Since the companies mining the oil from the sands of Alberta wouldn't provide access to their operations to a reporter, he rented a plane and took a bunch of photos.
As Stewart said, "Better than I thought".
There's a serious proposal to build an undersea electrical grid as part of the infrastructure for future offshore wind turbines. David Roberts writes about its importance:
Offshore wind power has significant advantages over the onshore variety. Uninterrupted by changes in terrain, the wind at sea blows steadier and stronger. Installing turbines far enough from shore that they're invisible except on the very clearest days lessens the possibility of not-in-my-backyard resistance. The challenge is getting the electricity back to land, to the people who will use it...
The Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC) would provide multiple transmission hubs for future wind farms, making the waters off the mid-Atlantic coast an attractive and economical place for developers to set up turbines. The AWC's lines could transmit as much as six gigawatts of low-carbon power from turbines back to the coast--the equivalent capacity of 10 average coal-fired power plants.
There's a particular stretch of seabed, a flat shelf between the north Jersey and southern Virginia, that's geologically and geographically perfect for this. That's where they're setting up shop. Power-hungry Google is helping foot the bill.
I haven't been keeping up with the Japan nuclear power plant situation as much as I want, but I wanted to pass along a few interesting articles. Over at Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote a widely linked piece about how nuclear power plants work:
For the vast majority of people, nuclear power is a black box technology. Radioactive stuff goes in. Electricity (and nuclear waste) comes out. Somewhere in there, we're aware that explosions and meltdowns can happen. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that set of information is enough to get by on. But, then, an emergency like this happens and, suddenly, keeping up-to-date on the news feels like you've walked in on the middle of a movie. Nobody pauses to catch you up on all the stuff you missed.
As I write this, it's still not clear how bad, or how big, the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant will be. I don't know enough to speculate on that. I'm not sure anyone does. But I can give you a clearer picture of what's inside the black box. That way, whatever happens at Fukushima, you'll understand why it's happening, and what it means.
MrReid, a physics teacher, writes about the situation at Fukushima:
Even with the release of steam, the pressure and temperature inside Unit 1 continued to increase. The high temperatures inside the reactor caused the protective zirconium cladding on the uranium fuel rods to react with steam inside the reactor to form zirconium oxide and hydrogen. This hydrogen leaked into the building that surrounded the reactor and ignited, damaging the surrounding building but without damaging the reactor vessel itself. Because the reactor vessel has not been compromised, the release of radiation should be minimal. It appears that a very similar situation has occurred at Unit 3 and that hydrogen is again responsible for the explosion seen there.
And this piece is a more meta take on the situation, What the Media Doesn't Get About Meltdowns.
Of immediate concern is the prospect of a so-called "meltdown" at one or more of the Japanese reactors. But part of the problem in understanding the potential dangers is continued indiscriminate use, by experts and the media, of this inherently frightening term without explanation or perspective. There are varying degrees of melting or meltdown of the nuclear fuel rods in a given reactor; but there are also multiple safety systems, or containment barriers, in a given plant's design that are intended to keep radioactive materials from escaping into the general environment in the event of a partial or complete meltdown of the reactor core. Finally, there are the steps taken by a plant's operators to try to bring the nuclear emergency under control before these containment barriers are breached.
Turbines are expensive to build, noisy, big, and they kill birds. Perhaps these pad panels would be better suited to generating electricity from the wind.
The wind panels are the brainchild of Francis Moon, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell University. He created a panel of 25 pads that oscillate in the wind, much the way leaves vibrate when a gust of air sifts through a tree. The pads attach to piezoelectric materials that produce electricity from each vibration.
The Big Picture has a selection of photos of the National Ignition Facility which I've written about previously.
"Creating a miniature star on Earth" is the goal of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), home to the world's largest and highest-energy laser in Livermore, California. On September 29th, 2010, the NIF completed its first integrated ignition experiment, where it focused its 192 lasers on a small cylinder housing a tiny frozen capsule containing hydrogen fuel, briefly bombarding it with 1 megajoule of laser energy. The experiment was the latest in a series of tests leading to a hoped-for "ignition", where the nuclei of the atoms of the fuel inside the target capsule are made to fuse together releasing tremendous energy -- potentially more energy than was put in to start the initial reaction, becoming a valuable power source.
