Though it’s on my to-do list, I haven’t yet visited the Getty Villa, the sight of J. Paul Getty’s magnificent collection of antiquities. Checking out the video on the website linked above just now made me wonder about who Getty was as a person. Regrettably, it’s not a happy story, at least according to this listing in the New World Encyclopedia. (more…)
Frequent commenter and all-around cool guy Brian McGowan just sent me this post from EmmKay.
Wow, that says it all, doesn’t it?
Nice job to you both. (more…)
I spend a couple of hours every day working on my new book, whose working title is “Bullish on Renewable Energy – Eleven Reasons Why Clean Energy Investors Can’t Lose.” Would you like to help?
As the name suggests, it’s a project that enumerates all the reasons that the migration away from fossil fuels and nuclear is in the process of happening far faster than most people predict. Does that sound like an interesting effort? (more…)
In October, I plan to spend two happy days down at the University of California at Santa Barbara for a symposium that is part of their ongoing “Academic Initiative in Sustainability,” called “Sustainable Materials and Product Design.”
Topics to be covered include: (more…)
Here’s an amusing list of 25 actual predictions that were absolutely wrong. I hope you’ll take a few minutes and enjoy them.
My current book project is essentially a take-off on this subject. We’re told, largely by the vested interests desperately trying to maintain the status quo in the energy industry, that renewable energy is a fad, and that powering our Earth from the sun is a pipe-dream. The book will illustrate the folly of this concept, and explain why we’re experiencing the extremely rapid migration to clean energy, based purely on market economics.
When it comes to PR in the energy business, I must confess that I have a suspicious mind. For example, when I see a billboard like this one pictured here, I somehow believe that it must be some sort of logically spurious (not to mention tasteless, profoundly offensive, etc.) attempt on the part of the fossil fuel industry to convince us that their products have no harmful environmental consequences. And bulls-eye! It’s the work of the Heartland Institute, whose funding sources include Koch Industries. (more…)
Here’s a short video–a sort of primer on grid operation called “How the lights stay on.” And another more advanced one on the economics and logistics of grid operation. Their creator quips, “I made them simple enough that a congressman can understand them.” Ha!
Actually, they have a great deal to offer; I hope you’ll check them out.
Here’s something I think readers will enjoy; I know I did. It’s a five-question online quiz called “Got Science?” created by The Union of Concerned Scientists, in which you’ll be asked to choose between real science and the bullcrap being peddled as such. Good stuff.
It’s the birthday of Louis Leakey, a founding figure in modern anthropology. Per the Writer’s Almanac:
In 1948, Leakey and his wife found one of the earliest fossil ape skulls ever discovered; it was between 25 and 40 million years old. It is now believed to be the skull of the ancestor of all large primates, including humans. Then, in 1959, they turned up another hominid skull, which was 1.75 million years old. It was the oldest skull of a close human relative ever found at that point, and it helped persuade other anthropologists that Africa was indeed the place where human beings had evolved. (more…)
A reader asked for my comments on this piece on Jinko Solar and this one on algae. Here’s my position on this:
1) Jinko is extremely well-positioned to expand further its already-existing mega-presence in solar. I ran into them at Intersolar a couple of weeks ago (they were pretty hard to miss), and I’m extremely impressed with what they’re doing.
2) By contrast, I’m not betting on algae.
