Heat: how to stop the planet burning

I've been reading George Monbiot's new book, Heat: how to stop the planet burning. It's an excellent book, and I urge you all to read it. He describes how we can achieve the necessary cuts in carbon emissions to prevent the worst effects of climate change, and furthermore how we can do it without giving up our civil liberties or our industrial society. He seems to have done his homework pretty thoroughly - the chapters average out at about a hundred footnotes each. If you've been following his Guardian column, you'll recognize a lot of the material (some of it looks like it was copied-and-pasted from old columns), but there's some new stuff, and it's good to see his thought presented as a coherent argument.

( Herewith an executive summary )

He's also summarised his plan here, with timings.

I'm currently reading The Utility of Force by General Sir Rupert Smith, which, while not quite so well-written, is also fascinating. Yay for the Blackwell's sale! :-)

Space elevators

Another Important Idea That Everyone Should Know About :-)

Capture a small asteroid. Stick it into geosynchronous orbit above a reasonably stable part of the Equator. Attach it to the ground with a big cable. It will need to be a very strong cable to support its own weight (to reach geosynchronous orbit, it would have to be nearly 36,000 km long), so you'd better make it out of carbon nanotubes. Run a railway line up the side. Ta-da! You've just reduced the cost of reaching geosynchronous orbit by a factor of more than 100.

What you have just built is called a Space Elevator.

This idea isn't actually as daft as I've just made it sound, and some very bright people (including NASA) are working on building one. In fact, if you want to go to Mars, it would probably be cheaper to build a space elevator first. These guys reckon they can do it by 2031. There's lots more information in the Wikipedia article linked; I'd also recommend Arthur C. Clarke's excellent novel The Fountains of Paradise, which is half about the construction of a space elevator and half about his beloved Sri Lanka.