I am watching Bitter Lake a film by Adam Curtis on the BBC iplayer. It is about a deal made by Roosevelt and Abdulaziz in the 1950s guaranteeing Saudi oil for letting Saudi Arabia play caliphate with the Wahhabi regime. We are seeing the consequences of these deals all over the world now.
For a long time I have wondered why we have not invested in Solar Power. There is the sun, powering up this planet, keeping it warm, sending photons of light that all living things rely on. Plants use this light energy to make matter (materials), transforming energy into chemicals. We eat plants or animals that have ate plants to release, from the chemicals, the energy we need to fuel our lives, our metabolic processes. So why can’t we work out a way of using light energy to fuel our homes and cars?
By this I don’t mean those primitive black boxes spread over acres of fields or roofs to make enough energy to fuel a kettle? I mean sophisticated small boxes that capture energy. We have small computers and phones. Why not solar panels? Cheap, small, easily manufactured, linked to small, quiet generators or capacitors? Why, after all this technology are we still making fire to fuel our lives, whether the fire is from wood, coal, gas or oil, it is still fire?
Seeing that film I realise there is too much vested interest in not coming up with cheap, small, solar panels. These would free everybody and liberate us from power companies, so of course they don’t want them, and from countries sitting on oil and gas reserves, so of course they don’t want them. Fracking is not the solution.
A bright entrepreneur should put up a vast sum of money for a reward to the person that comes up with this. That would fuel the research.
dr cedar 