The NIF and the LHC are this generation's Apollo program.
Russia is building eight floating nuclear power stations for deployment in the Arctic Ocean to support their efforts to drill for oil near the North Pole.
He says each power station, costing $400m, can supply electricity and heating for communities of up to 45,000 people and can stay on location for 12 years before needing to be serviced back in St Petersburg.
And while initially they will be positioned next to Arctic bases along the North coast, there are plans for floating nuclear power stations to be taken out to sea near large gas rigs.
"We can guarantee the safety of our units one hundred per cent, all risks are absolutely ruled out," says Mr Zavyalov.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? (via @polarben)
Engineers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado have devised an air conditioning unit that could use up to 90% less energy than a conventional unit.
The new, patented system abandons the power-hungry compressor-driven refrigeration process used in many domestic (and virtually all commercial) air conditioners in favor of a couple of high-efficiency pumps and fans. But it also uses water for evaporative cooling -- a concept familiar to many people living in the arid West who have roof-mounted "swamp coolers." Swamp coolers work well when the outside air is dry, as evaporating water carries away heat, cooling and moistening the air that is re-circulated into the house.
I'm hoping this will be a new option on Google Maps alongside "satellite" soon: thermographic view. It's basically a heat map of all the buildings on a map...pop in your address and see how energy efficient your roof is. Belgium only. Unfortunately...unless you live in Belgium. (via infosthetics)
Not content with movie stars, California wants its own actual stellar object. The LIFE project at the NIF (National Ignition Facility) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aims to create a tiny star with intense laser power. How intense? The facility increases the power of the laser beam a quadrillion times before it reaches its target:
The National Ignition Facility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the world's largest laser system... 192 huge laser beams in a massive building, all focused down at the last moment at a 2 millimeter ball containing frozen hydrogen gas. The goal is to achieve fusion... getting more energy out than was used to create it. It's never been done before under controlled conditions, just in nuclear weapons and in stars. We expect to do it within the next 2-3 years. The purpose is threefold: to create an almost limitless supply of safe, carbon-free, proliferation-free electricity; examine new regimes of astrophysics as well as basic science; and study the inner-workings of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure they remain safe, secure and reliable without the need for underground testing.
Wow. The fusion will produce high-energy neutrons, which will bombard a material capable of converting their energy into heat, which in turn will make steam and eventually electricity. But it gets even better:
In addition, the LIFE engine design can be "charged" with fission fuel. The resulting fission reactions will produce additional energy that can be harvested for electricity production. Moreover, by using depleted uranium or spent nuclear fuel from existing nuclear power plants in the blanket, a LIFE engine will be capable of burning the by-products of the current nuclear fuel cycle. Because the fusion neutrons are produced independently of the fission process, the fission fuel could be used without reprocessing. In this way, LIFE may be able to consume nuclear waste as fuel, mitigate against further nuclear proliferation, and provide long-term sustainability of carbon-free energy. A LIFE engine, via pure fusion or through the combination of fusion and fission, will generate the steady heat required to drive turbines for generating from 1,000 to 2,500 MW of safe, environmentally attractive electric power 24 hours a day for decades.
Also, free unicorns for everyone!
I'm happy to be wrong about this but it sounds far-fetched and cold fusion-y:
The Bloom box is a new kind of fuel cell that produces electricity by combining oxygen in the air with any fuel source, such as natural gas, bio-gas, and solar energy. Sridhar said the chemical reaction is efficient and clean, creating energy without burning or combustion. He said that two Bloom boxes - each the size of a grapefruit - could wirelessly power a US home, fully replacing the power grid; one box could power a European home, and two or three Asian homes could share a single box.
But the article says that several commercial Bloom boxes are already in use at Google, eBay, FedEx, and Wal-Mart and VC John Doerr and Colin Powell are on board, so who knows? (via @daveg)
If all the gaming consoles in the US formed their own city, that city would use as much power as San Diego, the 9th-largest city in the country.
Here are 20 bold/crazy ideas that could save the world...most of them related to energy and climate change.
