I am also troubled by the possibility that the oil barons may use it as an excuse to keep on keeping on.
That bothers me too, when applied to less drastic solutions that people are actually offering now, such as building dikes around cities.
There is also the chance that, due to the uncertainties involved, the effect will be too great, and overshoot the mark, resulting in a new ice age. Once such a cloud is in place, it would be next to impossible to get rid of it again, and we may not find out that we have gone too far, until it is too late.
I do not think this would be a problem, because it would take a long time to do this, and only a little of the aluminum would be added per payload, so the effects would be closely monitored.
I discussed a project similar to this in chapter 9 of "Cold Fusion and the Future." I proposed gigantic orbiting mylar parasols. These would certainly be benign and I think they would be more practical than they sound. I said it would only be practical to implement something like this with space elevators. This is true of the aluminum plan as well I think. It would drastically lower the cost, by a factor of 10 or 100. Two or three modest space elevators with perhaps 10 times of capacity each would probably be enough to implement the plan. I think this would inevitably lead to the construction of a larger set of space elevators with hundreds of tons of capacity. This, in turn, could allow orbiting space power systems that transmit power to Earth via microwaves. This would solve the energy crisis, and eliminate CO2 emissions. It would be far more expensive than cold fusion, and much less flexible, but it would solve the problem. For that matter, so would a practical hot fusion reactor.
- Jed
