Energy for the World in a Blade of Grass?
"You Can't Take It with You" Movie Hits Dead Center on Energy Solution
The other day I was watching Frank Capra's 1938 movie version of Kaufman and Hart's smash Broadway hit "You Can't Take It with You".
The movie starred Lionel Barrymore, Spring Byington, James Stewart and Jean Arthur. In one scene, Alice and Jeff are on a date and end up in Central Park discussing life. Jeff allows that banking was not his choice.
Rather in college, he was fascinated with how the green gets into leaves and blades of grass. Jeff plucks a blade and gently turning it in his fingers, he wonders aloud what might have happened if he and his roomie had figured out how the little engines deep in the blade of grass took the sun and made green or chlorophyll.
And then Jeff continued--with something like,
"if we had figured out that we could have figured out how to make energy from the sun and power the world".
I almost fell off the couch in astonishment. This is a movie made 1938 mind you!!

My friend Dave has articulated a central issue that I'd not heard described other wise: Food Security. In the Keweenah Penisula, it would take a trucking collapse of only two weeks to starve the population of the entire peninsula, unless there were alternate local food production methods.And in a climate that regularly has winter about 7 months of the year--that is an important issue. How do you make people secure in their food supply? 


