What about dust from Source Code or World of Warcraft?
I mean, it depends how thick you want the layer of gold to be.
Solar panels are down to ~$50 per square meter, so a square kilometre would be about $50M. That is a medium to large solar farm by today’s standards. The current largest is 160 km^2 in Bhadla in India. Fifty million is a lot of money, but compared to the amount of power it will generate, it’s pretty cheap by power station standards. (If you’ve got a spare fifty mil down the back of the sofa, building your own solar farm would be a good investment.)
Conveniently gold is roughly $50/g, so your $50M would buy about five tons of gold (if you could even buy that much at one time). Rhode Island is apparently about 3,144 km², so with that much gold you could plate it to a depth of (roughly) 0.16 nanometres. That’s pretty thin, about ten thousand times thinner than standard gold leaf, but one of the properties of gold is that it is very malleable, and can be rolled out into very, very thin sheets, so it might just be possible. (The coating would be thinner than the wavelength of visible light, so you’d probably get cool rainbow diffraction patterns on everything, like oil on water)
tl/dr you can gold plate anything, the question is, how thick do you want to coat it. And, solar panels are probably cheaper than you thought.
Rich people who don’t wanna give up their megayachts and private jets:
I think Cave Johnson tried something like this
Solar panels on Earth are pretty cheap. I’m betting the price is a few orders of magnitude greater FOB the lunar surface. Enough that I’m guessing it would be cheaper to ship a factory their and use in situ materials. Even so gathering silicon, processing it, doping and making the panels would be a major project.
Sure, but that’d be so 1960ies.
The “on the moon” bit is an important part of the price. Right now today I’ll happily sell you a thousand square meters of solar panels not for $50K, but a mere $5K–plus ten million dollars shipping and handling.
(Incidentally, launch prices are so high, for space applications it usually makes sense to use multijunction cells [ Multi-junction solar cell - Wikipedia ] with twice the efficiency for a hundred times the price. At 15 kg per square meter, that $50 solar panel would cost about $150K to get into low earth orbit with an Ariane 5G. The numbers might change if we ever build entire factories on the Moon, of course–but for the moment, efficient makes for cheaper than does cheap. )
Nailed it.
And as it slides out of the L1 point, a large amount of the dust will begin a million mile fall back into Earth-Moon space.
That Moon base better be self-supporting, because they’d shut down all space flight for a long time.
The biggest thing killing reefs is coral bleaching, which absolutely is related to warmer temperatures. But yeah, this would leave all the other consequences of high CO2 levels plus add new ones from reduced solar input.
As Mindy said, we know the real solution, it just doesn’t make anyone money so capitalism won’t consider it. 
They need to be better modelers, not try it out. Let’s see 'em also campaign harder than Jane Fonda against Nuclear; but against Coal and Oil. If farmers start rolling SAF to operate then they can run a trial drone to scoop some moon and drop it around Venus.
They will never address the real cause, but they will sure make money.
I remember a simpler time when all we wanted was to chrome the Moon (and pave the Earth)
I know I won’t be worried about the climate when I’m working underground in the parking garage for the glory of the drivers.
