My wife and I have been approached about delivering a sermon at a Unitarian church. Here's a first attempt:
Adam Smith preached that an invisible hand ruled a well-regulated free market. I want to tell you about what the invisible left hand has been doing while the invisible right hand is making goods and services cheaper and better.
There was a flightless bird called the Great Auk, a northern hemisphere rival to the penguin. These birds nested on islands in the North Atlantic. Ships came to these islands and sailors ate thousands of the birds. Each ship captain acted in his individual self-interest, until there were no more birds. The Great Auk went extinct.
Passenger pigeons used to darken the sky for days as they migrated. People shot blindly into the dark clouds and then copious amounts of dinner rained down from heaven. The passenger pigeon went extinct.
Herds of thousands of buffalo once roamed the Great Plains. People shot them for food. Soon there was a herd of only 14 buffalo left on earth, in Yellowstone National Park. That’s when America acted in its own collective self-interest and preserved the buffalo for our generation.
Whales used to supply the world with whale oil. Humanity’s need for oil almost made them extinct, but in the end the entire world acted in its collective self-interest, and so we have whales.
We used to have a chemical called chlorofluorocarbons inside the coils in our refrigerators. These chemicals were causing holes in the earth’s ozone layer, and if we kept polluting the earth with CFCs we would all have far more skin cancer and shorter lifespans. So, the world signed a treaty banning the use of these chemicals. About 85% of the CFCs released into the atmosphere before 1990 are still there in 2013, but they’re slowly disappearing.
There are about 30 million animal and plant species on earth. Scientists forecast that most of these species will become extinct in the wild if we keep heating up the earth. If the loss of one species impoverishes us all forever, imagine the loss of millions upon millions of species. And so, I think that the world should sign a treaty regulating carbon dioxide, methane and soot as pollutants. I also think that in our technological world, we should be developing dependable alternatives to fossil fuel.
I’ve been working on solar heat. The sun shines on every building. Solar heat can be concentrated to almost any temperature for almost every conceivable use. I believe that solar can replace fossil fuel for the first 80% of any building’s heating needs. It remains to drive the price of solar heat down through innovation, or to drive the price of fossil fuel up through taxation, to where nobody takes fossil fuel out of the ground any more.
I believe as an inventor that air is ultimately the most maintenance-free heat transfer substance around. Air doesn’t boil, it doesn’t freeze and if air leaks out it doesn’t need to be cleaned up. Millions of buildings use air ducts to move heat around. Air isn’t the most space-efficient heat transfer substance but it does the job. Heat can be stored for days in a box of rocks, where rocks cost $30 a ton plus a delivery charge, and the rocks last forever.
There used to be a fatal flaw with solar air and rock beds. Moisture from showers and dishwashers would flow into the rock beds in summer, and then the moisture would grow mold. People can’t live in moldy houses. I solved this problem by using a closed loop system outdoors and by only bringing heat into the building through water pipes. My rock bed isn’t expected to have any mold, and even if the rock bed did have mold the mold could never get into the building. Rock beds can also have radon problems, but again, I have designed the problem away by isolating the rock bed air.
I also experiment with daylighting. My prototype greenhouse concentrates a good amount of sunshine through a relatively small window. The reflectors need manual adjustment once a week, which for a farmer isn’t that much work. My target is both heat and light control inside the greenhouse for lots of plant growth inside a small building. I’ve identified two of the keys to better greenhouses. They are, not overconcentrating the light so as to have a built-in safety system, and building robustness into the reflectors to survive hurricane-force wind gusts.
I have experimented with the robotic control of solar tracking mirrors. Concentrating tracking mirrors are the future of solar heat and of daylighting, but first they need to function dependably. They aren’t quite dependable enough to put in your backyard, but someday they could focus light into a mirrored tube next to your house, leading to a basement window, and then you could have a small greenhouse in the basement of your house. Even if your yard is covered by large trees, there must be some place in the yard to put tracking mirrors on poles.
I predict that with concentrating tracking mirrors, we can grow algae inexpensively in small insulated tanks filled with ocean water. As the cost of petroleum production goes up, the cost of biodiesel fuel from algae will drop, and they’ll pass each other in opposite directions sooner or later, just as the cost of photovoltaic power matched the cost of fossil fuel power in some countries last year. After this point, the only good reason to take fossil fuel out of the ground would be for re-enactments at living museums, and then you would put the coal back into the ground before the next show.
Since the year 2000 I have advocated for interchangeable battery packs so that electric cars can drive into a battery pack changing station, swap battery packs and drive out. There are problems with some drivers abusing the battery packs. So, all battery packs will need computer chips, and abusive drivers will be charged a bit extra for their largesse.
We really need to develop an automated transit system running on a couple of cables above the street. An automated system running above a freeway can carry 100 times as many cars as the freeway can, and when a rare breakdown takes place the traffic flows seamlessly around the problem, so that traffic jams are gone. We need an automated personal transit system that doesn’t kill 40,000 people a year, with no $14 billion dollar Big Digs. We need a system where you aren’t driving so that you have time to read e-mail in your car, so that your car has a refrigerator, a bed, a place to park your wheelchair.
