Archive for the 'Carbon Dioxide' Category
Monday, July 28th, 2008
In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore said he grew tobacco among other crops on the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee during summer vacations in his youth. Gore also likened what he views as today’s suppression of global warming evidence by Big Oil to the cover up long ago by Big Tobacco of the health risks […]
Carbon Dioxide, Energy, Organic Gardening, Self Reliance | 2 Comments »
Monday, July 21st, 2008
Last Thursday, Al Gore challenged the U.S. to stop using fossil fuels in ten years. He discussed his plan and the reactions to it Sunday on Meet The Press.
Wind power may be viewed as an indirect form of solar energy moving the atmosphere, but megawatt production (like the Pickens Plan) is restricted to select wind […]
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Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Readers have asked (via email) for an off-grid-friendly fuel making how-to article.
A process that looks simple is found at kitchen-biodiesel.com. The “Automatic Alternative” shown below the animation is one of their sponsor’s systems.
Don’t take the abbreviated animated GIF thumbnail I made from images there as the whole process. Make sure to actually visit their site […]
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Monday, July 14th, 2008
Cassava is “Africa’s Food Security Crop” according to the World Bank.
A CNN report about Nigerian civil engineer, Dr Joseph Adelegan, and his projects to convert waste into useful commodities, describes his latest idea to recover energy from cassava processing waste, which in the past would be dumped untreated to pollute local water supplies.
Through innovative biogas […]
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Friday, June 27th, 2008
Kurzweil AI links to a report of new windpower design selling for one dollar per watt.
Energy Daily:
“. . .efficient aerodynamic design lends itself to smaller wind turbines, which can operate closer to the ground or on a rooftop. They can handle a wide range of wind velocities, anywhere between 4 and 80 mph. They generate […]
Carbon Dioxide, Energy, Peace | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 20th, 2008
J. Neil Schulman told me that Fox News Channel aired a report about a Cuban refinery for Venezuelan oil. Here’s the Havana take on it.
An older report from another Cuban source says:
The Cienfuegos oil refinery, a new joint Cuba- Venezuela project, reached 112.9 percent its target production for the first two months of operation.
That’s an […]
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Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
Digg front page item links to a report from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research that I heard yesterday on right wing talk radio saying Al Gore’s energy usage is up 10% even after installing a token solar panel and geothermal pump.
As one commenter at Digg noticed, TCPR’s headline unfairly compares Gore’s annual usage […]
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Monday, June 16th, 2008
Times Online in the UK reports on the biofuel tech race in the U.S.:
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi […]
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Sunday, June 1st, 2008
UK Guardian reports a possible breakthrough that could offset any warming effects of carbon dioxide emissions. A prototype that would remove more CO2 from the air than the device’s carbon cost to build and operate is planned to be demonstrated within two years. A diagram of the “CO2 Extractor” and a description of its discovery […]
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Monday, May 12th, 2008
It’s not quite “Mr. Fusion” as seen at the end of Back To The Future, but EFuel100 does let you pour beer into a distiller that also serves as an ethanol fuel pump.
The cost for processing discarded liquor can run as low as $0.10 per gallon of ethanol produced. A typical bar or restaurant discards […]
Carbon Dioxide, Energy, Self Reliance | No Comments »
Monday, April 28th, 2008
Green Wombat describes former Australian Greenpeace activist Danny Kennedy’s new California venture, Sungevity:
“Putting photovoltaic panels on residential rooftops remains largely a labor-intensive cottage business, often involving multiple visits to a client’s home to make the sales pitch, measure the roof, and design a custom system. Sungevity, which officially launches Tuesday on Earth Day, takes all […]
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Thursday, April 24th, 2008
Food aid is not being delivered because of fuel costs, and the cost of food is skyrocketing by itself. Biofuel from corn or even switchgrass requires turning agricultural land into not very efficient fields dedicated to fuel production instead. Kurzweil AI reports a Physorg article about genetically altered cyanobacterium (blue-green algae) that produces cellulose and […]
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
So I wasn’t imagining things, Al Gore really did say a tax on carbon should replace the employment tax. Maybe he could get together with Pat Buchanan since the number one CO2 emitter is now China, and thus part of the carbon tax could be viewed as a tariff.
