Renewable Energy and a New Economy- Here We Come

I have just returned from a 2 month vacation and this blog will now be updated at least once a week. Thank you for reading.


PG and E is trying to start a project near San Francisco that would store energy from renewable sources in an underground facility so it can use energy during times when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, this would make sources like coal less vital and neccessary.


National Geographic comments on sustainable agriculture, and on the page is links to a lot of other great stories and information sources.


Rocky Mountain Institute provides a great interactive map showing where we have received all of our oil in the US for the past 4 decades. Currently, in the NW of the US 17% of all oil at the gas station comes from the TarSands in Alberta Canada, a source that is greatly inefficient compared to our historical returns from investments on petroleum production, we are certainly using up all of the cheap sources of quality, known oil.


Amory Lovins, one of the frontmen at Rocky Mountain Institute recently received another reward, this time for energy efficiency. He is well aware of all the obstacles to his plans and ideas, most of them being politics and lack of knowledge on the part of engineers and other planners of our economy and infrastructure. An issue with increasing energy efficiency has been that the cheaper and more accessible it is the more a single person will use thus wasting the gains of increasing efficiency.


Mass Media Environmentalism focuses on Global Warming but much else is going on, is this monofocus good? I would say that the monofocus is often productive, but of course more needs to be explained to the public about the many environmental threats that exist today.


Wind energy is on the rise, but remember we can only receive a small fraction of our energy demand from wind, and each turbine takes a colossal amount of steel which carries a heavy environmental price.


The solar cell is becoming more efficient everyday, this is vital to using the sun's energy as a power source. A new solar cell efficiency record was set, it is expensive now but hopefully not in the near future.


Japan continues on with its economy, strengthening itself through technologies of the future, solar cells and big in Japan and on the rise.

Hiatus

I will not be posting on this blog until the beginning of September.

Check out the last post made before this one though.

There are many posts however and you can search through old posts to find good information and great articles.

Peruvian Jungle

This was sent to me by a friend living in this jungle in Peru.


Dear Reader,

Espiritu de la Selva (in English, “Spirit of the
Jungle,”) is a group of healers who practice the healing traditions of
the Shipibo culture. The Shipibo are an indigenous group native to the
Peruvian jungle. Currently, Alan Garcia, president of the Peruvian
government, is selling the jungle.

Espiritu de la Selva is dedicated to the preservation of this sacred
land, its people, and natural medicinal plants. This ancient healing
tradition is a product of the interconnectedness between people and
their land. These cultures are currently at risk of destruction.

The Atalaya, Baguas, Loreto, and Ucayali regions of the Peruvian
jungle have always been home to these indigenous communities and have
never been owned or sold before. The land is being divided into 20
regions of 5,000 hectares, a total of 100,000 hectares of unbroken
jungle to be sold bit by bit. This land holds more than 1,850
communities and 3,800 natural medicinal plants.

An oficial version of the conflict states that 9 indigenous peoples
and 35 police officers have died in indigenous terrorist acts of
violence. Alberto Pisango, chief of all native Peruvian tribes, is
said to be the intellectual coordinator of all the attacks. Due to
orders to capture Pisango if he enters the country, he is under the
poitical protection of the Nicaraguan government. Protesting natives
throughout Peru state that they act in defense of themselves and their
land and are considered terrorists. However, a mass burial of 197
natives has been found, 40 natives remain missing, while the actual
toll of police dead is 12. On June 22nd, the government begins sale of
100,000 hectates of the jungle. This land, home to 1,853 indigenous
communities, would be sold to Plus Petrol to be bombed to enable the
extraction of petroleum and natural gas.

Espiritu de la Selva is organizing to buy as many 5000 hectare plots
as it can to create a reserve in which these plants and communities
will be protected. In addition to maintaining the ecological stability
of the regions we seek to protect, we wish to create a shamanic
healing center. Preserving this land and creating this center is the
retiring wish of a respected Shipibo healer who was been practicing
for over 70 years. To make this happen we need your help. Please share
this with those close to you. All donations you can share, small or
great, go directly to buying the land.

Sincerely,
Espiritu de la Selva


Further Reading:

Peru moves to ease Amazon crisis, BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_8100000/newsid_8104700/8104787.stm

Simon presenta propuesta para derogatoria de DL 1064 y 1090, La Republica
http://www.larepublica.pe/politica/17/06/2009/simon-presenta-propuesta-derogatoria-de-decretos-1064-y-1090

Protesters Gird for Long Fight Over Opening Peru’s Amazon - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/world/americas/12peru.html?_r=1

A world looks ahead to a world that will look behind to try to mitigate the decisions that we make today

Peak oil is a public discussion that lacks clarity, the economist gives a short explanation of the economics of oil reserves.

