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We are going to solve the carbon and energy problems. Technically they are pretty well solved already and more processes are being discovered every day. What a great time for a technical geek to be alive.

The real remaining problems are political and social. Dim bulbs like Jane Fonda and Al Gore have made it impossible to disentangle the red tape and dispell the misinformation that is guiding public attitudes and policy. Suppose I tell you about a catastrophy in which no one was killed. No one was even hurt. No property was damaged outside the factory. There was no damage to the environment and, although there was extensive damage to a large machine inside a building, it was repaired at modest cost. I've just described the catastrophy at Three Mile Island. Press coverage notwithstanding, this catastrophy barely merited coverage on the back page of the Harrisburg newspaper.

But it could have been much worse -- an incorrect assumption by those who understood neither the processes nor their consequences. What about Chernobyl? Chernobyl was, in fact, a bad news industrial accident, but consider. If you start counting in January 1945 and you count accidental (and on purpose) deaths per kilowatt hour of electricity generated for both fossil fuel and nuclear processes (including Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl) you find that fossil fuel power costs more in human lives than power from nuclear processes. Of course, we must remember that a person killed by nuclear energy is more dead than a person killed in a methane explosion in a coal mine.

We could go a long way toward solving the carbon footprint and energy problems by using nuclear reactors to make electrical power. By the way, some will argue that nuclear power is not cost effective -- true if you require draconian and totally unnecessary processes and procedures be implemented. No fossil fuel plant could meet the requirements for release of radio-active substances laid on nuclear plants since when fossil fuel is burned, Carbon 14 is released in the smoke and it is radio-active. France makes nearly 80% of their power with nuclear reactors. So don't buy any more rouquefort lest you be poisoned by radio active substances in the cheese.

As for global warming it is real and has been going on for 10,000 years. The Industrial Revolution is a few hundred years old. We with our fossil fuels are responsible for 12% of the carbon dioxide in the air. We know how to remove CO2 from air -- ask any astronaut that needed CO2 removed from the air they breathed in the space capsules. The trick is to make the process efficient and inexpensive. A method that removes 60% of the CO2 has been developed and a pilot plant was built at the University of Calgary and it works. Probably for about the same money that we spend on Twinkies we could not only reverse global warming but initiate global refrigeration.

These are only two of the processes that can solve two of the major problems. What would the actors and politicians do then? Neither involves a giant step backwards like everyone riding bicycles or riding around in glorified kitty-cars. We don't need windmills in every one's yard or solar cells on every roof. Who is going to clean the dust off of those mirrors and photo-electric cells? And we don't have to give up anything -- heat, light or fattening food.