I have decided to devote this column to doing only good.
I shall start by solving the energy crisis. Now, crisis is a terrible description and shortage is worse. The terms of this debate have been set by the oil industry, whose worldview was formed when atoms were solid. Oil industry executives still see cars as the solution to the global threat emanating from horses (who, scientists once predicted, would bury the world’s cities under 20ft of manure by 1950). But how can you have a shortage of energy in a universe made out of nothing but energy? On a planet half of which is bathed in high-energy radiation at all times? A planet with a core of solid, crystalline iron, which rotates in a boiling slurry of molten rock so energetic it can burst through the earth’s skin to consume cities? A planet with a moon that hauls entire oceans, whales and all, several meters up in the air, twice daily? Earth’s air pours forth raw electricity, in billion-volt bolts, at a global rate of 100 times a second. Absurd excesses of energy lash us from every direction, it’s a miracle we’re not all dead. Shortage? The crisis is one of overproduction.
Yet people are faffing about attempting to run cars on soya oil. Stop it! It’s embarrassing! Where is your pride in technological advance? Way back in the 1970s, spacecraft already used fuel cells and solar panels and elegant gravitational slingshots around distant planets and yet we, in the 21st century, are still trying to move forward by essentially lighting our own farts.
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