Burt Rutan - Is Climate Change caused by Mankind?

[artdutra04]

I think the worst problem is both side's complete rejection of anything proposed by the other side. Take for example, energy independence. Why should we be sending over half a million dollars every minute overseas, often to nations which we politically strongly disagree with, when we can create enough energy here at home to satisfy our needs? Having energy independence would provide a lot of Americans good paying jobs that can't be outsourced.

There are many paths to accomplish this. The best solutions are clean energy, as regardless of whether you believe humans are the reason for climate change, burning fossil fuels release pollution. And pollution and poor air quality has been shown time and time again to have numerous adverse health effects on the human body, particularly on children, pregnant woman, and the elderly. These results aren't anywhere near as controversial as global warming.

So for clean energy, we need both more nuclear and more renewable (wind, solar, geothermal, hydro). Nuclear technology, despite all the fear-mongering, is safe. The worst accident in American nuclear history, Three Mile Island, which involved a partial meltdown of one of the reactor cores, has yet to be linked to a single death or case of cancer because the reactor's safety features worked. The only reason Chernobyl was so bad was because Soviet safety standards were nowhere near as safe as American ones, and at the time of the disaster the Soviets had disabled the backup coolant system to "run experiments" in the reactor.

Add onto that a comprehensive plan for storing spent fuel rods at Yucca Mountain and recent developments such as the sodium-cooled fast reactor, (which have the potential run off "depleted" uranium, thus reducing the amount of spent fuel rods we have to dispose of), and the future of nuclear power is glowing.

At the same time, renewable energy sources, like wind turbines, aren't some work of the devil sent to destroy American capitalism. Last year, a wind turbine was erected in Worcester, MA (a city of 175,000), where I go to college. It's certainly big, and can be seen from much of the city but I really can't see why people would have problems with it. It's pretty quiet, and it spins at slightly less than one rotation per second. It's actually kind of peaceful watching it.

Several ski resorts in the state, first Jiminy Peak and now Wachusett Mountain, have recently installed their own wind turbines. Jiminy Peak expects their turbine to generate up to 2/3 of the power needed to run their resort during the winter months (remember: snowmaking uses an enormous amount of electricity), and break even only 3 years into its 25 year lifespan.

Then there is micro-scale wind turbines, such as these that can be installed on the rooftops of existing buildings. After all, the wind is already blowing, why not generate electricity from it?

Then there are really simple and cheap things, such as painting rooftops white or planting grass/plants on them, that would work just as well as other more costly attempts to reduce the greenhouse effect of cities or reduce the rainwater runoff that floods sewer systems and causes many to discharge raw sewage into rivers during storms.

// I really need to stop myself and my fascination in new technology saving mankind from all our problems before I write enough to fill a novel. This is one of the reasons why I believe Walt Disney is probably one of the best people of the 20th century, in that his internal optimism in the human ability to invent our way out of problems and his drive to achieve those goals was unparalleled by most. If only he had lived a few more years to see the original plan for EPCOT Center to completion, we may all have been riding monorails at 300 mph by now instead of deciding how to slice up a measly $8B in federal stimulus grants to high speed rail projects among the requested $100+B from the states.