Google's Suggestion for Climate Fix

Readers following LENR posts on EcatWorld and on Londont know that Industrial Heat and Brillouin target their initial reactors at the heating sector. These are transitional applications in retrofitting coal-fired electricity and heating plants' They will immediately impact CO2 emissions. BlackLight Power, with its novel plasma/photovoltaic technology goes directly for electricity generation.

Our readers also know that writers often make use of “selective quotations” to support their point of view. Therefore, without much ado (or original content), here is a selection of excerpts from a November 2014 article in IEEE Spectrum by a couple of Google engineers, Ross Koningstein and David Fork. Their title: “What it would really take to reverse Climate change.

They begin with the assertions, “Climate scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”

The engineers suggest the template to use is from an aborted Google project to “produce a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than a coal-fired plant could, and to achieve this in years, not decades... The approach suggests that 70 percent of employee time be spent working on core business tasks, 20 percent on side projects related to core business, and the final 10 percent on strange new ideas that have the potential to be truly disruptive.”

Koningstein and Fork suggest reforestation for carbon sequestration and “exhort scientists and engineers to seek disruptive technologies.”

They write: “We’re not trying to predict the winning technology here, but its cost needs to be vastly lower than that of fossil energy systems... A disruptive fusion technology, for example, might skip the steam and produce high-energy charged particles that can be converted directly into electricity... disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible.”

“So we’re issuing a call to action. There’s hope to avert disaster if our society takes a hard look at the true scale of the problem and uses that reckoning to shape its priorities.”

Given, the UN just extended its climate change summit in Lima, Peru, these excerpts might have put pressure on delegates to identify and agree on affordable solutions. As usual, the emphasis seems to have been on getting committments on emission reductions (posturing) rather than means of funding research to accomplish goals (action)

The Google engineers neglected to touch upon nuclear's radioactive issues or the emerging LENR solution; perhaps their editor wanted to leave that to the UN's Ban Ki-moon -and to Messrs Harper and Obama.

Back date
A 2012 essay by Peter Gluck that still resonates.
http://coldfusionnow.org/peter-gluck-inspired-by-defkalion-the-tortuous-way-toward-lenr-standards/
and a line from his latest EgoOut issue that really echos my assessment of the latest UN climate meeting in Lima: "...the fact that you actually do not solve a problem if your solution does not come fast enough."
Update
Response to an emailer who thought i was too hard on politicians whom he felt tended to wait for public consensus rather than lead, and in any case, did not pick winners in the current contest between hot nuclear researchers and cool experimenters:
Rather than defend party positions, astute politicians might look beyond fossil, solar, wind and not-so-benign nuclear. Indeed, they might drop a Solution Aversion stance and entertain the prospect of a more affordable and safer energy alternative ...albeit, a market-disrupting one.
Dec. 21, 2014 Update
Further to August post on the formation of LENR-Cities, Peter Gluck reports on his interview with CEO, Michel Vandenberghe on upcoming events in the UK and Italy, and on the translation of LENR acronym as "Low Energy Nanoscale Reaction." Vandenberghe claims LENR is more of a disruption in markets than in technology.
http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Thread/1005-Peter-Gluck-report-discussion-With-LENR-Cities-founder-Michel-Vandenberghe/