Kiera Butler

Mother Jones: What's the most promising new energy source?

Stewart Brand: Might well be space solar. Because the main problem with solar on the Earth's surface is that it is so intermittent, and we don't have decent storage yet. The advantage of having something out at synchronous distance is that it's in the sun all the time. You can beam down, via microwave, significant juice, about nine times greater than you'd get on the Earth's surface.

MJ: Wouldn't that cost a lot?

SB: Yeah, that's a big one, probably on the order of a large dam or something. The main cost, as usual, is getting stuff out of the gravity well of the planet. But one advantage of a solar collector in space: It would be some kind of origami thing that would unfold and be relatively light because it doesn't have gravity to deal with. All you'd have to do is be able to steer it or have it be self-steering, so it points at the sun and sends the energy down to a big receiver on the ground. Like all the energy stuff, it's basically infrastructure.

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72 percent of American adults have children.

60 percent of American children say they're more afraid of global warming than of terrorism, car crashes, or cancer.

Between 2000 and 2050, the US will add 114 million kids to its population. Africa will add 1.2 billion—but their respective CO₂ emissions will be the same.

One American child generates as much CO₂ as 106 Haitian kids.

Zahara Jolie-Pitt will produce 45,000 pounds of CO₂ yearly, compared with 221 pounds if she still lived in Ethiopia.

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