RMI's Reinventing Fire initiative launched

If the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico makes you want to help move the U.S. to a more sane approach to meeting energy requirements, consider the path that the Rocky Mountain Institute has devised to reshape our thinking and our national priorities on energy issues.

String rail: a low-cost rail alternative?

String rail, a promising, inexpensive alternative to conventional rail systems profiled by Gizmag, might be a genuine breakthrough in comparion with other forms of high-speed mass transit. With costs estimated to be anywhere from three to 10 less expensive than approaches such as railway or monorail, string rail—originally prototyped by Anatoly Unitsky in Russia—is projected to support top speeds of 220 to 300 mph.

Is this something that could actually happen? The article's author, Loz Blain, notes:

Would I find it a bit freaky to be doing 350 kmh while hanging from a wire? Yes sir. Am I entirely convinced that the strings won't snap, even if a tower or three get taken out? No. Would a full scale demonstration convince me? Probably, yes. And this is the stage Unitsky is stuck at. His demonstration rig is small-scale, and there's nothing like the UST in operation anywhere in the world.

STU Systems in Australia is working to commercialize the concept and, naturally, seeking investors. Does anyone have a few hundred million of seed money to help get a very interesting mass transit approach off the ground?

Reacting to the Gulf of Mexico Disaster

Even the early NASA photos etched a chilling picture of the scope of the British Petroleum oil spill. The scale of environmental damage is incalculable and even though the outpouring of oil and gas appears to have been at least temporarily stopped, the true cost of this mega-accident won't be known for decades.

The sane response, and the one presented by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is to immediately launch a nationwide initiative to switch to clean energy. An excerpt from his press release on the subject lays out the simple facts:

The simple truth is that we cannot drill our way to energy independence or lower gas prices. The United States uses roughly 25 percent of the world’s oil, 7.5 billion barrels per year, but we have only 2 to 3 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Offshore drilling today provides roughly 10 percent of the oil we use in the United States. While we are all familiar with such political rhetoric, supported by the enormously profitable oil industry, as “drill here, drill now, pay less,” it’s just not accurate. The non-partisan Energy Information Administration has stated that opening new areas for offshore drilling would not save consumers a single penny per gallon until 2020, and would only save about 3 cents per gallon in 2030.

The alternative to continuing to risk catastrophe from offshore drilling is a bold and aggressive move to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. Instead of saving a few pennies on the gallon by 2030 through more drilling, we can save far more with stronger fuel economy standards. Just by raising our fuel efficiency standards to 35.5 miles per gallon for cars and trucks, as President Obama is doing, we will save consumers a dollar per gallon of gas in 2030, and save so much oil that we will no longer need to import any from Saudi Arabia. We know we can do this because new cars sold in China today average more than 36 miles per gallon, and General Motors already sells nearly as many cars in China as in the United States.

If, as a nation, we are prepared to take bold action in energy efficiency, public transportation, advanced vehicle technologies, solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal, we can transform our energy system, clean up our environment, and create millions of new jobs in the process. This direction, and not more offshore drilling, is where we have got to go.

No more new offshore drilling. Not now! Not ever!

Post Peak Oil Two-Wheeled Fun

I'm a sucker for two-wheeled vehicles, but I've been discouraged lately from the acquisition of petroleum-powered machines by both the nature of the fuel and the CO2 generation. Bicycles are great, but in a rural area with few bike paths battling autos for a tiny sliver of space on a skinny backroad can get dicey.

The introduction of a new electric scooter, the ZEV7000, as profiled by Gizmag, looks like a healthy way to enjoy two-wheeled travel without the pollution problem.

The battery power specs for this machine, billed as the fastest electric scooter on the market, look pretty good:

Range for the ZEV7000 is similar to the Vectrix at between 55 and 70 miles between charges, which take 25 minutes for a 75 percent top-up, or around 2 hours for a full charge. You can extend the vehicle's range or choose to access higher power by using what the company calls its "electronic transmission" - a switch that lets you choose how many amps the engine is running at. Low amps means low power but extended range, higher amps will drain the battery faster but give the bike substantially more beans.

