Word: solarization
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...Pluto moves to intersect the light of a star. You set up observers across the earth, and you each get a different angle of view of Pluto intersecting the light of the star. And when you do this, you can actually map the size of an object in the solar system. Here's what happened. They said, "O.K., here's a star that's going to get really close, and Pluto is surely going to blot out the light of the star." Nope. The star just went right on by untouched. "Well, here's a closer passing one." Nothing...
...science you can come up with. So I called in a panel of experts on the status of Pluto. And by the end of the night, it was clear that Pluto's day was over and it was time to rethink the structure and the form of the outer solar system. Our exhibit was that way for a year, and nobody complained about it until it showed up in the New York Times, Page One: "PLUTO'S NOT A PLANET? ONLY IN NEW YORK." That's when all hell broke loose and the hate mail started...
...whole show the triumph of a kind of techno-environmentalism that would be all but unrecognizable to the crunchy nature lovers who once dominated the green movement. A walk through the summit's cavernous exhibition area, where models push mini-wind turbines, reveals booths dedicated to thin-film solar arrays, geothermal pumps and carbon-trading consultancies. There's little about trees or wildlife, nothing about environmental sacrifice - this is about the business of getting the carbon out of our energy supply as quickly as possible. And even in the middle of a worldwide financial crisis, it's a potentially lucrative...
...None of the tech is cleaner or higher than Masdar City itself, designed by the greenish British architect Norman Foster. Beyond being completely powered by renewables - mostly rooftop solar panels - Masdar will be a car-free city. Instead, the designers will build a personal-rapid-transit (PRT) system, an automated cable-car-like network that will whiz residents around the city's streets. Planners unveiled a model of a PRT car on the summit's first day. With the sleek silhouette of a racing motorcycle, but with room for four passengers, the PRT seems to have escaped from the movie...
...Masdar and the WFES aren't about simplicity - they're about silicon and solar and the power of technology to free us from carbon without calling for uncomfortable sacrifices. "You can have your lifestyle and your business here," says Masdar's Awad. And though it may make old-school greens shake in their Birkenstocks, this carbon-free city next to a very unsustainable desert metropolis - where watering keeps the lawns green in the dry winter and everything is air-conditioned - represents at least one future of environmentalism, a future that embraces new technology to remedy the ills of old technology...