Needed: Space Trash Entrepreneurs

In today's column, Thomas Friedman gets all gushy about a couple of American women--Caroline Howe and Alexis Ringwald--he met at a conference in New Delhi who were driving a solar-powered car around India.

Howe and Ringwald thought the best way to do that might be a climate solutions road tour, using modified electric cars from India’s Reva Electric Car Company, whose C.E.O. Ringwald knew. Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 5, they drove the cars on a 2,100-mile trip from Chennai to New Delhi, stopping in 15 cities and dozens of villages, training Indian students to start their own climate action programs and filming 20 videos of India’s top home-grown energy innovations. They also brought along a solar-powered band, plus a luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from catropha and pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. A Bollywood dance group joined at different stops and a Czech who learned about their trip on YouTube hopped on with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste.

Good for Howe and Ringwald.

And cudos to Friedman for writing about the conference instead of basing his entire column on the cab ride from the airport.

Now Friedman can turn his attention to the 12,000 pieces of space junk--old satellites and other man-made space refuse--circling the earth.

There must be an entrepreneur out there somewhere with an idea for cleaning it up.