Put up a wind turbine to recharge it at night and you've got a non-petroleum mode of transport that promises to be a kick and a half to ride.

Energy used for Cloud Computing

Large-scale data centers place tremendous demand on the electrical grid, a demand that is increasing rapidly as cloud computing becomes more common as a business strategy for many corporations. As more than one pundit has pointed out, the source for powering these data centers is often generated by coal--modern technology energized by an eighteenth century fuel that is a global warming nightmare.

Heather Clancy in a ZDNet post thinks that corpoations ought to make a strong effort to boost the visibility and acceptance of renewable energy sources, as in an example she cites about Kaiser Permanente and Recurrent Energy installing solar power systems.

When they are completed, the systems will carry approximately 10 percent of the power load at sites in Vallejo and Santa Clara in Northern California and Fontana and San Diego in Southern California.

Kaiser is developing the systems with Recurrent, which will actually own them. Kaiser will buy the power through solar power purchase agreements. And, low and behold, this will make recurrent eligible for a 30 percent tax credit because Kaiser is a not-to-profit organization.

Kaiser will look to additional renewable energy sources in the future to continue building out its distributed system.

So far, Kaiser has managed to save up to $10 million per year in its energy conservation efforts.

The inspiration for this piece, a Greenpeace report on the ramafications of cloud computing, suggests that industry IT leaders, such as Microsoft, IBM, Google, Facebook, and Apple, ought to begin wielding their influence to speed the adoption of renewable energy systems.

Attack of the Deniers

A few snowstorms bring out the climate change deniers in force, proudly displaying their ignorance in mistaking meterological events with long-term climate trends. The winter of 2009/2010 has given them an unexpected windfall of events to use as ammunition in their misinformation campaigns, which appear to be working: more and more Americans no longer believe climate change is a matter of importance.

A TomDispatch article by Bill McKibben, one of the first writers to sound the global warming alarm as scientific studies came to light, examines the phenomenon of the denier movement and considers their tactics and motivation.

The fact that the media gives the skeptics high-profile coverage is one reason behind the diminishing belief in climate change, despite overwhelming and growing body of scientific evidence.

The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to Exxon Mobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few rightwing British tabloids which validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.

That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even the New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel,” which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount. He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:

"...screen the entire population regularly and… quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.”

He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic -- and now from above the fold in the paper of record.

While the fossil-fuel companies fight furiously to dispute climate science, McKibben notes that the Chinese are already taking advantage of American inaction.

Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.

McKibben's upcoming book is Eaarth: Making a Life on as Tough New Planet.

Vermont Yankee Voted Down by Senate

Unreliability, radioactive spills, aging reactor components, and lying statements from Entergy, the firm that had operated the Vermont Yankee plant for the past 37 years, were among the reasons that the Vermont Senate voted to deny a request for a 20-year extension of its operating license. Here is a photo essay on the historic vote from the Burlington Free Press.

Tesla Gears Up to Manufacture the Model S

With a USD 465-million loan finalized, Tesla is setting up manufacturing lines for the world's first mass-produced electric vehicle, the Model S. An article in Ecoseed notes that this loan from the United States Department of Energy is one of a series intended to stimulate growth of this sector of the transportation industry.

The loan is the second agreed by the Energy Department with an advanced technology vehicle manufacturer. The department signed its first loan agreement for $5.9 billion to Ford Motor Company in September last year.

The department has also signed conditional commitments with Nissan North America Inc. and Fisker Automotive. Nissan plans to build electric cars and battery packs at the company’s Smyrna, Tennessee manufacturing complex, while Fisker recently announced that it will re-open a General Motors plant in Wilmington, Delaware to build plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

The price tag for the Model S is daunting ($49,900), but the technology offers promises to change the nature of the auto industry.

The Future of E-bikes

Adam Stein in this article on The TerraPass Footprint points out that e-bikes (electric hybrids) occupy an odd place in the American landspace. People don't know what to make of them. Dedicated bicycylists think they're a cheat. Auto drivers see them as an annoying poor-man's transportation they'd rather not share the road with. Motorcyclists see them as a joke. With a slightly different mindset, the e-bike could be a very useful and practical mode of transportation that could effectively take scores of automobiles off the road over the long term.

