Can charcoal solve our CO₂ problem, at least in part? Like chicken soup, it may not help, but it shouldn’t hurt. Its new eco name is “biochar,” but it is still plain old charcoal. How can charcoal reduce CO₂ in the atmosphere? The clue to this phenomenon came from a discovery that in the depleted, sandy soils of the Amazon Jungle there appeared patches of very rich soil. Most of the Brazilian rainforest soil is too poor to grow much of anything. These rich patches were apparently sites of ancient settlements, and the rich soils were the result of having charcoal, or biochar, mixed into the soil, not accidentally but on purpose…

• Read More...

I understand how a wind farm might look like a tornado on Doppler radar to the weather man. Doppler radar picks up wind movement. I can’t believe that technology and training can’t overcome this problem. First the weather man needs to know exactly where the turbines are. That seems to me to be a slam dunk, what with GPS technology. They could simply turn off the turbines in severe weather. Violent storms are usually fast moving so the down time would not be a serious problem, especially when we get our new Smart Grid built. Areas without severe weather could feed into areas where it was storming. Couldn't they just feather the blades like they do on an airplane to cut drag when an engine fails...?

• Read More...

The Saudis are mad at us because we are developing renewables. Guess what? So are they. They understand that oil wont last forever, but they want to keep us addicted for as long as it lasts because it is what runs their economy...our money, that is. They claim that they were our good buddies over the years because they tried to keep production up so we wouldn't have shortages. We didn't see much of that last summer. And they were sooo good to us in 1973, cutting us off altogehter. What did we do to deserve that? Oh, we supported Isreal who was attacked by Egypt and Syria. What were we thinking...

• Read More...

On August 21, 2009, the LA Times announced that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was heading a project to switch the lighting for the Capitol building over to energy saving lights, presumably Compact Fluorescents (CFL), although the article didn’t specify which type bulbs would be used. Republican Minority leader, who has never heard a Democratic proposal he liked, complained that it would take 50 years to recoup the cost. I’m not sure he knows what he is talking about. What it will do is send a powerful message to the American public and the world that the United States is serious about reducing our carbon footprint….

• Read More...

We need a strong energy policy. Anyone that is not living in a cave would likely agree to that. The devil is in the details. I don’t support the oil, coal, and gas industry’s policy of business as usual (BAU). All talk of sustainability goes out the window with just tweaking the current system a little and letting CO₂ spewing industries trade the pollution with some third world country or some company that grows tomatoes. You can trade credits, but the pollution is still there. Pollution refuses to outsource itself. Cap and Trade is not a solution. We need polluters to stop polluting. I don’t care how they do it or how much it costs. We simply have to do it. The consequences of not doing it are too great. We won’t be going to other planets any time soon in mass quantities…

• Read More...

a Stirling Engine? I just ran across something that I never considered for generating energy. I had heard of a Stirling Engine but never understood what it was. It is a device that does work. By that I mean it makes a piston move which can do work, like turning a generator to make electricity. It is based on the ability of a gas to expand when heated and shrink when cooled. The gas is captured in an enclosed cylinder and is never consumed. To make it run all one needs to do is apply heat. The sun is the ideal fuel and hydrogen the ideal gas because of its ability to expand and contract rapidly. The engine runs on nothing more than heat from the sun…

• Read More...

An article from the Washington Post, Sunday, August 16, reported that oil companies, through the American Petroleum Institute, were asking employees to attend town hall meetings and rallies over the August Congressional recess to make it appear that the general public didn’t want the climate bill being considered in Congress. It amounts to a small group of companies, whose interests lie totally in selling more fossil fuels to the detriment of our climate, the country, and the world, trying to have their way. Shame on them...

• Read More...

Just what we need. More urban sprawl in the desert. The July 2, 2009 edition of the Arizona Daily Star announced in a two page spread that a developer was building a 3,900 house development in Red Rock, a God forsaken place about 50 miles north of Tucson between Marana and Casa Grande. Is it a desert wonderland? No, it isn’t. It resembles Death Valley. The land is pancake flat and has been scraped clear of any vegetation, even cacti. It lies alongside Interstate Highway 10 and is a half hour’s drive from any shopping, even at the 75 mph speed limit. OK, there are some distant mountain views, but it is not by any definition of the word sustainable. The article doesn’t say where they are going to get water. Right now in Tucson, some forty miles away, there are thousands of homes standing empty and in receivership. One doesn’t have to go out into the desert to find cheaper property. This makes no sense to move farther from jobs and shopping…

• Read More...

You saw the Town Hall meetings on TV with people shouting down congressmen over the health care bill, acting like utter idiots. We know that most of the shouters were shills. Shill is a word from the early days of this country when hucksters selling snake oil, or some magic elixir that would “cure” every malady known to man, would go from town to town with a wagon. The shill was a person who pretended to be a customer who would be miraculously cured of his disease right before the crowd’s eyes. It was great theater but served to cheat the public. Now the shills of the big oil companies are doing the same thing on the climate bill...

• Read More...

I wrote here a short while ago about urine being a better source  for making hydrogen than plain water. It breaks down into its components easier. Here's a new wrinkle, not in fuel but in saving water, money and energy. In Brazil SOS Mata Atlantica Foundation has a TV ad campaign aimed at kids. The ad tells the little scapers to pee in the shower, saying that it saves a considerable amount of water over a year....

• Read More...

Controlling the weather has really never worked. Cloud seeding has never produced any significant rainfall. On the other hand, catastrophic events, such as volcanic eruptions, have certainly affected world climate. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 created a haze that reduced global average temperatures by 0.5C. The eruption of Mt Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 resulted in turning 1816 into the year without a summer. Bjorn Lomborg, Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, a Swedish think tank, believes that we can affect the warming of the world climate….

• Read More...

Charles E Grassley, R-Iowa, blocked the removal of a tariff of 54 cents per gallon on ethanol, most of which comes from Brazil. This protectionist move was for the benefit of his Iowa corn farmer constituants, but not the American public. Of all the materials from which ethanol can be made, corn is the worst. It costs $8.00 per gallon to make and uses tons of water to grow and process.It also requires fossil fuels to make and refine.  It inflates the price of corn and corn by-products....

• Read More...

An article in the Arizona Daily Star August 6, 2009, told of an experiment in which cookies were baked on the dashboard of a car. Temperatures here so far in August have been flirting with 110 degrees every day. They found that the temperature in the car reached 190 degrees, which is plenty hot to cook a lot of things. The experiment worked fine, but they weren't quite as crisp as one might want. I like 'em crisp....

• Read More...

According to an article in the Arizona Daily Star, August 6, 2009, Nissan plans to build recharging stations along Interstate Highway 10 between Tucson and Phoenix and introduce up to 1,000 Nissan Leaf electric vehicles in the Phoenix and Tucson market area. The Leaf is Nissan’s latest generation of the Prius and is 100 percent electric. The Leaf can only go 100 miles per charge but the recharging stations will be able to fast charge in 15 minutes or less to 80 percent capacity....

• Read More...

Columnist Kathleen Parker wrote in her column in the Washington Post, Tuesday August 4, that the Waxman-Markey energy bill now before Congress, would make us less secure if passed. She claims we only have two choices:  we can either be green or we can be less dependent on foreign oil. Her reasoning is a bit convoluted. She is assuming that we continue business as usual. To her alternative energy is a non-starter. Any attempts by the government to cap CO2 emissions will cause a stampede to OPEC for our oil supplies. We will certainly continue to need oil for some time as we transition to a fossil fuel free economy. Most of our oil comes from Canada and Mexico, but there is some new developments that could alter that...

• Read More...