A relatively small piece of the Sahara could theoretically provide electricity for the entire planet if it were covered in solar thermal mirrors. Plus think of all those jobs to build a solar plant the size of Britain. The new transmission grid would be quite a project as well...
Update: Hmm, the site appears to be down and redirected to same squatter spam thing. I'll put the link back up when the site (hopefully) returns.
Update: The Infrastructurist site is still down but I found the original link on the Guardian.
Driven by US government efficiency standards due to take effect in 2012, innovation in incandescent light bulbs is booming.
"There's a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly," said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. "There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades."
At the New Yorker Summit, Google's Dan Reicher mentioned the company's PowerMeter, an upcoming product/service that will measure household power use.
Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to her home electricity consumption right on her iGoogle homepage. The graph below shows how someone could use this information to figure out how much energy is used by different household activites.
Felix Salmon lays out the rationale:
The behavioral sociology of measuring energy usage is simple: the more you know about how much energy you're using, the less you use. Just getting the information cuts most people's energy usage by somewhere between 5% and 15%, while people with high electricity bills (like me) find it much easier to isolate exactly what is causing those bills and can then work out how best to reduce them through upgrading appliances or replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs or any number of other routes to energy efficiency.
The SmartSwitch is a replacement for a standard light switch that becomes more difficult to turn on when power usage is high in the household or on the grid as a whole.
Equipped with a network connection and a brake pad, the switch provides its user with tactile feedback about the amount of energy being used either within their household or by the electrical grid as a whole. SmartSwitch doesn't restrict the user from turning on a light, but rather it passively encourages behavior change. SmartSwitches can be programmed to respond to either personal or communal electrical usage. In a home wired with SmartSwitches, lights can become harder to turn on during hours of peak demand. The switches can also be customized to reflect household-specific energy conservation goals.
That is really clever. I want the same thing for my computer...e.g. it's more difficult to type when I shouldn't be using it. (via o'reilly)
Passive houses -- homes that use "recycled heat" to heat themselves, rather than a furnace -- are growing more popular in Germany and slowly spreading elsewhere in the world.
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants' bodies.
Constructing new LEED-certified green buildings is all well and good, but if they're further from your workers' homes and you have to tear down perfectly good old buildings to do so, the hoped-for energy savings are wasted.
Embodied energy. Another term unlovely to the ear, it's one with which preservationists need to get comfortable. In two words, it neatly encapsulates a persuasive rationale for sustaining old buildings rather than building from scratch. When people talk about energy use and buildings, they invariably mean operating energy: how much energy a building -- whether new or old -- will use from today forward for heating, cooling, and illumination. Starting at this point of analysis -- the present -- new will often trump old. But the analysis takes into account neither the energy that's already bound up in preexisting buildings nor the energy used to construct a new green building instead of reusing an old one. "Old buildings are a fossil fuel repository," as Jackson put it, "places where we've saved energy."
If embodied energy is taken into consideration, a new building that's replaced an older building will take up to 65 years to start saving energy...and those buildings aren't really designed to last that long.
The PopTech blog rounds up some interesting wind turbine designs. I'm particularly intrigued by the placement of turbines on or near highways. One of the knocks against wind farms is that they disrupt the natural landscape...placing wind turbines along highways would somewhat alleviate that problem. Oobject houses a collection of beautiful wind turbines.
Replacing a car that gets horrible gas mileage with one that gets good gas mileage is preferable to replacing a car that gets good gas mileage with one that gets excellent gas mileage. To that end, kottke.org contributor Cliff Kuang says to the car companies: forget about 100-mpg cars and focus on small, achievable increases in MPG ratings.
My concern is a rhetorical one: What happens when advancements in cars are eternally linked -- through marketing and special prizes -- with big innovations, rather than tangible results right now? Fuel efficiency gets its urgency sapped: Someone's working on it, with results TBD. Wait and see.
A lightbulb in a firehouse in California has been burning more or less continuously since 1901. You can check on the light's status on its WWW home page. (thx, john)
How nine cities from around the world are cutting their energy usage.
For cities, the motivation is twofold. All the hand-wringing over climate change has prompted more cities to do their part to contain greenhouse-gas emissions that most scientists believe are causing global warming. In the U.S., more than 700 mayors have signed an agreement to try to follow the Kyoto Protocol's goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions -- even though the Senate has rejected the treaty.