Stein asks:

Could this change? Maybe. In China, where bicycles are a major mode of transportation, people love them. In Copenhagen, also a cycling hotbed, people are indifferent. I’m not entirely sure what accounts for the difference, but I’m guessing culture plays a big role.

Developing more acceptance of two-wheeled transportation might not be a bad idea. Bike paths, anyone?

Jellyfish Populations and Global Warming

false twins -jellyfishes
Originally uploaded by marfis75

"They just make these things up," climate modeler Mojib Latif observed after seeing an article in the London Daily Mail that identified Latif as projecting a 30-year span of global cooling. This Truthout article, written by Michael Winship, offers other examples of climate change deniers misinterpreting and misrepresenting scientific studies, often attributing statements to researchers that are essentially bald lies.

In fact, as Latif told the British newspaper the Guardian, "I believe in manmade global warming... There is no doubt within the scientific community that we are affecting the climate, that the climate is changing and responding to our emissions of greenhouse gases."

Winship than points to one of the bizarre and harrowing consequences of global warming: massive increases in jellyfish populations that are causing havoc with the fishing industry and jamming desalination plants.

This has led to all manner of consequences, some you would expect, others not. A 2008 National Science Foundation study found populations growing along the East Coast -- in the Chesapeake Bay area, people are stung about half a million times a year. In the Middle East and Africa, swarms have jammed hydroelectric and desalination plants, forcing them to shut down. In Japan, the fishing industry is losing up to $332 million a year because jellyfish swarms fill the nets, crowding out mackerel, sea bass and other fish.

The AP reports that in October, off the eastern coast of Japan, "Jelly-filled nets capsized a 10-ton trawler as its crew tried to pull them up. The three fishermen were rescued."

This is the stuff of science fiction, but in this case it's entirely real.

Accelerating Wind Power in the UK

While the US effectively twiddles its collective thumbs on the issue of offshore wind power (with installations such as Cape Wind Project in Nantucket Sound endlessly delayed), the UK is forging ahead with a massive investment in offshore wind farms. The British government has approved the building of wind farms in nine development zones capable of generating more than 32 gigawatts of power, as detailed in this article from the Environment News Service.

Justin Wilkes, policy director of the European Wind Energy Association, said the projects announced today, once built, "will multiply by 10 Europe's offshore wind energy capacity."

"These are European companies building a European industry and generating some 45,000 European jobs. It takes Europe closer to exploiting the power of our seas and developing a brand new European offshore wind industry," said Wilkes. "Offshore wind is Europe's largest untapped energy source. There is enough wind across Europe's seas to power Europe seven times over."

The power that will be generated by the developments announced today is part of the more than 100 GW of offshore wind power currently being planned by European utilities, developers, and governments, mostly in the North Sea.

Proposed projects in the US, as shown by this map created by OffshoreWind.net, show potential, but we lag significantly behind the European countries that have installed wind turbines offshore.

Derailing Wind Energy Progress

The basis of our American experiment in democracy has always been predicated on following the will of the majority while respecting the positions of the minority. As a recent Mother Jones article (Cape Wind Delay a Big Win for Dirty Energy Interests) points out, the democractic process has been turned on its ear by an unlikely alliance of oil and gas interests with a group of Native Americans who are looking to define an entire body of water as a national historic site, blocking the construction of the Cape Wind Project on Nanucket Sound.

Journalist Kate Sheppard notes:

The tribes surely have perfectly sound reasons of their own for opposing the project. "We are hoping...that we can protect the sound and our religious right to worship the rising sun and be able to pass that tradition on to our grandchildren," Green said. "The government has not honored many of the things it has promised to the Native American people...All we have is the process, and all we've asked for is due process."

That's clearly a consideration for the Department of Interior, which oversees NPS. To that end, the Interior Department recently issued a new tribal consultation policy, a long overdue effort to improve the agency's relationship with tribes.

