My Dream of Free Electricity

Coal, Oil and Gas are GOOD - of highest good - as long as they DON'T COMBUST WITH THE OPEN ATMOSPHERE!

You may conceive of U.S. air pollution, particularly the heat-trapping CO₂, as continuously dumped into the atmosphere in three big chunks: One third of the problem, the largest third, comes out of generating electricity with fossil fuels. The other two thirds, smaller thirds, arrive from the fossil-fuel-dependent transportation we use (mostly automobiles, but one sixth of this third comes from air and sea transport), and from the industries we support through consumer purchases (steel, paper and cement tend to be the worst air polluters because they, like the electric industry, burn coal pellets to create heat energy).

I dream about redirecting Earth's coals and oils to the chemical sector, where these amazing raw materials belong, for creating highly useful products and facilitating non-polluting industrial processes. Just some of the obvious helpful human employments of fossil organic matter:

Nanoscale carbon Buckyballs are created by electrifying graphite, the fully carbonized end product of the fossil organic coalification process. Buckyballs, also known as fullerenes are bouncy, unbreakable balls of carbon arranged in a spherical atom, usually C₆₀; they, as miniature ball bearings, form the ultimate lubricant, and are also useful for carrying coatings of other chemicals and caging smaller chemicals inside.

Why are these atoms called buckminsterfullerene? Do you remember Bucky Fuller (inventor/popularizer of geodetic structures)? Remember his imagined floating cities mounted inside giant spherical balloons?

(Re-)discovered by science in 1985 (they're in candle soot, for Pete's sake!), these spherical carbon molecules were termed buckyballs and fullerenes after Buckminster Fuller's 1983 demise to honor that quintessential modernist .

Polymers of carbon nanotubes, now being worked up by Houston's Rice University in partnership with NASA, utilize the smallest (a basic carbon tube fiber is circumscribed by just twelve carbon atoms around a supermicrominiscule open space), lightest (C₁₂ is not a metal), strongest (hard as a diamond) material yet known
Myriad plastics, ("plastics, my boy") can be polymerized in closed loop cracking and production cycles, and always recycled.
Gasolines and "natural gas" and many exotic lighter substances, which are indispensible catalysts and fuels for unlimited use in closed loop chemical processes.

From where shall we get our energy then?

Of course, solar energy is creating change all the time on Earth, moving water and air, and so eroding and mixing particles of matter, and irradiating and combining and breaking chemicals in the atmosphere and on the surface. One of the coolest results, in my humble opinion, is us.

I dream that all required heat, electric, magnetic and motive power be captured from solar radiation directly, above the atmosphere, where it is roughly three times more powerful than it is down here on the surface of Earth. This part of the dream, known as Space Solar Power System (SSPS) to NASA, dates back at least to the original "oil crisis" of 1973. My dream differs by concentrating sunlight's full strength via sun-orbiting constellations of heavy mirrors quite a bit nearer the Sun than our Earth orbit, cohering sunlight and beaming it toward Earth orbit (and other-ward).

Read my brief text all about this dream.

View my page on International Association of Space Entrepreneurs

Objections, please - Why not Nuclear? Is Nuclear Waste a real problem for us? Why not "clean coal"? How about safe Fusion? How is Iter coming along? Why should I care at all about any of this?

The pollution of the nitrox atmosphere is a global phenomenon. It requires a global solution.