Here’s the story, “Al Gore’s Pollution Tax […]
Carbon Dioxide, Freedom | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
In this recent TED talk, speaker Al Gore wonders what he could say to promote a greater sense of urgency about the climate crisis. I don’t have an answer about that, but in order to get political action in his direction, he might talk more about the tax change I think he proposed in this […]
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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
The U.S. is no longer number 1, according to a University of California research team quoted in this BBC online story.
We’ve got to try harder! Er, I mean to stop China’s reckless industry, that is.
Sphere: Related Content
Carbon Dioxide, Pollution | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Internet marketer Ben Mack of Think Two Products Ahead announced a series of teleseminar calls from experts based on the thought of Buckminster Fuller, for the benefit of GENI, the Global Energy Network Institute, which is developing a global energy grid based on electricity from renewable sources so poor regions with sunlight and wind but […]
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Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow posted an article, “Can aviation go green with algae-based biofuels?” about biojet aviation fuel for Virgin Atlantic.
The link to a World Changing story, “Taking Aloft With Sustainable Biojet”, describes the next test:
When the Air New Zealand test takes place, it will be with a second generation feedstock. Of the possibilities, two […]
Carbon Dioxide, Energy, Pollution | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 7th, 2008
A popular TreeHugger story reports that carbon neutral biodiesel fuel can be grown from trees. Biodiesel burns cleaner than petrodiesel.
. . .the Brazilian Copaifera langsdorfii, to use its botanical name, can be tapped not unlike a rubber tree, but instead of yielding rubbery latex it gives up a natural diesel. According to the nurseryman selling […]
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Monday, April 7th, 2008
David Bach usually writes bestselling financial improvement books for the Oprah crowd. His latest book, Go Green, Live Rich, available April 8, is another in that series, but this time the method of living rich is by going green. By accident he moved into a new green building complex to be near his children in […]
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Sunday, April 6th, 2008
Maybe this is five days late. . .
Someone hit me on the left side of the head yesterday, so today’s post is being written by my right side.
Insightful critics of renewables point out that gasoline works for transportation. Switching to something else will require a massive investment in new filling stations. The efficiency of any […]
Carbon Dioxide, Energy, Freedom, Peace | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
Off Grid story from March 22 (again, not an April Fool’s Day joke) about personal nuclear reactors.
Think I’m lying? How about this Gizmodo story?
Stephen Years quotes a Santa Fe Reporter article about Los Alamos based Hyperion’s planned product.
The portable nuclear reactor is the size of a hot tub. It’s shaped like a sake cup, filled […]
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Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
Digg reports that a story in ecogeek describes success with nanocrystal LEDs, further explained at New Scientist.
Sphere: Related Content
Carbon Dioxide, Energy, Pollution | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
My WordPress setup doesn’t like to edit these embedded objects, so I’m reposting fresh to fix the weird layout problems. Sigh.
The above episode (number 106) of The Boaters TV discusses international ship pollution regulations and follows with a story about the upcoming Independence 60 solar luxury yacht.
Occasional green boating stories appear, but especially noteworthy in […]
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Thursday, February 28th, 2008
BBC reports “Scientists advance ‘drought crop’”.
The researchers say that this understanding could allow them to modify plants so that they continue to absorb carbon dioxide but reduce the amount of water released into the atmosphere, enabling them to thrive in very dry conditions.
I know that some of you objected when genetically modified plants were made […]
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Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
Boing Boing links indirectly to a WIRED magazine article I missed about an interesting advance in nanotechnology.
Researchers at UCLA made headlines this month by developing a nanoscale crystal that traps roughly 80 times its volume of carbon dioxide.
Not that we should care, because smart people say global warming is all lies.
General Motors Corp Vice Chairman […]
Carbon Dioxide | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
Jeffrey Yago, in an article at Backwoods Home, describes how inefficient incandescent bulbs are being phased out in some states by 2010, and federally by 2012. But there are problems with the most common replacement.
In past articles I have also described how the more energy-efficient compact fluorescent lamps being promoted to replace these incandescent light […]
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