Here’s a preview of an interview with Bernie Sanders on the subject of media consolidation. Our Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is in the process of further loosening the regulations that surround cross-ownership of various media types: radio stations, television channels, newspapers, etc. The result will be tighter control and greater homogeneity of everything we Americans hear, see and read. (more…)
It’s good to see the public and private sectors working together. Here’s a story announcing the U.S. Department of Energy’s five-year, $120-million award for a team of 14 companies, universities and national laboratories. The project will be led by Argonne National Laboratory, and will aim to develop advanced battery packs for electric vehicles.
Having next-gen batteries for electric transportation will be nice, but the key from an environmental perspective will be figuring out how to charge them without burning coal. Of course, if the project is successful and develops a solution whose cost is sufficiently low, the packs can be used to store off-peak wind and solar. That will be a happy day for humankind.
Good luck to the team; I hope the relationship will be cooperative, amiable and productive.
Here’s a neat infographic that presents these folks’ idea of the car of the future. No doubt there are some good, futuristic ideas here that differentiate this thing from what we have now, but I don’t believe this is the direction we’ll be taking.
In particular, this follows the auto paradigm of the 20th Century: a big heavy and bulky box on four wheels. I envision a wholesale shift in paradigm, where car ownership becomes far less prevalent, and is replaced in the main by a network of transportation solutions: mass transit, car sharing, ride sharing, e-bikes, ultra-small vehicles for urban commuting and package delivery, etc. Note that a few of our listings in our cleantech investment opportunities centers around transportation.
I also predict that, despite the stranglehold that the oil companies have on us, we will eventually break free. The concept that the car depicted in the infographic runs on gasoline refined out of gooey, planet-killing tar sands seems absurd.
As we frequently discuss, the real low-hanging fruit when it comes to greenhouse gas reduction lies more in energy efficiency than it does in renewables. Efficiency invokes largely proven and inexpensive technologies, and holds the promise of putting many millions of people to work deploying them.
To make all this even more exciting, the modern Internet-driven world is making the results of these efficiency solutions more striking by the day. This is largely a product of the use of information technology: sensors to gather data, and software to analyze it and make decisions based on it. Sensors in our roads, appliances, cars, power generation equipment – in essentially every physical object in our daily lives — all collect data, the net effect of which is reduced power consumption.
Here’s a good article describing GE’s transformation away from gadgetry and into analytics.
I just participated in a real-time webinar, a live broadcast from the COP-18 meetings in Doha, Qatar. Here are my notes:
• In the past few years, over 30,000 peer-reviewed papers have been published on global climate change, only 24 of which challenged the notion that human activity is causing this phenomenon.
• We have seen substantial progress in renewable energy. In 2006, only 3.5% of the world’s energy came from renewable resources; now that figure is 20%.
• We can and must embrace a low-carbon economy, putting people to work in building and deploying solutions in energy efficiency, clean energy, alternate fuel transportation, etc. Certain industrial giants, e.g., GE and Siemens, are actively embracing this change.
• The world needs a vision of a future in which we consume 0% fossil fuels. (more…)
Here’s an interesting (albeit disappointing) article predicting a slowing in cleantech investment in 2013. On the bright side, it points to a number of areas of growth, for example, agriculture:
Big ag steps up and cleans up: …. after evaluating hundreds of companies around the world, we found and profiled 57 with important new clean agricultural science (more…)
Fans of highly efficient internal combustion engines will be interested in this: a modern-day variant on a Wankel rotary engine of 50 years ago. By firing 16 times per revolution, it achieves extremely high torque in a very small volume; thus the name “MYT” or “Massive Yet Tiny.”
When I walk along the beach and take in the beauty of the Pacific, it sure does look big. Sure, the volumes of pollution pouring into our oceans is growing steadily, but won’t the sheer volume of water and abundance of aquatic plants and animals serve to hold all this in check?
Not to the degree most people imagine.
Here’s a picture I came across, done by Adam Nieman, whose aim is to get us to appreciate the environmental challenges we face, due to the fact that the volumes of water in our oceans and air in our skies really aren’t as large as we imagine. The graphic depicts the actual size of the Earth’s oceans (the small blue sphere on the left) and atmosphere (if it were at sea-level air pressure, the small white sphere on the right).
Since everything seems to come down to dollars and cents nowadays, I’l close with this reminder: It may be expensive to keep our planet clean, but it’s even more so to clean it up once it’s dirty.
What wealthy folks are investing in saving our 750,000,000 acres of public trust lands? In housing for homeless? In cleaning up the plastic island in the Pacific larger than Alaska? In cleaning up the mercury from the oceans, the Great Lakes, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Caribbean Sea? In cleaning up sewer and gray flush water? In getting rid of Africanized Bees? In finding solutions to the 20 million malnourished American kids who go to sleep hungry every night? In the 27,000 square mile Navajo Nation with 400,000 citizens that are 50% unemployed? In finding a cure for diabetes for 60% of the children on the 585 First American Nations?
What wealthy folks are investing in the rusting inner cities or the 23,000 rural communities at risk of extinction? In saving millions of homes in foreclosure? In Veterans Administration Hospitals? In our crumbling bridges and highways? In closing and protecting our borders? In soil restoration after prolonged drought? In 20,000,000 Americans who are unemployed or underemployed?
The fiscal cliff is an invention. (more…)
Last night we published our 2500th blog post. My sincere thanks to all of our contributors and supporters, and to the many dozens of fine friends I’ve made along the way.
I smile sadly when I hear about people rushing into retirement, and at my age (57) I’m surrounded by them. I want to be doing this until I take my final breath on this planet.
