Bush Enviro Plan: Block the Sun

[Morphizm IT wiz and all-around smart dude The Riz checks in with a rant on the Bush administration's plan to counteract global warming by blocking the sun with even more dust and some giant space mirrors. Does anyone there even work anymore? Do they just phone everything in? -- ST]

Damn, these guys are getting cartoonishly evil now. Remember The Simpsons episode where Burns constructs a giant shade to block the sun from Springfield so the only power source is the nuclear plant? Let's block the sun so solar power can never take over and the oil monopoly will rule for another 100 years thanks to all the new oil we can dig up in the newly melted arctic! Woohoo!

This is also interesting in the context of all the evidence now pouring out about their direct intimidation of half the scientists on the government payroll.

There's always a bit of sunlight seeping through though: Some dude figured out how to efficiently extract water from the vapor present in air with a specially designed windmill:

"They don't face into the wind like a conventional windmill; they're arranged vertically, within an elegant column, and take the wind from any direction. The secret of Max's design is how his windmills, whirring away in the merest hint of a wind, cool the air as it passes by. Like many a great idea, it couldn't be simpler -– or more obvious. But nobody thought of it before. With three or four of Max's magical machines on hills at our farm we could fill the tanks and troughs, and weather the drought. One small Whisson windmill on the roof of a suburban house could keep your taps flowing. Biggies on office buildings, whoppers on skyscrapers, could give independence from the city's water supply. And plonk a few hundred in marginal outback land –- specifically to water tree-lots -– and you could start to improve local rainfall."

Also, there is a company making ultracapacitors for battery-replacement duty a reality:

"The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company."

Both are low on details due to patent pending issues, but imagine the possibilities! So now within five years we'll be up to a windmill on the roof for water, thin-film solar panels on the roof of the house and car for power, and a plugin hybrid gas/electric car with 10X the electric energy storage thanks to a new generation of nano-engineered ultracapacitors in place of batteries. The gas would be used strictly in nighttime emergencies.

Combine this with Wimax and mesh networking (now being used in the new OLPC laptop for Third World kids) and you can pretty much live completely off the grid -- water from the windmill, power from the sun for the house and car, and meshed wireless internet for the house and car. Remind me what we need the government for again?

The more they tighten their grip, the more of us will slip off the grid...