Author: alan

Saw a few minutes of the 60 minutes episode the other night about the electric car industry springing up in Silicon valley. It seems these tech bubble entrepreneurs are pouring many millions into car start-ups or making their dough available as VC. The Tesla coupe looks cool, beyond the concept-phase and they’ve already got a big backlog of orders. GM is getting on board with the Chevy Volt, but the troubles of the big three make this a sucker’s bet by them – too much like gambling really, like a last gasp, hail Mary. But hail Marys sometimes work.

For more Electric car pr0n, check out some of the offerings from the recent Paris Motor show. Slick.

But the whole thing brings up a bigger issue, what Kunstler refers to as the general American paradigm of “Happy Motoring.” The engine on which this model is based – cheap gas – is just not going to be able to continue. So whether electric cars are green seems to be academic when the model itself is pretty much over. But… are electric cars green?

It seems axiomatic to say that greenhouse emissions would drop considerably if we were plugging in our cars, even if they were running on energy from dirty coal plants. But it’s not true.

Coal generates more CO2 per unit of energy than petroleum. As a pure carbon, coal’s C atoms bond to each other. As a hydrocarbon, petroleum’s carbon atoms are also bonded to hydrogen atoms. These are the bonds that are broken in combustion (providing power), which releases molecules of, in the case of petro, H2O and CO2. In the case of coal, only CO2, because there is no H.

So… running cars on coal-fired power plants = double no good. But a long term advantage to developing electric cars is that they could and will be powered from a source of electricity other than coal.

So he was also inventor, which, knowing what we know about what he knew, shouldn’t surprise anybody. An electrical engineer in the UK is bringing back a design patented by Einstein that uses no electricity. The design replaces freon with ammonia, butane and water and

takes advantage of low air pressure to reduce the boiling point of butane. In order to achieve a cooling effect, butane is heated into a gaseous state and then mixed with ammonia before being passed through a water-filled condenser. Here, the ammonia dissolves and the butane is released, before the cycle begins again.

Again, look at the date on the design. 19 friggin’ 30. What have we been doing?

This photo, Arrested Demonstrators, Birmingham, Alabama, was taken by Bruce Davidson in May 1963 and is part of the exhibition, Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968, at the High Museum in Atlanta. We caught it this weekend, right before the show closes today.

The exhibition is a presentation of the work of many photographers, journalists and artist types alike, who put themselves on the scene at these pivotal events in our history. And that is what the prints reveal. The physical and moral courage of the people in the photographs is heartbreaking. Elizabeth Eckford, a fifteen year-old girl braving the segregationist savagery of Little Rock, epitomizes the grace that turned a gigantic page. The humanity on the faces of those who were able to withstand being beaten, sprayed, bitten, shot at – plus those who weren’t – is a stunning portrait of the history we are still living. What we cannot feel we will not be able to endure, and just as we are made stronger by their courage, so we live in the long shadow cast by their strength to act. That should be the real and living legacy of the era.

The show was punctuated by several different series of images where the photographer was able to capture a brief chronology of an unfolding drama. One series showed the events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the local sheriff gave protesters a two-minute warning to vacate the bridge. Before the two minutes were even up, their assault began, an assault that resulted in John Lewis and Amelia Boynton being beaten unconscious. The leaders of the SCLC and the SNCC, in tandem with the journalists and photographers, learned how to use the actions of their southern antagonists against them. It was in many ways the powerless leveraging the conscience of a nation to achieve their goals. The images and stories shocked and embarrassed the country and focused great attention on the injustice of an unequal society.

This savvy to use the media seems at first incongruent to the bravery and heroism of the people who marched valiantly, who were assaulted with hoses, dogs and clubs, who bled with dignity and who buried loved ones for a cause greater than any of them individually. But rather than being out of place, it was one tool among many employed to effect great and lasting change. Their righteous goals empowered the use of all means of resistance plus a few that perhaps did not up until that time and may no longer exist. They were on the right side of history, and when you’ve got justice on your side, who knows to what you might be availed?

This is a map of the world generated by estimated carbon damage due to emissions. It’s an amazing site, though it could be dangerous to your afternoon. Vas doucement.

So the NYT has gotten into the act – man, so many words seem loaded in this day and age – with their Green, Inc blog. I’m not going to link to it, for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the entry this morning was about hybrid… yachts. No, really. Making Brazillianaires feel better about themselves. I’ve heard of a hybrid yacht before, in fact they’ve been around for a while. They’re called sailboats.

The title of the post is a nod to ‘Gabo’, of course. I found one of his books in my office this morning while looking for something else of supposedly great importance. It was all I could do not to lock the door and dive in, obviously a sign questionable virtue and character on my part. Take from that what you might, but coming across that book kind of put things in perspective for me.

This is a map of the world generated by estimated carbon damage due to emissions. It’s an amazing site, though it could be dangerous to your afternoon. Vas doucement.

So the NYT has gotten into the act – man, so many words seem loaded in this day and age – with their Green, Inc blog. I’m not going to link to it, for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the entry this morning was about hybrid… yachts. No, really. Making Brazillianaires feel better about themselves. I’ve heard of a hybrid yacht before, in fact they’ve been around for a while. They’re called sailboats.

