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Columns

Harvey Wasserman

Why SOLARTOPIA! can be won by Earth Day 2030
April 20, 2006

The vision of a fully green-powered Earth---SOLARTOPIA!---can and must become reality by 2030.

The nay-sayers are wrong. So are the global warming deniers. And the advocates of a lunatic re-birth of nuclear power, a mutant nightmare destined for catastrophe.

The seeds of an ultra-efficient green-powered post-pollution economy have been planted and proven, ecologically and economically. Our presence on this Earth cannot be sustained without it. A Solartopian transformation must happen to end the wars for oil and global-warmed storms, the nuke melt-downs and petro-dictatorships, while initiating an age of full employment, material prosperity and natural harmony.

The ancient Greeks were thoroughly schooled in the science of passive solar building design. Wind power has been profitable for centuries, including at least one machine that operated on Manhattan Island in the 1600s. Bio-fuels will soon be a trillion-dollar industry. And we have barely scraped the surface of increased energy efficiency.

Along with distributed generation and revived mass transit, these are the key components of the necessary and inevitable transformation to Solartopia. Some will translate into electricity, others into hydrogen, still more into straight heating, cooling and people moving.

But all are essential to reversing the horrors of global warming and mega-pollution, to beating global bankruptcy and permanent plague-driven poverty.

Global warming is a misnomer. What we really face is climate chaos, or what Amory Lovins has called "global wierding," Record heat and record cold, record storms and record drought, record crop loss and record property damage, wars for oil and killer hurricanes---they're the delirium tremens of our fossil/nuke addiction.

Our continued enslavement to King C.O.N.G. (Coal, Oil, Nukes and Gas) is our harshest reality. Fossil fuels are ecologically unsustainable and economically suicidal. Nuclear power is a proven failure. It is dangerous beyond all other technologies, and cannot be privately insured. It irradiates everything around it, and its waste cannot be contained. Nor can it be protected from terrorist attacks by air, land or sea. With 2007's fiftieth anniversary of the failed Shippingport reactor, the time to forever bury this trillion-dollar lemon is abundantly upon us.

Thus the vision of a Solartopia, freed from the plagues of Fossil/Nuke. Our nascent new green economy is already yielding billions in extremely profitable renewable investments. Wind power, the cheapest form of new electric generation, is growing worldwide at more than 25% per year. Photovoltaic cells, which translate direct sunlight into electric current, are transcending computer chips as our most important use of silicon. Crops for energy are booming past corn and soy and into "incredible inedibles" such as switchgrass and poplar trees, Jerusalem artichoke and hemp.

Over the next few decades, these will be the energy sources that work, that dominate, and that pay. King CONG is doomed. Our planet cannot sustain more fossil fire and war. Our economy can't afford them. Nor can we tolerate more nuclear plants, destined to melt and fail as sure as the sun will rise and the winds will blow.

The constant stream of technical breakthroughs in renewable energy, and the huge surge in stock market support for it, tell us one thing: Solartopia is coming.

It's necessary…it's where the money is…it's how our Earth will survive. It is our future.

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Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 is now available at www.harveywasserman.com, where it's posted in part.

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