The other major motivation for cities: energy costs, which have more than doubled since 2000. Strapped for cash, municipalities are scrambling to save as much money on energy use as they can.
Map of the world where the size of the countries correspond to how much oil they have. On this map, the Middle East is just The Middle.
The US Air Force Research Lab has come up with an idea for refueling tiny spy planes on long missions: recharging its electric motor by stealing energy while hanging from power lines.
It could even temporarily change its shape to look more like innocuous piece of trash hanging from the cable.
Thunder! Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah! Con Edison is cutting their last direct current line in NYC, ending 125 years of continuous service that started when Thomas Edison set up shop in 1882 and signaling the final triumph of alternating current in the AC/DC wars. (Lesson: Nikola Tesla always wins in the end.)
The last snip of Con Ed's direct current system will take place at 10 East 40th Street, near the Mid-Manhattan Library. That building, like the thousands of other direct current users that have been transitioned over the last several years, now has a converter installed on the premises that can take alternating electricity from the Con Ed power grid and adapt it on premises. Until now, Con Edison had been converting alternating to direct current for the customers who needed it -- old buildings on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side that used direct current for their elevators for example.
This post about the carbon footprint of wine contains an interesting map at the bottom. It's a map of the US with a line splitting the country in two. West of the line, it is more carbon efficient to drink Napa wine while to the east of the line it is more carbon efficient to drink French Bordeaux. You can almost see the coastline of the eastern and Gulf states struggling westward against the trucking route from California. The Vinicultural Divide?
Stopping underground coal fires would significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere.
Underground coal fires in China alone produce as much carbon dioxide annually as all the cars and light trucks in the United States.
A coal fire near Centralia, PA has been burning continuously since 1962 and prompted the permanent evacuation of the townspeople.
Determining the amount of energy it takes to bring food from farm to table is difficult, but it looks as though shipping in food from afar is, in some cases, more energy efficient than food produced locally and that the transport energy might not matter as much in comparision to the amount of energy it takes to grow the food in the first place. "And it turns out our own part in the chain is often the most damaging, since when we drive to the supermarket, we might come back with only a few of bags of food in the car boot. Such a trip is far less fuel efficient than the one taken by that same food on its way to the supermarket in a truck packed with the assistance of load-optimisation software, which determines how to stack cargo so that barely an inch of empty space is left in the back of the vehicle."
The Senate voted to increase fuel mileage requirements on cars sold in the US. "If the Senate bill becomes law, car manufacturers would have to increase the average mileage of new cars and light trucks to 35 miles per gallon by 2020, compared with roughly 25 miles per gallon today." According to CNN, SUVs are included under the requirement...it's about fricking time that loophole was closed.
An average human being gets 400 miles per gallon at 3 mph. "A 155 lb human walking at 3 mph will burn 246 kcal/hour, or 82 kcal/mile. Feed that human one gallon of gas in potential energy -- 31,548 kcal -- and he'll have enough energy to walk for 128 hours."
Update: Riding a bike increases the MPG to ~750.
It's been awhile since I've done one of these. Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently:
Two counterexamples to the assertion that cities != organisms or ecosystems: cancer and coral reefs. (thx, neville and david)
In pointing to the story about Ken Thompson's C compiler back door, I forgot to note that the backdoor was theoretical, not real. But it could have easily been implemented, which was Thompson's whole point. A transcript of his original talk is available on the ACM web site. (thx, eric)
ChangeThis has a "manifesto" by Nassim Taleb about his black swan idea. But reader Jean-Paul says that Taleb's idea is not that new or unique. In particular, he mentions Alain Badiou's Being and Event, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. (thx, paul & jean-paul)
When I linked The Onion's 'Most E-Mailed' List Tearing New York Times' Newsroom Apart, I said "I'd rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications". American Journalism Review published one such story last summer, as did the Chicago Tribune's Hypertext blog and the LA Times (abstract only). (thx, gene & adam)
Related to Kate Spicer's attempt to slim down to a size zero in 6 weeks: Female Body Shape in the 20th Century. (thx, energy fiend)
Got the following query from a reader:
are those twitter updates on your blog updated automatically when you update your twitter? if so, how did you do it?
