Shining

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, amid all the doom and gloom of this, the "real" world, you come across something which lifts your spirits, like Prozac. In this case it was a piece of filler material on a news broadcast, one of those one or two minute informational segments which uses up the remaining time after all the news has been read. They were talking about fields of solar energy panels, floating on top of large bodies of water, like lakes. They were focusing on a large lake in New Jersey, in which a huge array of solar energy collectors were floating on a substantial portion of the lake's surface, but not all of it. Apparently this is a new trend, a recently developed idea which is being put into action all over the world. Countries with high population density and limited land area for use as solar energy facilities, countries such as Taiwan and China, are especially taking advantage of this new idea for solar arrays. It appears more and more every day that solar energy is indeed the solution to global warming and climate change, the best way to use the abundant, nearly infinite amount of energy which strikes the Earth's surfact each day from the sun,to replace fossil fuels, and get the excess carbon out of the atmosphere. Not only are we humans failing to remove the extra carbon we have already put into the atmosphere, causing the global warming we plainly see today, but we are still adding more to the mix, with increasingly disastrous consequences. So, we must do both. We must not only stop adding more carbon to the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels, we must remove billions of tons of carbon already in the air. Both are possible, do-able. Solar energy arrays could be placed o teh surfaces of calm, tropical oceans, and collect an enormous amount of sunlight. Also, huge light reflectors could be placed in Earth orbit, and reflect the collected solar energy down to the Earth's surface, where it could be processed and disributed at solar facilities. Obviously, solar collecting falilities in the middle of desert areas is a possibility, and such structures are in fact springing up all over the world. Every day, thousands of solar radiation panels are installed on top of buildings, which is probably teh best place for them to be located. If,building by building, all over the world, all man made structures could eventually be energized with solar energy, humanity will have won the war against climate change, a war wssentially against itself. Every day, humanity is closer to that ideal; a human infrastructure entirely run by solar energy...one building at a time. The technology for removing carbon from the atmosphere is still in a fairly primitive state; as of now it requires far too much energy to remove the carbon, which defeats the purpose, making it so inefficient as to be impractical. But evidently, like solar energy itself, the process is being made more efficient, and less expensive, and is receiving much needed investment. the efficiency of solar energy collectors has dramatically increased in recent years and the expense of generating solar energy is still decreasing at a dramatic rate, making solar energy more desirable every day. Because of this progress, we humans have at least some semblance of hope for the future and our survival, a real opportunity to preserve a healthy planet for future generations, if we refuse to fail.