2050




   So I fly in my mind to 2050 and I look down on the world I see there. This isn't just any 2050. This is the one that for 40 years was steered to by mankind.Starting in Copenhagen, but committed to in mexico, this is the pathway to tomorrow built by man…walked by humanity.A pathway handed down by our forefathers from  long ago..

       Really it looks a lot like 2009.
           I mean there are 10 billion people so its more crowded but one of the design criteria used was 'change things as little as possible'.

      Which is not to say it was easy to arrive at. The sheer volume of tiny invisible changes is staggering.

     This is a 2050 where most uses of carbon are deprecated. Perhaps a campfire by the lake when you go camping, a candle when the lights go out, a guilty cigarette, but the planet is at 430 ppm and the number is dropping by 2 a year. You wouldn't burn carbon to go anywhere (well sometimes biodiesel,but that was grown) or heat your house. Its a post carbon day, which is faster than planned for 2050...

    How is carbon dropping by 2 a year when in 2009 it is going up by almost 3 a year? Well this is a much greener world, in its plant coverage it has changed a lot. There are very few scrublands or desserts, the sahel in africa is largely irrigated.. other than parks and reserved ecological sanctuaries 2050 has changed the landscape a lot. The sahara for example is covered in solar arrays of sterling engine thermal dishes,  with a lot of sea water desalination going on to water the forests...

there is a new smart grid, and every body seems to have a piece of the energy biz, selling power from their house,   their car,the cottage.

Really having a cottage that earns money in alternative energy isn't so odd. There are management companies that maintain equipment, it's all taken care of. You just get a check in the mail each month....


     Very early, like 2012, after carbon was monetized,
it became a valuable business proposition to buy up dry wasteland by oceans all over the world and irrigate it with desalinated sea water. Mostly drip irrigated forests…There were incentives to USE seawater lowering the oceans, there were incentives to take a piece of land that is neutral in carbon uptake and times that by 20 creating a rain forest. Getting paid by the carbon fixed...
After years of being artificially irrigated the trees form a canopy and trap water themselves.


      Actually getting water for dry lands was something that the world had a renaissance in. Done so well that most small systems became irrelevant.  Desalination arrays that were really huge were created. A channel of seawater as big as a river is heated by sunlight, then enters a long condensation chamber that climb a hillside     . At the top the pure water is trapped and then flows into a huge tank that flows downhill onto a drip irrigated forest.


    So how is the carbon sucked out of the air each year doubled?
Largely by water dripped onto perennials, and permaculture water saving techniques were applied getting the most foliage for the least water.

         

       But by the rules of transpiration, all this greenery created canopies and rainfall so the irrigation was just a backup in unstable times…re-engineering the plants re-engineered the rain.


        So you've got a world that is fixing tons of carbon in plants.. A world that has reinvented and improved irrigation… Small cars run on elec., trucks on biodiesel. Lots of dirt batteries underground…

       Dirt batteries were huge in the underground. If you had special glasses that showed the buried underground world you'd see arrays of these huge thermal mass systems that could be warmed during the summer months to provide enough heat for a house all winter.


    the fact that so much of the change is hidden was because people rapidly grew tired of a busier world with solar panels everywhere and windmills…Too busy, too ugly.
       instead they opted for photovoltaic roof tiles that looked like normal roof tiles, roads that were photovoltaic, walls. all covered with a clear saran wrap like photovoltaic.
     Geothermal plants for electrical generation that were almost completely buried… high altitude windmills that flew out of sight in the jetstream and offshore windmills unseen from the shoreline…

      Uglier things were built in the 10's and 20's but mostly  rebuilt in the 30's and 40s as techniques improved.


     So rather that a world that is festooned with alternative energy devices…they built a world of hidden treasures.

       You have to understand that people loved doing this work because they were  competent. The entire project was computer designed and pre visualized by all. This made random acts make sense. It was a goldrush and they were making big cash too. that helped.


       So there is a party. I mean there was a plan adopted called the 'party steps' so in 2020,2030 and 2040 there are big parties to celebrate progress…then in 2050 is the biggest party, not at a predefined date, but when all goals are met. The 2040 party and 2050 parties are both contingent on meeting goals. The 2040 party doesn't happen till 2043. but the 2050 party happens in the fall of that same year.

         and its at that party our story begins.
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