But in the case of this particular decision on Cape Wind, granting this level of preservation to an entire body of water could be a bad omen for all future offshore wind development. Barring development here, Cape Wind president Jim Gordon told Mother Jones recently, "would have a chilling effect on what could possibly be one of the most promising sources for energy independence and creating a new green economy."

The forces aligned against renewable energy use every tactic imagineable to derail progress on the alternative energy front. In this case, the majority of the residents of Massachusetts, the state legislature, the state's congressional delegation, and the Governor, Deval Patrick, are solidly behind the Cape Wind project. The opposition is small, well-funded, and determined--undettered by what their opposition means to the future of energy development or the absolute necessity to reverse global warming. In this particular scenario, democracy isn't working very well at all.

Stopping Major Climate Distruption

In his new book, Storms of My Grandchildren, climate scientist James Hansen offers a pragmatic solution, perhaps our last chance, for reversing the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere and restoring equilibrium to global weather patterns. In an excerpt published in The Nation, Hansen spells out the essential tenets of his plan:

Let's define what a workable backbone and framework should look like. The essential backbone is a rising price on carbon applied at the source (the mine, wellhead, or port of entry), such that it would affect all activities that use fossil fuels, directly or indirectly.

Our goal is a global phaseout of fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions. We have shown, quantitatively, that the only practical way to achieve an acceptable carbon dioxide level is to disallow the use of coal and unconventional fossil fuels (such as tar sands and oil shale) unless the resulting carbon is captured and stored. We realize that remaining, readily available pools of oil and gas will be used during the transition to a post-fossil-fuel world. But a rising carbon price surely will make it economically senseless to go after every last drop of oil and gas--even though use of those fuels with carbon capture and storage may be technically feasible and permissible.

Global phaseout of fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions is a stringent requirement. Proposed government policies, consisting of an improved Kyoto Protocol approach with more ambitious targets, do not have a prayer of achieving that result. Our governments are deceiving us, and perhaps conveniently deceiving themselves, when they say that it is possible to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050 with such an approach.

Hansen then goes into a discussion about why cap-and-trade solutions are doomed to failure and what our best bets are for preserving the planet for our grandchildren. As arguably the foremost authority on the issue of global warming, Hansen's words carry a strong degree of credibility.

Building a Sustainable Motorcycle

As a long-time fan of two-wheel transport, I've been disappointed that the motorcycle world has lagged behind automotive advances in clean-running sustainability. This concept design by Jordan Meadows, highlighted by GizMag, does much to open up new possibilities for motorcycle design without abandoning sustainable principles.

Jordan notes:

"The concept is powered by a v4 engine running on bio diesel. This increases the range and MPG well above conventional gasoline bikes while running on a fuel which is more environmentally-friendly. Its frame and skin are crafted from recycled aluminum.

"This has the advantage of saving weight to enhance performance while reclaiming pre-used material. In the manufacturing process, the alloy is treated to patina and age naturally without expensive and harmful paint applications.

In this age of looming Peak Oil, motorcycles have a lot to offer for individual transport and designs incorporating bio diesel fuel deserve more attention.

Waste Not, Want Not

One of the deeply ingrained problems of our Western culture, particularly in the U.S., is that we've been living through a period of abundance with profligate attitudes. Many of our current energy challenges could be met by simply being less wasteful.

Generating electricity from waste heat is a step in the right direction. A Waste Heat Engine designed by Cyclone Power Technologies, as profiled in this gizmag article, can generate up to 10kw, recapturing energy from heat sources such as biomass combuston, industrial ovens, and furnaces.

Journalist Paul Evans notes:

The first WHE system will be installed at Bent Glass Design in Hatboro, PA. This system will harness waste heat from the customer’s glass manufacturing furnaces, and is expected to produce enough electricity to light their 65,000 ft2 facility while providing a quick payback possibly within two or three years.

Smart technology! We need more of this kind of approach.

Bugatti: The Last Grand Accomplishment of the Age of Oil

Those of us born in the 50's or 60's (maybe even later) are so thoroughly enraptured by the mystique of the automobile that—even though the reality of peak oil is as inescapable as a future visit from the grim reaper—we still can't totally escape the visceral admiration of machines that can propel bodies at fantastic speeds with unflappable precision.