The title of the post is a nod to ‘Gabo’, of course. I found one of his books in my office this morning while looking for something else of supposedly great importance. It was all I could do not to lock the door and dive in, obviously a sign questionable virtue and character on my part. Take from that what you might, but coming across that book kind of put things in perspective for me.

There is a tight line between indulgence and responsibility which, especially when we let it go slack, runs the risk of self-strangulation. Think of any luxury – it need not be an extravagance, though they often are at first until we find just the right rationalizations – and you can at hint at what must eventually be reconciled in order to court it. You know who the piper is, in other words.

It’s easy to think about this in the context of the current financial turmoil, even in our trade deficit with China. We’re living on borrowed money and there will be a bill. A similar logic follows our infatuation with the automobile.

It sounds somewhat puritan but it’s only common sense; there is a commensurate price for an indulgence – indeed it’s one definition of an indulgence. Cars allowed us to conquer and use this continent in specific, splendid and often stylish ways, mostly to our benefit. Or so it seemed at first. Now, it looks like they will exact a terrible price from us for what appears to be the ability to live in far flung reaches, move about at our leisure, and siphon vast amounts toward heating the planet on the installment plan. It wasn’t all bad – submarine races by themselves almost acquit the entire mechanism. Almost. But there’s actually no case to be made about whether the invention of the car was good or bad; it simply happened and we bit, and we’re left to accept the consequences of moving our society forward via the automobile, literally, exactly to here.

So, untangle the line and connect what you do to what it requires, and understand that our alleged independence was a mirage. We start by becoming conscious of the small things and then we realize there really aren’t any. Your town becomes different when it’s a place you walk through, take the bus then bike across instead of drive through. They’re not even comparable. Onward, to more solid footing.

Much to the chagrin of their preferred stockholders The New York Times Atlantic Monthly Flagpole Magazine has seen fit to publish a variant of the musings on this site in a column, called Eco Hustle and to be renewed each fortnight. The first one is here. Welcome Flagpole readers.

Much to the chagrin of their preferred stockholders The New York Times Atlantic Monthly Flagpole Magazine has seen fit to publish a variant of the musings on this site in a column, called Eco Hustle and to be renewed each fortnight. The first one is here. Welcome Flagpole readers.

As a country we’ve made a living bragging about how ambitious we are, how audacious our concepts of freedom, liberty and happiness are as to make their fulfillment just a matter of conquering a lesser will.

Well, here’s the way to defuse most every geopolitical conflict for the next century or so, at least until things even out and Republicans can get elected again and start whining about socialism or how unjust their tax burden is. Cheap desalination powered with clean energy is the key to making the fossil fuels conundrum exit stage left. As the article points out hese are massive public works projects with very sophisticated interactions with the natural environment; The question is not will they work, but do we have the will to make them work.

In the speech by House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi yesterday that had all the Republican house members whining and crying with hurt feelings, she recalled that people around the world constantly tell her that the greatest emerging market in the world is rebuilding the public infrastructure of the United States of America. She said it could be done in a fiscally responsible manner. Even with only what we know how to do right now, it could also be done in a highly innovative manner, geared toward sustainably shifting our transportation and land-use conventions in the permanent direction of clean water and low-carbon power.

Building a green house isn’t green, but takes a lot of green. The reviewer says it at the end:

Maybe the real meaning of being green is closer to what modest Kermit had in mind: learning to make the best of what we already have rather than having to create, spend and construct something “eco-friendlier.”

Yes it is. One household living off the grid does not a difference make; we need to get the grid off the grid. Meanwhile, live close to work, know where your food comes from, spend and buy accordingly.

We already have experience with this, if we thought about it. The way we close military bases, for example, is an orderly, deliberative process that recognizes obsolescence in the system and gives expression to eliminating it. Some stakeholders yell and scream, but calm prevails as we reconcile resources and needs. It is and should be a constant re-alignment. These bases are usually re-purposed to our advantage. A Navy Supply Corps School in our town is going to eventually become a medical school. So re-casting other obsolete elements in our society isn’t such a unthinkable prospect, only a matter of acknowledging the disconnect between original intent and present/future needs and opportunity costs. Imagine how powerful it might feel to begin abandoning a few roads here and there.

And speaking of power, there is a not-insignificant degree of helplessness wound around our dependence on extra-territorially derived transportation fuel, aka foreign oil. Well, throw your weight around. Saudi Arabia believes that $100/barrel oil is too high; meanwhile countries with more shallow reserves want to get as much for their oil as they can while it lasts. Why this disconnect? Long-term demand. The House of Saud knows high prices are tamping it down and are concerned with the many alternatives at our disposal. They’re actually afraid we might start walking to work or to the grocery, much less all the consequences that will spin out beyond that.

The winners and honorable mentions of the Science magazine and NSF sixth annual International Science and Engineering visualization challenge. Note the lack of irony in the remark from panel of finalist judges member Malvina Martin: “I remember studying very basic cell biology and being bored to death, but the fact that it was an interactive computer game you could get your hands on and see direct results of too much sun and not enough sun was very pertinent in this day and age when folks are so far removed from the plant and the planet.”