A couple of weeks ago, I added my Twitter updates and recent music (via last.fm) into the front page flow (they're not in the RSS feed, for now). Check out the front page and scroll down a bit if you want to check them out. The Twitter post is updated three times a week (MWF) and includes my previous four Twitter posts. I use cron to grab the RSS file from Twitter, some PHP to get the recent posts, and some more PHP to stick it into the flow. The last.fm post works much the same way, although it's only updated once a week and needs a splash of something to liven it up a bit.
The guy who played Spaulding in Caddyshack is a real estate broker in the Boston area. (thx, ivan)
Two reading recommendations regarding the Jonestown documentary: a story by Tim Cahill in A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Seductive Poison by former People's Temple member Deborah Layton. (thx, garret and andrea)
In case someone in the back didn't hear it, this map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from Zork/Dungeon. (via a surprising amount of people in a short period of time)
When reading about how low NYC's greenhouse gas emissions are relative to the rest of the US, keep in mind the area surrounding NYC (kottke.org link). "Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable." (thx, bob)
NPR did a report on the Nickelback potential self-plagiarism. (thx, roman)
After posting about the web site for Miranda July's new book, several people reminded me that Jeff Bridges' site has a similar lo-fi, hand-drawn, narrative-driven feel.
In the wake of linking to the IMDB page for Back to the Future trivia, several people reminded me of the Back to the Future timeline, which I linked to back in December. A true Wikipedia gem.
I'm ashamed to say I'm still hooked on DesktopTD. The problem is that the creator of the game keeps updating the damn thing, adding new challenges just as you've finally convinced yourself that you've wrung all of the stimulation out of the game. As Robin notes, it's a brilliant strategy, the continual incremental sequel. Version 1.21 introduced a 10K gold fun mode...you get 10,000 gold pieces at the beginning to build a maze. Try building one where you can send all 50 levels at the same time and not lose any lives. Fun, indeed.
Regarding the low wattage color palette, reader Jonathan notes that you should use that palette in conjunction with a print stylesheet that optimizes the colors for printing so that you're not wasting a lot of ink on those dark background colors. He also sent along an OS X trick I'd never seen before: to invert the colors on your monitor, press ctrl-option-cmd-8. (thx, jonathan)
Dorothea Lange's iconic Migrant Mother photograph was modified for publication...a thumb was removed from the lower right hand corner of the photo. Joerg Colberg wonders if that case could inform our opinions about more recent cases of photo alteration.
In reviewing all of this, the following seem related in an interesting way: Nickelback's self-plagiarism, continual incremental sequels, digital photo alteration, Tarantino and Rodriquez's Grindhouse, and the recent appropriation of SimpleBits' logo by LogoMaid.
A low wattage color palette for web designers. The palette is based on the Energy Star wattage ratings for colors. (via migurski)
Visualization from the WWF of how much exhaust a car gives off during the course of the day. Details here. (via wider angle)
Compared with Snapple, whiteout, and Pepto Bismol ($123.20/gallon), gasoline is surprisingly inexpensive. "$21.19 for WATER - and the buyers don't even know the source. No wonder Evian spelled backwards is Naive."
Update: Rob Cockerham did a more extensive analysis of liquid pricing a few years ago.
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations about the embodied energy of bottled water: "the cost to produce and deliver a bottle of imported water is $0.22, leaving $1.28 per bottle profit for the manufacturer and the retail store".
How many uses does it take for a reusable cup to surpass a disposable paper or styrofoam cup in terms of energy usage? You have to use a single ceramic cup more than 1000 times in order for it to be more energy efficient than using the same number of dispoable styrofoam cups. Of course, this doesn't take into account anything outside of the manufacturing or washing processes...like the cost of shipping all these foam cups and what happens to them after you're done with them. (via thoughtwax)
The headline blares that "NYC Blamed for 1% of Greenhouse Gases", which puts it on par with small countries like Portugal and Ireland, but they buried the lede on this one: "With 2.7 percent of the country's population -- 8.2 million of 300 million -- the average New York City resident contributes less than a third of the emissions generated by a typical American."
