A Green Moonshot, Not a Green New Deal

I just finished reading Douglas Brinkley’s “American Moonshot” and it came to me that what is needed to solve the problem of climate change is not an amorphous Green New Deal, but rather a focused Green Moonshot. (See https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2019/05/my-amazon-review-of-douglas-brinkleys.html) The American space program of the 1960s is a far better analogy than the New Deal of the 1930s. This is especially true because the space program, although spending big bucks, did not require a remaking of American society while the supporters of the Green New Deal want to use it as an excuse to remake society in their social democratic image. The latter is not desirable and is politically impossible.

What a Green Moonshot would do is that it would focus attention not so much on alternative energy, carbon taxes and conservation which as important as they are, will not solve the problem. What is needed is a crash program to REMOVE carbon from the atmosphere. An April 7^th New York Times article on the subject was entitled, “Blamed for Climate Change, Oil Companies Invest in Carbon Removal.”  The process involves direct air capture to generate a flow of air over calcium hydroxide that captures the carbon and converts it into fuel.

There are other techniques to remove carbon dioxide from the air through cryogenics, expensive, but it works. What we have here is less a problem of pure science than a problem of chemical engineering. It is very much similar to the creation of the modern aluminum industry when the Hall- Hercoult process refined aluminum from alumina and note the chemical formula for alumina is AL2O3, not too different from carbon dioxide CO2. One is an aluminum oxide and the other is a carbon oxide.

Further unlike the space program which had to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 we already have in place the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It is though that agency a focused research effort in conjunction with private contractors that an economical solution to carbon capture problem could be solved within a decade.

Indeed such a program would be a far easier sell to those members of Congress who are skeptical of the Green New Deal. To be sure the climate deniers in the Republican Party probably won’t go along with this, but hopefully by 2021 cooler heads will prevail. To paraphrase President Kennedy we will do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

The End of a Dream

As a child of the space age I am especially saddened that with the final voyage of the space shuttle Atlantis we are witnessing the end of the manned space program. I vividly remember watching the first moon landing on a grainy black and white TV in my Fort Bragg orderly room on a hot July night in 1969. If you asked me then what the future would bring, I would most certainly have said that by 2011 we would be launching star fleets to Mars and Venus. We dreamed big things back then. Now our dreams seem pitifully small and we can't even do little things like fixing roads and bridges.

I think the political process grossly underestimates the need a society has for heroes and big projects. I was at astronaut John Glenn's ticker tape parade in 1962 after he returned from space. Glen was a real hero. Although President Kennedy was not as popular when he was in office than he is today, the space program was among his most popular efforts.

It was the space program that inspired millions of students to become scientists and engineers and we have been living off of that legacy for decades. The astronauts were far better roll models for kids to look up to than the reality television of today.

I know that latter thought proves that I am a curmudgeon, but trust me, with this last flight, we are losing something real.