Wrong Bottle

Letter didn't make it to publication:

A Star in a Bottle: "An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out."

Why "create a new energy source" when all the carbon-free energy we could ever use is already in a bottle right beneath our feet? Instead of donating $40 billion every year to the fossil fuel industrial complex, how about investing in the enormous store of heat less than 10 miles from anywhere on Earth -- straight down?

In a couple of decades, that investment in geothermal heat could "generate power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and" no radioactive waste. It would also eliminate the significant and forgotten environmental impacts of fossil fuel and nuclear power externalities -- mine, refine, store, transport, burn, waste disposal.

Geothermal power generation has been around for a century.  Deep geothermal generates three percent of our electricity now. Let's focus on how to do it better, anywhere -- less expensively, less exotically and with much less risk than with fusion. Academic studies by the Department of Energy and engineering sch and actual practice have validated the promise of geothermal many times over.

Re: Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Star in a Bottle", New Yorker Magazine, May 3, 2014

see also http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/u/Vane