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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Fossil Fuels

I had the pleasure to interview the president of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) for my next book project (“Renewable Energy – Following the Money”) just now. Dennis McGinn (pictured here, second from left) is a retired vice admiral from the US Navy, and an incredibly articulate spokesperson for our industry. Though I found our talk quite interesting and multi-dimensional, I’ll summarize it in a few high-level bullet points:

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Like everybody else, I suppose I have certain abilities as a person. But looking into the future and divining weird trends and fads sure isn’t one of them. If you had asked me 10 years ago if I thought a large swath of educated Americans would be ignoring the claims of scientists, and challenging the findings of the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community on a certain matter, I would have laughed at you.

Yet I ask you to check this out: We have scientists literally taking to the streets, protesting the fact that they’re being ignored.

I would have said hell would have frozen over first.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I had an outstanding day, the centerpiece of which was a fairly strenuous hike in the mountains above the Pacific with a fine friend. I burned a few calories, had a great time, and came back with a level of exhaustion that reminds me that I’d really done something. That’s hard to beat.

Here’s the bad news: in all our rambling conversations, neither of us could find much reason for celebration – or even hope for the human race – at least the American brand of it. He’s a banker, so he (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Biomass

For quite a while, I helped to promote a client back east and their solution to processing the manure that comes from our nation’s 7.6 billion chickens. The problem I had, in retrospect, was the technology, which was garden-variety (pardon the pun) anaerobic digestion. AD, a process in which waste is converted to methane and other products biologically, has been around for thousands of years. It’s slow, and worse, incomplete, leaving a huge portion of the incoming mass as sludge.

The other day I had lunch with an old friend who’s become quite an expert in biomass. When I told him that I was on a quest for the best technologies, he suggested that I check out Genifuel.

This looks really attractive to me. Pyrolysis and gasification are thermochemical processes that have the potential to be far faster and more complete than AD. I’m going to call them Monday and try to visit one of their customers if I can find one locally.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Here’s a wonderful article that begins with a question: Since it’s so clear that our civilization faces several different types of existential threats due to its overconsumption of finite and increasingly scarce resources, why is essentially nothing being done about it? The answer is implied in the name of the group that the author (Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University) has formed to deal with these issues: The Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. I.e., he claims that aberrant human behavior is the culprit, and cites the need to educate the public about the threats that uncontrolled human activities pose to the environment. 

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with an economics professor at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, Dr. Jason Scorse, who took a few minutes and explained the basics of “behavioral economics” to me. The subject is based on the work of two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who studied deviations from rationality, i.e., why people make decisions that do harm – both to themselves and to others; they developed a kind of architecture for how people think and act in the real world. Scorse believes that using this work to inform public policy can make a huge difference in the choices people make regarding the preservation of the environment.

Let’s hope he’s right.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Fossil Fuels

I had lunch today with David Raney, one of the most accomplished professionals in the automotive industry. About a month ago, I had introduced 2GreenEnergy transportation guru Dan Sturges to him, and I thought it would be a good idea to meet again with David to get his sense for what he was thinking about the future of the industry.

Though I’m not sure David would agree with me, here’s my belief: car ownership was the paradigm for the 20th Century, and it was wonderfully effective in bringing wealth, jobs, convenience, and countless different types of improvement to our lifestyles. However, the ecologic consequences were significant. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I serve on the board of advisors for the Clean Business Investment Summit, an annual opportunity for a carefully vetted set of cleantech entrepreneurs to present to potential investors. One of the roles I play is mentoring the presenters; I meet with each of them in advance, and critique their PowerPoint and their presentation style. Having looked at 1100+ business plans in the past three years has put me in a good position to know what works here and what doesn’t in this arena — not to mention the 30 years before that, during which I made presentations based on PowerPoint (earlier, view-graphs) to audiences all over the world.   (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I urge readers to join in the discussion in response to my piece on Sylvia Earle: “Humankind’s Plight at a Macro Level.” In particular, frequent commenter Cameron Atwood discusses the role that the ultra-libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand has in our current government here in the US.

It’s funny you bring up Ronald Reagan’s mention of Ayn Rand in 1966, Cameron. It was only a few years after that (the early 1970s) that I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (the former is the better of the two, IMO). The whole libertarian thing made a great deal of sense to me for a couple of decades — until I realized the truth of essentially what you’ve written in your comment, i.e., that private interests in a deregulated environment, generally, will exploit the resources around it to an unacceptable level. Any doubt Americans had about this should have vanished in 2008 with the collapse of our financial system, not to mention our society’s coming face to face with the ruination of the fragile ecosystem on which it and all other life forms depend.

The fact that many of us simply refuse to see this doesn’t speak too highly of us.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

A friend of mine sent me a bunch of material on the dangers of fracking, which I offer here to readers. But first, our brief conversation:

Friend: Wow. Check this out.

Craig: Thanks.  As you know, I’m a big proponent of renewables. But I’m an even bigger proponent of fairness. Do you think this piece is completely fair to all sides? (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

At the rate of about a dozen a week, I’m approached with ideas in clean energy/transportation. Here’s a rough breakdown of my perception of  the concepts I’ve received over the last three years:

2%: Crackpots. An attempt to raise money to build a prototype of something that is theoretically impossible, where the principal (I think) actually believes it to be possible. I speak (briefly) with people fairly frequently who are trying to convince me that their idea is the very one that has successfully violated the First or Second Law of Thermodynamics.

3%: Fraud. Same as above, except that the “inventor” doesn’t believe his own story.  It’s a not-too-cleverly disguised attempt to bilk investors out of money to build a prototype of some that the principal knows very well to be theoretically impossible. (more…)

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