Radical thinking

Making a significant impact on the global warming trajectory will require radical thinking. Now, making an impact is not so difficult -- conservation measures, if implemented radically, will have an impact. But ultimately we need more sources of lots of power. That's why the following article made me feel pretty good that people (and groups and businesses) are actually thinking about what it would take to stop sucking on the petroleum teat.

Solar Collectors Covering 0.3 Percent of the Sahara Could Power All of Europe

I prefer this picture from the movie "Sahara" to illustrate this post:

Ohh, sorry, wrong picture. Actually, I only found one very small image of the solar thermal power plant from "Sahara", and I figured Penelope Cruz generates plenty of heat by herself.

But anyway, getting back to the original subject of this post, below is an image of a solar thermal power plant.

The plan for the Sahara desert is pretty ambitious, and requires an estimated $400 billion dollars to get going. But I thought about this for a minute, and said to myself: Why aren't the Saudis and other petro-nations thinking about the future? They can invest their petro-dollars now in projects like this, get them online, and as the cost of oil field development and extraction goes higher and higher, then they can start selling power from the other source of power that they have plenty of: abundant sunlight.