Air Pollution, Clean Air. Spirit Science 16 - The Shift of Ages. "The Guarded Secret of the Plants": Will Dan Nocera's Artificial Leaf Revolutionize Energy? In 1912, ten years before his death, Giacomo Luigi Ciamician predicted the world’s clean energy future. “On the arid lands there will spring up industrial colonies without smoke and without smokestacks; Forests of glass tubes will extend over the plains and glass buildings will rise everywhere,” Ciamician, a nine-time Nobel prize nominee, declared. Within that glass world, he asserted, “will take place the photochemical processes that hitherto have been the guarded secret of the plants.”
Even if the coalmines were emptied, civilization would prosper so long as the sun shined. A hundred years later, Ciamician’s apostles, chief among them Daniel Nocera, are still pursuing the “guarded secret of the plants.” Nocera, who is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working to realize that long-ago dream of capturing “the guarded secret of the plants.”
He has built an artificial leaf. Photosynthesis “is how the whole world operates,” he said. Should the DHS assume control of the electric grid? A new report published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recommends that a federal agency such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assume control over the US electric grid. According to MIT Professor John Kassakian, the risk of security breaches or cyber attacks against the grid will increase exponentially as related infrastructure becomes more interconnected.
Currently, no single agency has responsibility and authority for the entire grid. Although Kassakian believes the DHS could potentially be tasked with overseeing the grid, he does acknowledge that "thorny issues" related to authority over local distribution systems would need to be resolved, along with the formulation of strict rules to protect customer privacy. "The government spent a lot of money on pilot programs and experiments, and installations of a lot of new equipment that can improve the efficiency and reliability of the grid and the management of demand," Kassakian says. Democratize the Grid. The Bible tells us that on the Sixth Day, God created man, allowing him to live in the lush garden and be steward of the whole Earth. But God’s great mistake on that day was failing to demand a security deposit.
At last, though, humankind seems to grasp the fact that we’re perilously close to environmental catastrophe, and governments around the world are beginning to respond. A green transformation is under way as growing majorities of people demand everything from strict regulation of climate-change pollutants to aggressive development of a new clean-energy economy. In the past few years, freelance inventors, small companies, co-ops, professors, backyard mechanics, and a few mad scientists have made tremendous strides in the development of alternative fuel technologies.
These technologies are already cheaper than fossil fuels when we factor in the tremendous savings they provide in the health and environmental costs we are now paying for oil and coal.