Looks like the change in Daylight Savings Time in the US didn't have the intended effect on energy savings. No measurable impact on their business, say the power companies.
The most enjoyable and interesting thing I've read in a week has to be this article about Wayne Gerdes (via bb). Gerdes is a hypermiler -- a person who drives in an obsessive fashion in order to increase his vehicle's fuel efficiency -- and strikes me as someone that Errol Morris would be quite interested in doing a short documentary about. He's refined his driving technique over the years to wring 59 MPG out of a plain Honda Accord and clocked over 180 MPG with a hybrid Honda Insight. Here's a taste of how he drives:
"Buckle up tight, because this is the death turn," says Wayne. Death turn? We're moving at 50 mph. Wayne turns off the engine. He's bearing down on the exit, and as he turns the wheel sharply to the right, the tires squeal-which is what happens when you take a 25 mph turn going 50. Cathy, Terry's wife, who is sitting next to me in the backseat, grabs my leg. I grab the door handle. As we come out of the 270-degree turn, Cathy says, "I hope you have upholstery cleaner."
We glide for over a mile with the engine off, past a gas station, right at a green light, through another green light -- Wayne is always timing his speed to land green lights -- and around a mall, using momentum in a way that would have made Isaac Newton proud. "Are we going to attempt that at home?" Cathy asks Terry, a talkative man who has been stone silent since Wayne executed the death turn in his car. "Not in this lifetime," he shoots back.
At PopTech last year, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging told the crowd that cars with realtime mileage displays get better gas mileage. Turns out that's how Gerdes got really interested in hypermiling:
But it was driving his wife's Acura MDX that moved Wayne up to the next rung of hypermiler driving. That's because the SUV came with a fuel consumption display (FCD), which shows mpg in real time. As he drove, he began to see how little things -- slight movements of his foot, accelerations up hills, even a cold day -- influenced his fuel efficiency. He learned to wring as many as 638 miles from a single 19-gallon tank in the MDX; he rarely gets less than 30 mpg when he drives it. "Most people get 18 in them," he says. The FCD changed the driving game for Wayne. "It's a running joke," he says, "but instead of a fuel consumption display, a lot of us call them 'game gauges'" -- a reference to the running score posted on video games -- "because we're trying to beat our last score -- our miles per gallon."
If people could see how much fuel they guzzled while driving, Wayne believes they'd quickly learn to drive more efficiently. "If the EPA would mandate FCDs in every car, this country would save 20 percent on fuel overnight," he says. "They're not expensive for the manufacturers to put in -- 10 to 20 bucks -- and it would save more fuel than all the laws passed in the last 25 years. All from a simple display."
Competition, even with yourself, can be a powerful motivator. I'm not convinced, however, that FCDs would improve gas mileage across the board. There are other games you can play with the display -- the how-much-gas-can-I-waste game or the how-close-can-I-get-to-18-MPG game -- that don't have much to do with conserving fuel consumption. Still, next time I'm in a car with a mileage display, I'll be trying out some of Gerdes less intensive driving techniques, including the ones he shares on this Sierra Club podcast (Gerdes' interview is about 2/3 of the way through).
"Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn't plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They'll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They'll stop worrying about "frankenfoods" and embrace genetic engineering."
Regarding last week's post about LED lightbulbs, Matt Haughey bought a variety pack of LED bulbs, tried them out, and says "save your money". "The color is definitely blue and the light is dim. There's no way on earth these bulbs are worth running out and spending $30+ per bulb on."
