I saw the film The Astronaut Farmer yesterday -- wonderful, and wonderfully geeky film: see it when it opens next week. It’s about a Texas rancher, played by Billy Bob Thornton, who’s building a rocket in his barn, which isn’t so farfetched: he was an aerospace engineer and astronaut-in-training before he was a rancher, so he knows what he’s doing. And the film me thinking about the Virgin Earth initiative I wrote about yesterday -- I’d posted that just before I ran into the movie, so I guess it was fresh in my mind.
It occurred to me that it is perhaps just as likely that an individual could win the Virgin Earth prize, for coming up with the technology to scrub greenhouse gases from the Earth’s atmosphere. There’s a long American tradition of technological breakthroughs or new products coming from garage scientists -- see: Apple Computer, for one. And we’re certainly NOT seeing innovative thinking coming out of corporate or governmental arenas. As reported on Monday:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Carpooling won't do much to reduce U.S. highway congestion in urban areas, and a better solution would be to build new highways and charge drivers fees to use them, the White House said on Monday.
Instead of attempting to get people to carpool -- or, even better, figuring out ways to get people out of their cars altogether -- our leaders have just given up and want to dig us even deeper into the already deep hole we’re in.
Of course, The Astronaut Farmer is about how the government tries to stifle individual innovation and effort, and that’s pretty plausible, too.
Other quick global warming stuff:
• Anderson Cooper wonders in his blog whether we can save the planet. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for a commenter to point out that the planet is going to be fine, even if the temperature rises 100 degrees Celsius. It’s the humans we need to worry about saving.
• The British newspaper the Guardian has a great section devoted climate news, including coverage of some scary details that deniers need to get through their thick skulls, like how global warming could, paradoxical as it might seem, send Europe into a deep freeze, and how global warming seems to be speeding up because the planet’s capacity to absorb excess CO2 appears to have reached saturation point.
• I highly recommend the new book Hell and High Water, by climate scientist Joseph Romm, for its calm and concise explanation of why we are doomed to a certain level of warming, melting, and other extreme weather even if we start right now to reduce carbon emissions, but how, if we don’t start right now to reduce carbon emissions, the catastrophe will be unimaginably worse. As alarming as this book is, it is not alarmist, and Romm lays out things we can and should be doing now, as a culture, things that are technologically feasible -- the only thing holding us back is politics. This is the global warming equivalent of that memo President Bush ignored -- the one with the headline “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States” -- but we will all be infinitely worse off if this gets ignored.
(Technorati tags: global warming, Astronaut Farmer, Virgin Earth)
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