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.

The future begins with today

Welcome to the future; a US company is shooting for harvesting solar energy in space, the technology exists but the cost is high.

Britain is not looking so good though in regards to solar energy, Gordon Brown (UK Prime Minister) promised government investment in alternative energy but is lagging on the part where he gives alternative energy companies money.

Wind Power is doing well in this recession. Wind power has a promising future but we have to find a better way to build these things, it takes a lot of steel to build a single turbine.

MotherJones gives an informative rant on our economy and the waste we create, we throw away enough aluminum every three months to replace the world's plane fleet. Finding our way to a new economy is difficult, it takes us being informed and driving the market with our consumption, or lack thereof.

A recent "green" hype for governments is to offer cash for old cars, seems like a good idea, right? This article is critical of the idea, and so am I. I think that we should be putting new non-combustion engines in old cars, it is the most efficient way to change over our vehicle infrastructure. The only reason governments are so happy about this program is that it can temporarily push up the purchase of new vehicles from failing car manufacturers. We spend too much energy keeping dying industries afloat, we should be focusing on retraining our workforce to work in the economy of the future.

Oil prices are low and staying low due to increased demand from the current recession. I will always say this about oil prices: as long as oil prices are low private investment in alternative energy will be slow.

Stoves in poorer regions of the world: a new focus for abating climate change. Sometimes environmental degradation is due to poverty, solution: either buy them new stoves or develop their country out of poverty.

Obesity is killing us, in many ways. Check this out: many environmental problems would be less severe if people in the industrialized world ate less food and less meat. The damage we cause by eating so much meat is unneeded. Vegetarianism is not the answer, just eating less meat. Why do we as a society take so long make such needed changes?

Telsa is creating more affordable electric cars.

2/8/09: Few seem to really know what "being green" means but atleast it gets people interested in Change.

This is a great article from the Wall Street Journal on changes you make to your home for cheap that both save energy and give you real monetary savings in a couple of months to a couple of years.

"Buy American" has been a popular war cry in America in the past couple of decades as a response to Globalization. Globalization has been occurring since humans had enough free time to create excess goods. With modern economics we have brought great wealth to a growing part of the population. During hard economic times increased protectionism (i.e. "buy american")is called "beggar thy neighbor" and it is directly connected to a spiraling economic situation. We are so interconnected in this modern age that global economic stability is local economic stability. This article is "the economist" begging for the USA not repeat the same mistake she made during the Great Depression.


This is a breakdown, department by department of the federal government, of the mess that Obama has inherited. We must understand the depth of our problems. Our problems are so deep because no one has wanted to look at the ugly truth for many decades, both Dem. and Rep. Bush was a blessing because he disturbed our slumber and now we want CHANGE. But, we must know the problem before we can make intelligent change. Obama may want to help but he still needs skeptical eyes, and we still need to keep up with the problems as Bush inspired us to do.

On the subject of change, this article is a great comment on opulence in American and how we don't resent the rich enough to bring them down, but we resent them nonetheless. I include this article because of its comment on our reluctance as a general public to become activists, we are really just voters in a Democrat-Republic. Also, if you want to talk about true environmentalism it starts with living more efficient lives of less conspicuous consumption creating excessive excess.

Iraq voted in its first election without the military support of the USA. Only 50% of the population voted, but there was no violence and %50 is better than the USA has mustered in the past several decades. This is two short articles about the election: Article 1......Article 2.

One if the proposed technological cures for the excessive amounts of CO2 currently being pumped into our atmosphere is called carbon sequestration. The idea is to take CO2 from the atmosphere and somehow get it to stay underground. Some ideas involve just pumping it underground in gas form and hope that it wont leak out, other ideas though involve transforming CO2 from gas to rock form. This article highlights one effort Iceland that is being undertaken. As a side note: As the USA has elected its first non-white president, Iceland has elected the worlds first publicly lesbian Prime Minister. I am glad that our leaders are starting to look like the public that they represent.

Wind power is one of the technologies that is supposed to usher us into a future of sustainability. It will be hard to do, especially with low oil and coal prices and a global recession, but: the USA is throwing up wind turbines....as well as Europe.