Here’s one more attempt at ocean wave energy. Note that this one is not just bad, it’s pitiful.
As waves pass a floating barge, water enters an L-shaped chamber (shown left) as the wave rises and exits when it falls. This, and get this now, pushes air (not water) through a turbine. So what you have here in essence is, a tiny wind turbine.
What makes hydrokinetics work at some level is high density of water, compared with air. This throws that advantage out the window.
I’m with you on this one, Jim.
I’ve always been heavy into boycotting. I won’t go into stores with Fox News on, or those that are owned by bigots.
That goes double for places of business that allow the carrying of weapons of war. It’s just sickening.
Simply refuse to be a part of our gun-crazed nation. 
Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, now in its 51st year, has never failed to delivery incisive political humor. Here’s a current piece that gets to the core of party affiliation in these insane times. To set up the punch line at the end, I’m sure Trudeau considered “inflicting pain on poor people,” or “morphing democracy into oligarchy,” or “turning the country into one big firing range,” or some such, but it wouldn’t have been as funny.
Kudos. (more…)
The level of insanity that is now in the United States has reached a point where there is a palpable feeling in the air that it’s only going to get worse, but no one can imagine how that’s possible. The storming of the U.S. Capitol seemed outrageous at the time, but isn’t something going to happen that ups the ante even further?
There are still ~50 million voters who believe Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him, and most of them are highly armed, like the two members of Congress shown here.
We went from John McCain to Marjorie Taylor Greene in less than five years. What’s next?
Jerrold, an old acquaintance, sent me this video yesterday, which made claims including these:
WHERE YOUR TAXES GO – ILLEGAL ALIENS – from the L.A. Times
95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.
Over 2/3’s of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal whose births were paid for by taxpayers. (more…)
A reader notes: There was a movie called “Soylent Green” in the 1970s where the food was made out of people. I won’t be eating any of that fake meat.
First of all, I wouldn’t call it “fake.” Plant-based meat is made from the protein called heme, which is what makes beef taste like beef. Heme is a substance precursive to hemoglobin, which is necessary to bind oxygen in the bloodstream, and it’s biosynthesized in both the bone marrow and the liver. Fortunately, it’s also found in plants, and so it could be argued that it’s immaterial in what life form’s body the protein was synthesized.
Second, I wouldn’t be too sure, depending on your life expectancy. Considering the trajectory of the science behind plant-based meat, as well as meat that is grown from the DNA of a living cow, it’s very likely that young people today will be consuming an awful lot of meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered cows before they leave this Earth.
2Greenenergy’s infographic “The Pros and Cons of Renewable Energy” has been downloaded tens of thousands of times, and I hope it’s helped create a good understanding of some of the promises of the industry, as well as a few of the challenges.
Here’s something I just came across: “The Benefits and Challenges of Floating Solar” that I thought was well done. Rightfully, the subject is getting a great deal of positive attention at this point.
Pictured here is the world’s largest floating solar array, which happens to be in Singapore.
We talk a great deal about climate change mitigation, but less about adaptation. The Netherlands, with about one-quarter of its land area below sea level, has always been subject to flooding. Linked above is a cool video that presents what the Dutch have done to deal with this–the largest engineering project on Earth.
This all came to be, following an enormous storm in 1953 that flooded many cities and killed 2000 people.
It can’t help make one wonder what the United States would do if such a massive undertaking were to be required here. One thing’s clear: if a Democrat were in the White House, the Republicans would oppose it, regardless of how horrible the effect of doing so might be.
That’s the way it look to me, as well. But then again I’m not a Harvard Law Professor.
From his Wikipedia page:
Laurence Henry Tribe (born October 10, 1941) is an American legal scholar who is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at the Harvard Law School of Harvard University. Tribe is a constitutional law scholar and co-founder of the American Constitution Society. He is the author of American Constitutional Law (1978), a major treatise in that field, and has argued before the United States Supreme Court 36 times.
Aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas
From The Hill:
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry on Tuesday said he believed the private sector was more likely to find solutions to climate change than government.
“I was convinced, and I remain convinced, no government is going to solve this problem,” Kerry said in remarks at the Institute of International Finance’s 2021 Washington Policy Summit.
“The solution is going to come from the private sector, and what government needs to do is create the framework within which the private sector can do what it does best, which is allocate capital and innovate and begin to take the framework that’s been created. … We need to go after this as if we’re really at war.”
Well, let’s be real. Consumers have to demand low-carbon energy and eat less meat. The private sector needs to build products whose LCAs (lifecycle analyses) are eco-friendlier. And government needs to use taxation and subsidies to make all this more attractive. One can’t work without the other two.
The problem here in the U.S. is that our Congress is essentially owned by corporate entities, including, infamously, the fossil fuel industry. We’re still subsidizing oil exploration, a 100-year-old industry, that is the wealthiest in human history. Maybe that’s what Kerry meant by “no government is going to solve this problem.”