LED lightbulbs are expensive, but they last a long time and use relatively little power. One LED lightbulb costs $35 but lasts 60,000 hours, during which time you'd have to buy 60 incandescent bulbs (at a cost of $40) and the difference in the cost of the electricity over the 60,000 hours is $360 for the incandescent versus $12 for the LED bulb. (via a.whole)
Update: Something to keep in mind...the above comparison is a bit apples and oranges because as the page states, the LED lightbulbs have a "reduced light output" compared to regular bulbs. The featured LED bulb only puts out 31 lumens of brightness while a 60 W incandescent puts out 850 lumens. (thx, kevin)
Tariffs on imported sugar and ethanol imposed by the US government keep our sugar expensive and is keeping the US from using more efficient methods of saving energy and, oh, by the way, helping the environment. This excerpt from the last two paragraphs of the piece is a succinct description of what's wrong with contemporary American politics:
Tariffs and quotas are extremely hard to get rid of, once established, because they create a vicious circle of back-scratching-government largesse means that sugar producers get wealthy, giving them lots of cash to toss at members of Congress, who then have an incentive to insure that the largesse continues to flow. More important, protectionist rules flourish because the benefits are concentrated among a small number of easy-to-identify winners, while the costs are spread out across the entire population. It may be annoying to pay a few more cents for sugar or ethanol, but most of us are unlikely to lobby Congress about it.
Maybe we should, though. Our current policy is absurd even by Washington standards: Congress is paying billions in subsidies to get us to use more ethanol, while keeping in place tariffs and quotas that guarantee that we'll use less. And while most of the time tariffs just mean higher prices and reduced competition, in the case of ethanol the negative effects are considerably greater, leaving us saddled with an inferior and less energy-efficient technology and as dependent as ever on oil-producing countries.
Maddening. Partisan politics is a not-very-elaborate smokescreen to distract us from this bullshit.
Some notes on a presentation by Thomas Friedman, who I've somehow managed to unconsciously steer clear of. (Doesn't help that his stuff is behind the NY Times paywall. If he really wanted to make the impact on this green stuff, he'd get the Times to move that stuff out in the open so us proles can link to it and discuss it.) Here are Friedman's five reasons why "this is not your father's energy crisis" (ie the 1970s):
1. With our energy consumption in the US, we're funding both sides in the "war on terror". Our oil consumption pays for terrorists and our taxes pay for the armed forces, etc.
2. The world is flat, globalization, opportunities to consume at first world levels are available to China, India, Russia, etc. And they're seizing the day.
3. Clean power and green energy is the #1 growth industry of the 21st century.
4. What Tom referred to as the First Law of Petropolitics: the price of oil has an inverse relationship with the pace of freedom. Oil prices fall, freedom goes up; oil prices rise and Iran starts talking about the myth of The Holocaust.
5. The new economy companies (Friedman namechecked Google and Yahoo specifically) are going to drive clean power and green energy because every time you do a search on the web, it costs them a little bit of power and they are going to want to drive that price down.
He finished by saying that green has been marginalized as being sissy, liberal, and Unamerican, but Friedman says "green is the new red, white, and blue".
Speaking of ecological footprints, Personal Kyoto lets your track your energy usage and reduce it according to the Kyoto Protocol. It only works for NYC residents...just grab your ConEd bill, punch in your account number, and PK will display your energy usage for the last year, along with averages and your Kyoto goal.
Update: PK's creator tells me that he's looking to bring the project to cities other than NYC. Good stuff.
Wal-Mart wants to sell 100 million CFLs (compact fluorescent lightbulbs) in the next 12 months. "Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity." Between this and the organic food, Wal-Mart is agressively pursuing green initiatives. (thx, brock)
The Oil We Eat. "With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet."
Update: Here's a Wired article on super organics, smartly breed foods that will "that will please the consumer, the producer, the activist, and the FDA". (thx, andy)
Study by the International Energy Agency says that "a global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth". How? Switch away from incandescent bulbs to CFLs (now) and eventually to LEDs.
According to this chart, the price of a gallon of gasoline in NYC rose about 70 cents in the 5 days after Katrina...that's one of the steepest increases I could find.
The Morning News interviews James Kunstler about our energy-scarce future. I think Robert could have just asked him one question and let him roll. Also fun...a Google ad at the bottom says "the myth of peak oil, read the truth!" Heh.
A table of gas prices from around the world. A gallon of gas in Amsterdam is $6.48 while it's only $0.12 in Venezuela. It's always so weird to see these types of lists where the US has more in common with Third World and non-democratic countries than with Europe, Japan, etc. (via rw)
And what the heck is "peak oil" anyway?. Peak oil "predicts that future world oil production will soon reach a peak and then rapidly decline".
James Kunstler lays out a gloomy and depressing energy crisis future in The Long Emergency. "Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are."
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