Solar Oven

A hand-me-down from my friends Mark and Georgina, local gurus of sustainability. Mark had a couple extras from a demo day at his place of employment, and said, "I'll give you one if you're really going to use it!" No problem there.

The pic is of my first effort: a hastily prepared rice dish, put out around 4 PM, unsure if the sun would be hot enough in the last hours of this early May day. The rice came out of the sun at 6.30, perfectly cooked. It would have felt like a very pure and simple cooking experience if I hadn't needed to microwave the chicken stock we keep stored in the freezer. The lady of the house was not very impressed with that. If only I had an extra hour of sun, I would have been able to shun the nuclear option.

I have some unexpected disappointments to sort through. This is, essentially, an outdoor cooking method, one that my wife seems happy to leave to The Man. But, strangely, there is no smoke. There are also no special tools, no sizzling, splattering of fat, or poking of charred meat with forks. Really I think my disappointment comes down to a lack of fire. I should say, just to be clear, that my criteria for cooking with fire is that said fire be at ground level, not burning at a distance of one astronomical unit.

I can live with it, because with this smokeless cooking method, entirely devoid of splattering fat as it is, there is also no power being used ... so no draw on the power lines in the house, no burden on the grid, no demand generated on some coal-burning plant somewhere, and so no smoke near or far, which means no impact near or far. This is good.

I'm counting on the fact that I'm banking some carbon equity, and can soon plan a meal that involves solar-baked potatoes and veggies, with a side of grilled meat.

On the Nascent Science of Geoengineering

I'm no scientist. I'm just a guy. But I heard a scientist talking about geoengineering  on the radio the other day, and I'd like to say for the record that I do not agree. Geoengineering refers to proposals to manipulate the planet's climate in order to counteract global warming.  An example: spraying chemicals in clouds to make them more reflective thereby bouncing the sun's rays away from the earth. Another example: sucking carbon dioxide into big holes in the ground. Hmm.

Now, I like tools well enough. I appreciate well-thought-out and well-crafted technological solutions. Take hammers. Hammers are cool. Hammers do their job really well, and you can choose from a number of different designs depending on your work-style and end-purpose. Hammer designers have been working on better hammer designs for a long time, and at this stage, we'd have to say that hammer design and technology is pretty mature. And yet, we occasionally smash these modern, well-designed hammers into our thumbs and create problems for ourselves. Nobody can design all the risk out of our tools.

So my question is, how worried should we be that well-meaning scientists, as smart as they may be, are talking about designing planet-sized hammers to solve a global problem? Even if I believed that Scientists (that group of people who totally agree all the time on how things work ... right?) could understand all of the large-scale mechanisms at work in global climate patterns, which I don't really believe, I'm not sure I would want them trying their hand at a global solution. What if the hammer slips? We're not talking about a big toe here. We're talking about the Earth.