has been with us for some forty years: the harvesting of solar power in space while beaming it down to earth. Massive satellites with solar collectors would beam solar energy back to ground-based receivers which could variously disburse it to power plants throughout the world.
Now before you get too excited, it would be costly to launch the needed infrastructure for such an endeavor. The price tag was put at one trillion dollars at one time.
Funny thing is that that figure is less than the total cost of the futile Iraqi war, and that certainly is no investment unless you count the stealing of Iraqi oil reserves, which will lead to more global warming.
Still the investment is staggering, but the benefits are quite staggering as well, especially considering the burgeoning cost of gasoline and the long-term harm to our planet caused by the continued, not to mention heightened use of fossil fuels.
Various estimates put new coal-fired power plants at around 100 per year, contributing some nine gigawatts of power. Most are being built in India and China.
Such one-year additions to power plants alone would make significant contributions to greenhouse gases.
Orbiting power satellites could substitute clean energy for such be-fouling plans. Charles Miller, a director of the Space Frontier Foundation, a group promoting public access to space, says, “We could see the first operational power satellite in about the 2020 time frame if we act now.”
O. Glenn Smith, a former manager of science and applications experiments for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, suggest that we could conduct a test using the International Space Station as a “construction shack” to house the astronauts and equipment. The station’s existing solar panels could be used for the demonstration project, and its robotic manipulator arms could assemble the large transmitting antenna.
The space station would only be a low orbiting platform for a spot test. The actual system would have a geosynchronous orbit at 22,000 miles where it could collect the sun’s energy 365 days a year and from there beam the stored energy down to ground receivers.
President John F. Kennedy got us to the moon on such a plan announced in 1961. It was accomplished in less than nine years, but was not a plan vital to the earth’s survival. It involved a cold-war battle eventually won.
The question is, “Do we have the vision and the planning to do it again?”
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