I had the pleasure of listening to the conservative columnist George Will deliver a talk yesterday here at my 35th reunion at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. As I told a friend before we entered the auditorium, I disagree with a great deal of this guy’s conclusions, but I’d give anything to be able to think and communicate at his level.
Per this report, Tesla is shooting for 20,000 units next year. That’s a big number for a novel, specialty car with a big price tag. Yet think about the consumer value proposition: I can buy an extremely high-end car with a 300 mile range that doesn’t use gasoline. When’s the last time I drove 300 miles in a day?
That’s a lot different than a proposition that goes like this: I get a low-end car at a premium price, and I have to make sure I stay local. I’m paying extra to be inconvenienced.
When I travel, I spend a fair amount of time in rental cars, which provides me with more opportunity to listen to radio programming on our civilization’s challenges and opportunities than I have when I’m home. One of the themes I see emerging is the economic plight of today’s youth, and how likely it appears that this generation will be the first to fall short of its parent’s in terms of quality of life, at least defined in economic terms. In particular, the feeble job market has made stable, high-quality careers in young people’s chosen fields extremely rare. And where the situation for college graduates is tough, the outlook for kids entering the job market with only a high school diploma is, of course, even worse. (more…)
Consider today’s report from the United Nations to the effect that we are doing a terrible job with respect to sustainability and that we’re nearing the “tipping point” re: global climate change. Add to it this bundle of joy on the same subject from Scientific American. Together they raise a few interesting questions:
1) Are they unbiased and scientifically accurate? They certainly jibe with nearly everything I read about the combined effects of population growth and the consumption/destruction of natural resources, but they’re sure to be assailed by the forces that profit from our business-as-usual approach to transportation, energy, consumerism, etc.
2) More importantly, assuming for a moment that the reports provide accurate depictions of the declining health of our natural environment, what do they mean in practical terms? Will they make a difference? How, if at all, do they provide a mandate for citizens of Earth, aggregated as we are in the 200 +/- sovereign countries, to take real action?
The problem is that it doesn’t matter what reports like these tell us. At so many levels within the realms of business and political reality, we live in a world where substantive change is as difficult as it is vital to our survival.
Frequent commenter Larry Lemmert waxes metaphorical with the respect to our clean energy targets:
We need to go after the low-hanging fruit before climbing the tree and going out on a limb to harvest energy that has a negative payback for our efforts. ….Craig has listed a number of these ill devised schemes.
There is no doubt that there IS low-hanging fruit – most obviously in the form of efficiency and conservation, but I think that solar and wind are fairly well proven technologies in which the costs are becoming quite attractive – and bound to fall even further in the near-term — especially if we can find a way of achieving some level of scale.
And yes, there are a lot of bad ideas being hawked by the large and ever-growing ranks of frauds and crackpots. Perhaps more dangerous, there are those whose MO is getting a few ambitious politicians to champion big (and terrible) ideas. “Clean coal” and corn ethanol come immediately to mind.
Our guest for this month’s webinar is Robert Orr of Manchester, England, who will tell us about his quest to build a facility to turn buffalo dung in Southern Pakistan into fertilizer and energy.
We are talking about a huge amount of animal waste: 400,000 dairy buffaloes confined in a small area are creating, between solids and liquids, about 8,000 tons per day. Today, most of it forms a river and flows south into the Arabian Sea, a body of water that is now so polluted that fishermen row their boats through five miles of sewage every morning before they encounter anything still alive.
I hope you’ll be able to join Robert and me for this lively presentation, Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 10 AM PDT (1 PM EDT). Robert has a refined and gentlemanly demeanor, yet carries with him a raw passion for the project, as well as perhaps a thinly disguised level of disgust and contempt that mankind has been brought to this horrific place.
He’s also a man with a plan – and by my wits, it’s a heck of a good plan at that. I hope you’ll join us. Here’s the sign-up form:
http://2greenenergy.com/free-webinar/
In his comment to my recent piece on global climate change, Cameron Atwood provides a wonderful analysis, which concludes:
This strikes me as very much like buying insurance – if nothing happens, you lose some money in exchange for peace of mind – if something does happen, and you’re not insured, God help you.
Do you have insurance?
Exactly right. And actually, the case is stronger than you laid out, since most of the actions we need to take to mitigate climate change will result in better health for all life forms and a more civil, just and peaceful world. Not a bad bargain.
Looks like electric vehicle sales are picking up. What’s the attraction that lies behind the surge (pardon the pun)? According to this, it’s HOV-lane access for EV drivers. That may sound pretty dumb to you folks in Casper, Wyoming. But if you’re in Washington, DC or Southern California, it’s a big deal.
I credit Brian Wynne, president of the Electric Drive Transportation Association (EDTA), the lobby group, for having nailed this; when I spoke with him in preparation for my next book (Renewable Energy — Following the Money), he predicted that this would be big.
I make periodic references to all the perpetual motion machines to which people from all over the globe introduce to me at the rate of at least once a month. Because of the stigma attached to the term “perpetual motion,” most of them don’t use that term. But this one sure does; they’re quite unabashed about it. 500 watts in, 2000 watts out, using compressed air, getting more energy out of uncompressing the air than they put into compressing it. Pure gibberish. (more…)
Tomorrow night marks the start of a trip out of town for me. I’ll be headed to San Francisco for a couple of meetings, including coffee with my friend Fareed Sfard, CEO of solar thermal start-up Ahura Energy. Then it’s back east for my 35th college reunion (at which conservative columnist George Will is scheduled to speak) and an interview for my next book with clean energy investment guru Joe Duggan. Back in California Monday night for a round table “summit” on renewables in Carmel, in which I’ve been asked to participate.
Home Tuesday night. I’ll post a few updates along the way.
