Three short videos

of safe, environmentally friendly windmills

Light Bulbs vs. The Nanny State

I experimented with the CFL a couple years ago , and found every flaw listed in this video. Since writing that post, someone suggested another explanation for why all my CFL bulbs blew so fast: they were all mounted inverted in downward-pointing sockets. CFLs create much less heat than incandescent bulbs, but they do create heat- and when inverted, the heat rises to cook the circuitry in the base of the bulb, dramatically reducing their lifespan. Incandescent bulbs have no circuitry to cook, and so last longer than CFLs in this usage.

Big deal, you say, just change the fixtures? This house was built in 1870; the chandeliers are the original gas chandeliers, wired for electricity, and they hang several feet down from the 13" ceilings. And the house is in an historical district- I would have to find five matching chandeliers, two front porch fixtures, and kitchen fixtures that are or look period, but are all wired with all sockets facing up, then have them all installed- even if possible, it would cost many, many thousands, which I don't have- especially for something that ridiculous. I suppose I could fill the house with floor lamps and never turn the chandeliers on except for company, but I don't have enough wall sockets to do that, either.

So come 2012, I will have to set aside a couple hundred dollars a year for the government mandated CFL bulbs- dramatically increasing my carbon footprint for inferior illumination- and make a special recycling basket that will cradle the bulbs without breaking them for the trips to the recyclers, so my congressman can feel he's doing something about greenhouse gasses. Something, good, I mean, rather than increasing them as it actually turns out. I will also be harming our balance of trade, as not a single CFL is made in the U.S. But as Al Gore has shown us, it's better to look green than to be green.

Nuclear power to the people

"Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.", according to this article from The Guardian. "The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion , a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'"

Hyperion is not the only company producing min-power plants. Toshiba has a 200KW reactor that is only 20' x 6' in size, is self sustaining, and can produce electricity at 5 cents/ KW for 40 years.

Neither system contains weapons grade material. With no internal moving parts, both are sealed in concrete for their entire service life, making them highly resistant to disaster, natural or man made. (Not that it will make any difference to the ecofreaks, of course)

Just as only Nixon could go to China, only a Democrat dare defy the environmental lobby... I hope the new President will dare do so, on behalf of this and many other technologies that can assist both Global Warming and the energy situation.

Simple answers to global warming

One of the biggest problems in dealing with any complex question is that many simple, common sense measures are dismissed because they are not a complex, comprehensive solution- a corollary of the axiom "the perfect is the enemy of the good enough". There are always people who, when your house is on fire, want to debate the root causes of house fires, and create blue ribbon panels to draft legislation about home building codes and materials- putting the fire out would be "too simplistic".

I have written here before about one such simple partial solution: giving tax breaks to encourage people to replace their black or dark colored roofs with white or light colored roofs. I have been talking about this program (and many other similar ones) since the days of the first gas crisis thirty years ago, when the issue was just saving energy. I've even put it on the internet before- when I was a guest on a radio show to discuss school vouchers , the host suggested before the show that I ought to put it on a website, and he would give out the address on the show; to flesh out the site, I included many of my other proposals, including some on passive solar energy .

Back then, when people wrote my proposals off as "too simplistic to have any real effect", I didn't have the resources to put numbers to it. But now some researchers have, and the numbers are even bigger than I had guessed. According to these stories from Science Magazine and The LA Times , replacing black roofs with white ones and replacing black asphalt roads with white concrete would offset 44 metric gigatons of greenhouse gases!

One of the best things about this proposal is that it can be done immediately, and we don't have to wait until it's finished to reap some benefits- even the smallest beginning will yield big results right away. "According to Hashem Akbari, a physicist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a 1,000-square-foot roof -- the average size on an American home -- offsets 10 metric tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere if dark-colored shingles or coatings are replaced with white material."

Is this a solution in itself? No. But this, (any many other similar, easy programs) can have a huge effect, can be done immediately, and require no new scientific breakthroughs, no new research programs- it's all off the shelf stuff, using materials already in mass production. But will any of our politicians adopt them? No, they're too simplistic. They don't buy votes in wavering congressional districts. They don't result in new government plum jobs to hand out to supporters. They won't get your name put on a new government office building in your home district. Better to just keep debating Kyoto.

The Non-Issue issues #1: Energy Independence

This is a series of posts about issues that really aren't- smokescreens that obscure things we really should be talking about. I chose energy independence first because it's one that both candidates agree on, differing only in details about how we achieve it.

This is an issue because it resonates with something visceral within us, the desire to be self sufficient. But no nation is, or can be, self sufficient. No society above the hunter-gatherer level can be. Even the Native Americans had extensive trade, with each of the First Nations producing goods expressly for trade with others. T. Boone Pickens has advertising saying that what we spend on oil is a transfer of wealth. Nonsense. It is trade, commerce. The fact that it's a consumable product doesn't make it a transfer of wealth; if that were true, you're transferring wealth every time you buy a loaf of bread.

Energy independence is not in America's best foreign policy interest. To hear the candidates talk, you'd think that all our oil is bought from the middle east; but according to the Department of Energy , only 20% comes from the Persian Gulf- and almost all of that from Saudi Arabia and Iraq. As to Iraq, after all that's happened, we should be buying our oil from them. Saudi Arabia is an ally- the only one there that will allow military bases and the launching of strikes from their soil. They have voted with us in the UN, and for us within OPEC. Almost all the rest of our imported oil comes from Canada and Mexico. Cutting off that trade makes no sense- it's a supply that won't be embargoed in case of war, and buys a lot of goodwill as well. I can't see that it's in America's best interest to drive them into bed with China in the search for a new customer.