To advance our "sustainable" economy we need hardworking, educated, intelligent people and in the USA we have the institutionally and educationally laziest kids in the developed world.

The "Green Economy" is looking better than other types of job sectors in this recession. I could not find a deffinition for "green jobs" in this article, maybe you can find it.

Water, another resource that we abuse. The positive feedback loops for our resource use is picking up speed and people are beginning to feel the effects of the overuse of water.

Indigenous tribes are usually the recipients of the negative effects of resource exploration and Peru is receiving the current round of indigenous-energy-exploration drama.

Bjorn Lomborg is a climate change skeptic that still cares about humans and the environment, and while sometimes I disagree with him sometimes this article is a great piece on the climate change exaggeration that prevents intelligent public debate.

The US is drafting its first climate change bill and it is not even close to ideal, but it is at least doing something.

Oil Prices, Oil Prices, Oil Prices Increasing

Oil prices are on the rise and this is great for alternative energy. If owners of companies can rely on a stable and permanent increase in real oil prices then they can justify investing in alternative energy. The Economist comments on the price increase and the effect on macroeconomics, it gives good context to our economy and oil prices and shows how integrated all of our modern issues are.

Governments can fund alternative energy projects and can subsidize alternative energy companies but it will be the market that makes the large scale changes that environmentalism seeks. The government does not fix the economy, rather it creates context and the market responds- Increase the real price of oil and people will use substitutes.

Climate Change

It is 2009 and we are still not taking the neccessary actions to mitigate the very real effects of Climate Change that are occuring now and will clearly occur in the future. For a full economic analysis of the effects of Climate Change in the US, read this. Another informative document, can be found by clicking here, and is a report that was completed for the European Commission.

The files are long but were made so that skimming is easy to do.

Both are pdf files, some computers do not have the neccessary software.

Change for the better, Politicizing for the worse

With the US government taking climate change as a serious threat politicians and lobbyists now step in to ruin a good intention. The deffinition of "renewable" is now being lobbied. Lobbyists for energy companies that ruin our environment are trying to get federal money for doing what they have always been doing like burning spent coal or capturing methane and re-using it or for burning food waste. The point of subsidizing renewable energy is to help wind and solar and wave to gain a footing in the energy market. Certainly we want companies to do things like capture their waste and re-use it but a federal subsidy is not needed to encourage this. We will see how watered down this vital effort gets.

The world business summit on climate change will occur next weekend and companies like shell are using the rhetoric of change while changing little. Shell's big plan is to just wait for carbon capture technology to develop in the next 10-20years and then use it when it is cheap enough for them to want to use it. Climate Change has a time line and waiting that long to reduce emissions is ineffective in mitigating Climate Change. This summit should be amusing as businesses come together to explain why we should do something about Climate Change while they do very little.

Steven Chu is the US Energy Secretary and he is making some contentious decisions. First, Chu is favoring the building of new coal fired power plants. This is unacceptable because every coal plant built today will burn coal until at least 2050. The understanding of environmentalists was that Chu would not allow another to be built under his watch, Chu is not gung-ho about coal plants, but is giving the nod to build more. Chu is also trying to get some reactors going that turn spent nuclear waste into a form that has a drastically smaller radioactive half-life. By doing this Chu would be making the spent nuclear fuel storage facility planned for mountains in Nevada unneeded. Finally, Chu is reducing the government funding of the hydrogen car, many are mad about this but hydrogen is a nowhere technology that was loved by GM and Bush because they could talk about it all day without the risk of having to make a single hydrogen car because there are too many obstacles for this technology. Also, to get fuel for these cars is so energy intensive it makes the car not the environmental thing that people want it to be.

Restructuring our infrastructure to be more "environmental" creates a lot of jobs!

Pollution damages our bodies we all know, but a study that is highlighted by National Geographic explains some of the newest research on the subject.

Canada is pulling oil out of a thing called the Alberta Tar Sands. It is drastically more energy intensive to get oil from sand fields then from tar deposits. The Alberta Tar Sands have 350 years of extraction left but it is expensive to extract and very costly to the environment as these sands lay below a forest and multiple meters of soil. In the Pacific NW of the US 10% of all oil comes from these sands, this topic is very important and you should research it more.