The other day I read a really inspiring article, published in Science Daily. A group of scientists at UCLA are working on a way to process carbon dioxide emitted from coal burning electric plants and liquid fuel that can be used to power vehicles or other machinery. The scientists were able to prove the process in the lab. Clearly, it will take years, millions of dollars, and a shift in the way utilities do business to turn this into a viable product. But that's not the point or what makes it inspiring. The inspiring part is that there are people out there who are thinking outside the box, to come up with real solutions. Rather than following the old pattern of just burying the waste, CO2 along with the sulfides and other nasty stuff being churned out the smokestacks by the ton, these guys are trying to find a way to take that waste and turn it into fuel. Whether this particular process succeeds along the evolutionary product path and clears all the hurdles along the way is almost beside the point.
In Atlas Shrugged, which I read about 20 years ago, a key story line was the "motor of the world", that would take static electricity and turn it into energy, representing a fundamental shift in the harnessing of energy. It is the ingenuity of scientists like those at UCLA that will create the next paradigm shift in the world's energy consumption model. I'm glad that people smarter than myself are working on it, and pushing the envelope to find solutions that don't involve planting virtual time bombs in the ground for the next generation to figure out how to disposition them.
Tight Lines,
Dave
