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Research into the air, the water, and the soil. It is difficult— But which technologies will enable us to do
perhaps even impossible—to break because
we need the energy embedded in fossil fuels
to propel the industry and to ensure adequate
material conditions and a basic standard of living
for all of Earth’s inhabitants.
How can the cycle be broken? Is there hope?
The Problem-Solving Machine
And yet, forecasts predicting the sad future
of our planet’s climate, like many other
historical predictions concerning nature and the
environment, are not carved in stone. In fact,
forecasts of this kind have a marked tendency to
be proven false—but only if certain conditions are
met.
When, in 1894, The Times predicted that “in
50 years, every street in London will be buried
under nine feet of manure,” it failed to consider
automobiles, which would, within a period of
twenty years, transform transportation and
eliminate horses as the most widespread mode
of travel. When, in 1976, Paul R. Ehrlich published
The Population Bomb, predicting that hundreds
of millions of people will die of starvation in
the coming decades, he failed to grasp the full
significance of the Green Revolution, which in
a biological engineering tour de force improved
the quality and resilience of plants grown in Asia
and Africa. As a result of this revolution, Asia
and Africa, to a large extent, are able to grow and
provide their own food today.
These forecasts and others like them did not take
into account the most crucial element to consider
when thinking about the future: The advancement
of technology itself.
In The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves,
Matt Ridley writes: “The human race has become
a collective problem-solving machine and it solves
problems by changing its ways.” Ridley has little
faith in the apocalyptic forecasts surrounding
climate changes for a simple reason: He believes
that humanity can still turn back the clock on
global warming, using the power of technology.
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that? Can we find technologies that will give
us efficient alternatives for fossil fuels, reduce
excess consumption of energy, and perhaps even
absorb the surplus of carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere?
The development of such technological solutions
is indeed underway—in part, at some of the
Technion’s laboratories.
Let the Sunshine In
Solar energy has a long history. Inventors as far
back as the seventh century BC were able to focus
sunlight using primitive magnifying glasses. They
did so to light bonfires or, in somewhat less than
pleasant circumstances, to set insects on fire.
The ancient Greeks would light “holy” torches
using mirrors that reflected and focused sunlight,
a practice that survives to this day as part of
the Olympic Games, ensuring—according to the
International Olympic Committee—that the flame
remains “ever pure.”
Pure or not, the Greeks were definitely on to
something. Our planet gets vast quantities of
According to Prof. Carmel Rotschild,
combining a turbine and a solar panel
will enable harvesting over one-third
of the energy locked in sunlight.
energy from the star at the center of our solar
system. If we could use all the energy reaching
Earth from the sun in just a single hour, we would
be able to fulfill all of humanity’s energy needs
for an entire year. If we could use all of the solar
energy hitting a single square mile, we’d have the
energy equivalent of 4 million barrels of oil.
So why aren’t we?
One of the most common arguments is that
harvesting solar power is still vastly more
expensive than producing energy from fossil