It is not in America's best economic interest. Home grown oil will be more expensive- that's why we're buying from foreign countries in the first place. And don't think better cars will make up for it; completely discounting gasoline, we use five million barrels a day in industry- for plastics, synthetic materials of all kinds, solvents, even medicines. So many things are made from oil that chemists say it's a shame to burn it as fuel. Windmills and corn alcohol cannot replace it for these duties- drastically increased oil prices mean every product you buy will increase in price. It would be insane to pay more than we have to for these petroleum products just from xenophobia.

Yes, synthetic fuels should be developed- to address air pollution and Global Warming. But doing that will not eliminate our need for imported oil, and both parties know that. The attempt to achieve independence for it's own sake will cost a fantastic amount of money, with the only benefit being political, and both parties know it. Don't let them off the hook as to CLEAN energy; we need to know what they're going to do about that. But don't let either candidate or T. Boone Pickens deflect the issue by talking about "Transfers of wealth to them thar Aye-rabs", either.

Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth?

Is the question raised by Brad Templeton in an article using data from the US Departments of Energy and Transportation. The answer- depending on where you are, of course- is sometimes yes!

He is not arguing against using existing mass transit systems, but for considering the numbers for future construction. In many instances, it may be better to encourage responsible personal transportation. I have long thought this, and my recent trips to Europe confirmed it- the problem is not whether one drives, but what and how.
CC's SmartCar would be at least a mid-size car in many European cities. In Italy I saw many, many vehicles I would call a "crossover" type; not a cross between a car and an SUV, as we would use the word here, but rather a cross between a faired scooter and a single seat car- like this one Some of them even had cute little pickup beds for delivery duties. Most all of them got northwards of 50 MPG, often quite a ways north; 60-80 MPG for some. None of them would be legal here.

Why? Because it's claimed they aren't safe- and yet, the accident injury and death rates are no higher there than here. Why? Because these are town cars; they are driven where geography and traffic conditions are such that you aren't going fast enough to have a high-impact accident. They don't have to be able to survive a 60 MPH accident with a Cadillac because the average accident would be 20 MPH with a pedestrian or another scooter- and even those accidents are less likely because such lightweight vehicles stop faster and maneuver better.

We have special licenses for Ultralight and Sports airplanes, as long as they don't try to mix it up at the big boy airports. We have special licenses for scooters and mopeds, as long as you don't try to take them on the highways. But we have no such provisions to allow micro-cars. Here in Indiana one town passed an ordinance permitting people to take their electric golf carts on city streets to the corner store, and the State Police swooped in and busted everybody, saying that only the State and Feds could make laws about cars. An appeal is pending, but there is little chance of them prevailing. In today's environment, this makes no sense.

We need a national law to provide for micro-sized town cars. For millions of Americans, a four-wheeled scooter would do us for getting to work and the store- 90% of our travel. This would also make electric vehicles practical overnight; without carrying those 5MPH bumpers, airbags, steel I beams, etc., they would be light enough for existing technologies to be competitive- as in the golf carts mentioned above. Downtown parking? I saw Italians comfortably parking three of them sideways in a single standard parking place, or one "regular" small car and one micro-car . For that odd long distance trip, you can rent a larger car- you'll still come out way ahead in the long run. Would Americans buy such cars? Notice that during the muscle-car years before the gas crisis, the Volkswagen Beetle was a best seller.

The $300 million challenge

proposed by Senator McCain for the development of a better battery for electric cars would be a waste of tax dollars, because the battery is not the limiting factor for electric cars.

What do I mean? Suppose there were a battery that was the size of a pack of cigarettes, held enough power for a family of four to travel 500 miles, was non-flammable, non-toxic, biodegradable, and cost $0.29 to manufacture- it still wouldn’t make the electric car viable. Why? Because the battery has to be recharged- and we simply don’t have the electrical capacity to do it.

Look- a gallon of gas is equal to 36.6 kw/hrs. We go through 400 million gallons of gas a day. That equals 14.6 gigawatt/hrs/day. We generate 4 million gigawatt/hrs per year... divided by 365, that makes 11 gigawatt/hrs/day. If we did nothing but recharge our cars every day, we’d still have only 2/3 the electrical capacity needed. Even if you assume vast improvements in efficiency for the electric car, we still can’t generate even a fraction of the electricity needed for electric cars. Heck, we can’t even generate enough electricity to avoid rolling brownouts on really hot days as is.

McCain was on a better track when he proposed building 45 nuclear power plants by 2030- the only thing wrong with that was its timidity. We need 400 more nuclear power plants, not 45. France gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear- we only get 20%. If we got 80% of our power from nuclear, we’d cut our carbon footprint far, far below Kyoto standards... if we doubled that we could then have our electric cars as well, and not only be independent of foreign oil, but take our carbon emissions back to 1890 levels, not 1990.

If anyone can tell me why it wouldn’t work, I’d love to hear it.

Energy breakthrough

"New Method Rapidly Produces Low-Cost Biofuels From Wood, Grass" is the headline of an article in Energy Daily ,describing a revolutionary new method for making biofuels, or "green gasoline," from wood or grasses, a process that would be much less expensive than conventional gasoline or ethanol made from corn. Even if you double the most pessimistic of their cost estimates, this new biofuel would still be less than we're paying for gasoline today. We could be energy independent as quickly as we can build the new type of stills!