High-tech products do have problems of cost and local technical support, but if they’re durable enough might still be a good solution in remote regions. Here’s a solar absorption house cooling system from a company based in Spain (description is in English): http://www.rotartica.com/pub/ingl/index.html

The small absorption chemical thermos-sized cooler should work with cheap solar sources used to replace cooking fires, as seen here: http://permakent.com/2008/07/25/solar-cooking-for-the-rest-of-us/ Notice I do point out the deforestation/health issues of cooking fires in that post.

Aside from that, cooking fires are hardly free – that fuel comes from miles away, carried by women at great risk and labor, and gained by deforestation. Diseases caused by smoke inhalation from heating and cooking fires are also a major problem, especially for young children. I’d be curious if a solar-heated model would be possible. Also I wonder what kind of insulation the container uses. Could the re-heat interval be lengthened by super-insulating it? Is it already super-insulated?

Sorry if I come across as a spoil-sport, but I feel that the technologies need to be incredibly inexpensive and capable of being made for the poor by themselves. Things like SODIS, CooKits, composting toilets, etc.

If it is as good as it sounds, I’d contribute to a campaign to generate testimonial, hard data , and innovations. We need references to the Stanford and the UK groups that participated, and other relevant data.

Could someone post these reverences and any available contrary views?

For those who insist on living in cities, plug-in hybrids (using 70 cent/gallon equivalent recharge from clean power) covering most daily 50-mile travel and biodiesel for the rare longer distance trip would be the biggest step to solving the energy crisis. I’m not a fan of mass transit unless you like crime, delays and tuberculosis outbreaks.

William McDonough, the Cradle To Cradle co-author, claims that renewables restricted to biology (bamboo, tobacco, cork, cotton, etc.) would only support a population of 500 million on Earth. Non-biological chemical renewables, selected based on health, safety and environmental criteria, will support everyone sustainably.

The Humane Society, on the other hand, has been extremely effective in promulgating its naive worldview because it doesn’t act silly; it just uses wickedly effective political and social marketing techniques.

Thank you and it was an honor to have you on the panel.

Howard Hinman

While I’m sure that Google enjoys the side effects of this ‘Publishers Clearinghouse’ style myth (ie. it leads to more business for them), it’s pretty well established that you cannot improve your position in search results by using either Adsense or Adwords.

At most, Google *may* share some of their crawling and indexing infrastructure between services so a side effect may be a small increase in the ‘freshness’ of your indexed content (even that is somewhat speculative, and your site would have to be pretty ’stale’ to see any benefit in any case). Ranking and relevance calculations are done independently for different services inside the Google cloud precisely to prevent this sort of influence, even the unintended variety.

Google has a page for webmasters here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Only one review. Hmm.

Note: English translation– http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fjatrophaonline.wordpress.com%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=es&tl=en

I include permaculture, seedballs, ham radio, and non-electric fluidic tinker-toy rod logic under the term “technology.” Neil Stephenson described the struggle over future technology as the choice between “feed” (like the grid) and “seed” (off-grid) in his novel, The Diamond Age. But with nanotech.

The relative prosperity in the United States over the last eighty years has left most people unprepared for the tough times that are an inevitable part of the cycle in both nature and human social systems.

You have an interesting blog in that most survivalist types are preparing for a complete meltdown of society to more “primitive levels” while you feel that technology will continue to serve an important role for those who survive the ordeal.

Of course you are more likely correct as the knowledge of technology will not go away even if the grid is down. I look forward to more posts Kent.

Seedballs.Com Wayback Archive

Regarding the ‘carbon-neutral mortgage association’, you may find this information interesting:
http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/cic_text/housing/energy_mort/energy-mortgage.htm

Forget about affordability for the moment, I just mean that if healthcare is hours away by car, it isn’t ‘accessible’.

Similarly, being stuck out in the boonies may not give them the social stimulation they want.