Arresting and correcting global warming is a huge, challenging task possible too great for a nation of suers rather than doers to get done. Democrat party politicians can’t just sneak a lawyer’s Rube Goldberg environmental bill under wraps through Congress with a one-party majority vote and actually get the job done even if they are elected and spend half a billion dollars on day care as a partial remedy. The challenge is quite large and is likely to need vast changes in the economy and human tool kit. That will require a publicly reviewed and engineered approach; one that the Democrat Party could sign on to and support before their next presidential primary season.
In 2020 one of the Democrat candidates in the primaries advocated building aa great sun screen at L-5, while another had some kind of complex, unknown plan that journalists who reviewed it said would cost more than 50 trillion dollars. Approaches to solving the global atmospheric heating crisis require input from a host of disciplines including physics, biological, sociological, economic etc. There will be consequences for the world to any approach taken. Such a once-in-a-lifetime political action needs peer reviewed vetting of the highest order. Reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth could have vast unintended consequences that need be considered.
During the Eisenhower administration the nation could still get large physical infrastructure projects accomplished. In recent decades the nation has failed at such large projects with vast cost overruns and even cancellations mid-way. Bureaucracies and legal challenges have rendered the feral government unable to accomplish projects like the Interstate Highway System, the T.V.A., the Grand Coulee Dam , the Apollo Missions that had great scale and investment and complexity. There was even a plan to extend the Inside Passage from Alaska to Portland Oregon with a canal from Olympia Washington. That would have made western Washington State an island and provided a two-state solution with Washington’s blue voters on the Western Island and the Red voters on the mainland decades ahead of time. Not all projects turned out to be environmentally, and there is a lesson in that for any potential environmental bill to knock out global warming. It is not certain that any large, costly (if necessary) global warming reduction project would amount to anything more than a costly swamp for partisan spending.
Private enterprise has added some technology to capture and sequester CO2, solar voltaic panels have become more affordable and will reduce acceleration of warming gasses from the sunny parts of the world that might otherwise be emitted from electrification powered by fossil fuels. It is plain that government should provide leadership for example, in developing road surface material that reflects rather than absorbs sunshine to warm the atmosphere during the day and after dark. Asphalt manufacturers aren’t likely to invest in research to develop new materials; that is a task that government could accelerate by offering a 100 million dollar prize for a practical, pragmatic way to convert asphalt to have a high albedo character or to convert photons into electrons traveling in circuits. A remedy to asphalt caused heating would cool cities and eliminate developing nations paving millions more miles with asphalt.
If one wants to build a salt-water canal across the southern border to let sunlight evaporate fresh water that would be condensed and collected with sloped polycarbonate roofs to collection canals in order to fill the Salt Lake with fresh water the job would be nearly impossible to get done today. If one actually wanted to build a tin foil hat sunscreen at L-5 to keep out intelligent ideas from reaching the Democrat party, after the research was done to determine the affect on the world; its oceans, plankton etc and to determine if it would cause a new ice age very quickly it would be reasonable to use the thing for multi-tasking. That is, the sunscreen could be used as a dish to receive programming from distant alien civilizations in other galaxies far far away, or to collect sunlight and focus it to a collector node t heat a trapped gas to power a laser to particle beam that would in turn be the power line for space-transport modules racing at very high speed throughout the solar system (i.e. 2 months travel time Earth to Pluto at ¾ the speed of light).
Affecting global warming’s arrest and correction may be the largest challenge western civilization, or rather world civilization faces (along with mass species extinction and natural resource depletion. Arnold Toynbee said that a civilization does experience challenges that it overcomes or that alternatively end it. Recognizing and addressing empirical challenges successfully is a skill that political leadership should not fail to keep in its skill set. The Democrat party has failed to order its political agenda in such a way that a transparent and publicly reviewed plan to end the global warming and mass extinction challenges along with a political economy that works to support the plan exists.
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