WIRED reviewer Joe Brown did a nice job of straddling the line between fantasy and irony in his piece, Peak Oil: Bugatti Makes a Car for the Ages. This machine is at once a monument to excess and gluttony while at the same time being an example of the engineering expertise of a species that celebrates the sheer joy of making things, with nary a concern how those things will affect the planet as a whole. Nuclear bombs, genetically modified crops, nanotechnology, and a host of other engineering marvels fit under this umbrella. It creates a certain schizophrenic point of view—a perspective that makes it possible to see the Apollo moon landings with a sense of awe and simultaneously condemn the incredible amounts of money consumed while people around the world starve.

At the article's close, Brown adds a nice summation:

Maybe we'll idolize maglevs next. Maybe Tesla will have its day on a Trapper Keeper with a juice box that tops 250. But whatever we're drooling over next year, whatever makes its way onto the dorm-room walls and man-children's screen-savers, it won't run on petrol. Unless it's still a Veyron: the last king of the gas-guzzlers, forever the greatest. All hail.

It gets 10 miles per gallon, but it sure is something.

Climate distruption hits Peru

Call it global warming or climate disruption or whatever you want: it's hitting Peru big time.

Tibetan Solar Technology

As reported by Kellie Schmitt in The Faster Times, Tibetan nuns regularly tap into the power of the sun, thin as the rays may be on the Lhasa mountainside. Next time your yak butter tea needs heating you might try this low-tech but effective technique.

Health Physicist Talks of Three Mile Island Coverup

As reported in a detailed investigative piece by Sue Sturgis in Facing South, Randall Thompson, the health physicist hired to monitor radiation emissions in the aftermath of the near meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in March of 1979, spoke of radiation releases hundreds to thousands of times higher than official reports.

The number of discrepancies between the government and Kemeny Commission findings are numerous and extremely disturbing, based on the first-person experiences of Randall Thompson and his wife, Joy, who was hired to monitor the radiation doses received by TMI workers.

They [the Thompsons] also offer evidence of atmospheric releases of dangerously long-lived radioactive particles such as cesium and strontium -- releases denied by the Kemeny Commission but indicated in the Thompsons' own post-disaster monitoring and detailed in the report -- and show that there were pathways for the radiation to escape into the environment. They demonstrate that the plant's radiation filtration system was totally inadequate to handle the large amounts of radiation released from the melted fuel and suggest that the commission may have arbitrarily set release estimates at levels low enough to make the filtration appear adequate.

Shockingly, they also report that when readings from the dosimeters used to monitor radiation doses to workers and the public were logged, doses of beta radiation -- one of three basic types along with alpha and gamma -- were simply not recorded, which Joy Thompson knew since she did the recording. But Thompson's monitoring equipment also indicated that beta radiation represented about 90 percent of the radiation to which TMI's neighbors were exposed in April 1979, which means an enormous part of the disaster's public health risk may have been wiped from the record.

Finally, in a separate analysis the Thompsons point to discrepancies in government and industry accounts of the disaster that suggest the TMI Unit 2 suffered a scram failure -- that is, a breakdown of the emergency shutoff system. That would mean the nuclear reaction spiraled out of control and therefore posed a much greater danger than the official story allows.

The Thompsons aren't the only ones who have produced evidence that the radiation releases from TMI were much higher than the official estimates. Arnie Gundersen -- a nuclear engineer and former nuclear industry executive turned whistle-blower -- has done his own analysis, which he shared for the first time at a symposium in Harrisburg last week.

"I think the numbers on the NRC's website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000," he said.

The story also describes the threats received by the Thompsons as they attempted to make this information public, which eventually caused them to move to New Mexico in fear for their lives. The truth of the Three Mile Island incident threatens a multi-billion dollar industry trying to revive itself and those indifferent to public safety seem willing to go to any lengths to hide the truth.

Small-scale solar transforms Kenya

President Obama's Kenyan grandmother, Sarah, goes solar in this Greenpeace video. Good work yields good results...