Even if we turn off our planet’s carbon dioxide production machine, we still face a certain degree of catastrophic climate change. My next group of important inventions has to do with increasing the earth’s snow and ice cover, to naturally reflect sunlight back into space, to bring the planet back to the way it used to be.
The Arctic Ocean is overheating in a positive feedback cycle. I’d like to see a simple device that enhances the transfer of heat from the ocean, from about 100 feet deep in the ocean, to the Arctic air in 40 below zero weather. The device would have radiator fins on top and a loop of salt brine down below. If we deployed enough of these devices then we would cool the Arctic Ocean and we would rebuild a multi-year ice pack on the surface of the Arctic Ocean.
Ski resorts have artificial snowmaking equipment. A wind-powered snowmaking device could coat the Arctic tundra early in the fall and late in the spring, reflecting a bit more heat back into space without overly affecting the local wildlife. Doing nothing will greatly affect the local wildlife.
If we value the earth’s diversity of species for many generations hence, I recommend that we freeze the fertilized eggs of millions of species in liquid nitrogen until we can remove the excess carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere.
Probably the surest way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is to grow algae in the desert, sell the biodiesel and bury the algae cell husks. An area the size of Nevada would remove around one gigaton of CO2 per year from the earth’s atmosphere. It’s going to be hard work, but humanity is technologically wealthy. In my opinion, the idea that humanity doesn’t have the money to save itself is silly.
Unfortunately, in my harsh experience as an inventor, the money has never been there. No private foundation anywhere has been interested in my ideas, even with their promises of a local sustainable economy, of jobs and of protecting the planet. No government agency has, as of yet, been interested in my ideas either. I’ve often wondered why. My best guess is that government money flows toward power, first toward large energy companies who might possibly have a vested interest in failure, and second the money flows toward prestigious universities where tenure track professors are badly overworked. My best guess about private foundation donors is that they’re almost always looking for younger versions of themselves, new entrepreneurs who will guarantee that a profit will be turned in a social venture.
And so, with trepidation, I’ve been funding my own prototypes out of our own somewhat scarce retirement money. I find volunteers, middle class folk. In 2007 a carpenter, Louis Tasse, build a 4 foot high greenhouse prototype with me. We put it in a friend’s back yard for the winter of 2008. In 2009 Scot Comey helped me to build a larger greenhouse on his land. It cost us $2500 out-of-pocket. I think that it was worth building. We kept tomato seedlings alive in the winter of 2010 without any outside heat. People were saying that the real market is solar building heat, so in the fall of 2011 we started on a solar heat system for the Temple Am David in Warwick. That has taken 18 months and has cost us $25,000 out of pocket already, and we’re almost done. If, knowing the costs, I had to do it over I probably wouldn’t have attempted it, but here we are.
Every time that I build a prototype I see its successes and its failures, and then I know how the next prototype will be better. That’s how innovation works. The Wright Brothers didn’t understand that control of the airplane in the air was important, not until they had studied wing shapes and powerful, lightweight engines. I wouldn’t have known that the government wasn’t functioning until I tried.
I raise the idea that, if we’re really in trouble and if the government has gone off its rocker, perhaps we need to do the right things ourselves, as individuals, as small faith communites and as larger coalitions of faith communities. I believe that with climate we’re really in trouble. Our federal government appears to be dysfunctional. Our Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation is still recovering from the 38 Studios fiasco, although their heart is probably in the right place in 2013.
If I ran the circus I’d be training really bright kids to become climate change inventors, in about a ten year training program starting in high school, and I’d be paying their rent money for years. We think nothing of laying out $200,000 for a four-year education at a prestigious university, where sometimes the prestige opens as many doors as the education. Then we train doctors with a residency program beyond graduate school, or we train teachers with rigorous Ph.D. programs and tenure track hiring. Our world’s sharpest kids go to Wall Street where they become brokers making fat bonuses. They're professional gamblers on the directions of stocks and interest rates. No one on earth runs any program for inventors. I’ve read that a few inventors in Missouri have cobbled together a little subsistence project on some farmland. Let me ask, if you could recommend a future to your kids, would you rather they invented solutions to climate change or would you rather that they went to Wall Street?
My best dream is for something I call a community corporation, supported, funded and directed by local consumers of solar power systems. The company would act for solar system owners in a manner similar to how the AAA acts for automobile owners, vetting installers for their honest business practices, funding insurance for safe solar systems, advocating for solar-friendly legislation, driving down solar costs through large group purchases. The community corporation would have zero interest in running away to China.
Part of a community corporation's job should be paying people for doing the right thing. If a community corporation existed in the future, by rights they should pay all of us for assembling the community corporation now and for holding the common stock until the corporation gets on its feet. I believe in filing patents because that's what a future community corporation would tell me to do if I worked for one.
God doesn't give us impossible tasks. He gives us hard tasks, and sometimes we give up. I don't believe that inhibiting and eventually reversing climate change is impossible, but it's going to be hard. Are we a video game generation that shirks from daunting tasks? For some of us, yes, for some of us, no. This challenge from God gets personal. Your homework is to find out what you're made of.