WastedEnergy

Topics on Energy, Resources, Waste and Culture

Archive for March, 2011

This Is YOUR Life

Posted by wastedenergy on March 31, 2011

I can’t decide what annoys me more: conservative dinosaurs whose ideological blinders prevent them from seeing the plain facts, or sniveling liberals who whine that we just can’t do what needs to be done because our side is losing. I say, it’s about time you, personally, took matters into your own hands. You can’t keep delgating the important issues to people like me. Unless we ALL start to live sustainably, it means nothing at all if people like me have a negative carbon footprint and actually think about the resources we use.

Let’s start with the Republicans, since they are the easy targets. Conservatives love to talk about the Ten Commandments, never mind their leaders’ proclivity toward adultery and mass murder through reversal of environmental protections, but they of course completely ignore the Zeroeth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Waste Energy. These guys like to think everything belongs to them; not even to their children, mind you, since they are throwing their inheritance in the form of the entire planet into the trash heap, but themselves, now. They want to consume as much as possible, right now, as if no force in the universe could ever be stronger than their own personal power. But I can assure you that if you kill too many chickens today, you’ll have no eggs tomorrow, and then you’ll starve to death. Also, if you don’t pay the people who guard you, and you revoke their right to collectively  bargain for a decent standard of living, don’t be surprised if one of them shanks you in your sleep. That’s about all I have for them. They’ll get their karma, the universe will see to that.

Now, the whiny bleeding heart liberals who pretend to agree with things I say but who claim they don’t have time for politics. I’m saving my best fire for last this time, just for them. Bending over will get you nowhere, I assure you. And you don’t negotiate with with eco-terrorists, so tell Boehner and his crew of killers where they can stick it instead of sticking your head back in the sand and obsessing over the next episode of Glee. The next time someone tells you there’s no way our side can win, you give them the stinkeye, just like you would give a Republican in an SUV blowing vile poison smoke in your face. You don’t believe in taking more than your fair share, so why would you stand by idly while others do the same? We need, desperately, a revolution in not just how we use, but how we even think about, energy and natural resources, so what on Earth could you be doing thinking it is OK to delegate the responsibility for changing minds to a handful of activists? You know, I reach maybe 100 people per day on this blog, and that just won’t cut it. But if you tell a friend to tell a friend, then maybe, just mabye, we’ll start getting somewhere. Maybe we’ll even win. But you must first realize the stakes: if the dinosaurs have their way, then we are surely already living in the Land of the Lost. Please, go forth now, and make it count.

“We are in the midst of a slow-motion train wreck, and all we can manage to discuss is the quality of the food in the dining car.” – Richard Heinberg

Welcome to WastedEnergy. If this is your first time reading, you HAVE to fight.

Posted in Energy Consumption | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Doctor Doom’s Lobotomy

Posted by wastedenergy on March 28, 2011

There are two ways to live in this world: the clean, efficient, sustainable way, and the dirty, low-net-energy, collapsitarian way. Which path is America and the world on right now?

If you’ve ever stood behind a truck or walked by a power plant, oil refinery, or shipyard, you know the answer already. There really is nothing quite like the smell of bunker fuel in the morning to get all the senses burning and your sense of righteous indignation at the chaotic forces of greed at work in the world today all fired up. Such experiences fuel a desire to seek out the culprits ultimately responsible for polluting not just the air, but also the airwaves, with dirty industrial byproducts, nasty messaging that seeks to advance an agenda of pure selfishness as virtue, and filthy political tricks that aim to disguise vested interests as legitimate grassroots activism.

Whence does such mischief arise? The answer, my friends, is quite simple: those with skin in the current game want to protect their own interests over those of humanity, by preventing the product they sell from being replaced with something newer, better, and far cleaner. It really is just that simple. So I’ve done my homework, I’ve pondered the message, and I’ve meditated on what is happening at great length, and I’ve finally made up my mind. I know exactly where to point the finger now, and just how to call them out: THESE are the droids you were looking for.

EVERYTHING they know is WRONG.

Orders of magnitude matter when it comes to sinning. I have referred on occasion to David and Charles Koch as “the Hitlers of our time,” not simply to make a rhetorical point vis-a-vis Godwin, but as a way of conveying the dire seriousness of the message that needs delivered to the people. If you didn’t know already, these guys have your number, and that of almost everyone else on the planet, but I have theirs too as it happens, and their area code is 666.

A little background, first, for the uninitiated: David and Charles Koch are the brains behind Koch Industries, aka the Kochtopus, a conglomerate mainly involved in the oil refining business, but also with tentacles deep in the paper and pulp industry, taking over formerly publicly owned utilities, and lobbying to reduce or even eliminate the authority of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They would rather make a quick dime than worry about the medical bills piling up for their neighbors, but what matters even more than their direct pollution (which is vast) is that they seek to convert others to their cause, and they are extremely aggressive in doing so.

Have you ever heard of a little “movement” called the Tea Party? Not the original one in Boston, mind you, but the one that rolled through Washington a few months ago. Well, that was their doing in no small part, thanks to such Koch-money-funded organizations and “philanthropic” activities as Americans for Prosperity, the Reason Foundation (yes, the publisher of Reason Magazine), the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Institute, the David Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, hired hands to edit Wikipedia entries, and countless other propaganda mills cleverly disguised, to the untrained eye, as the doing of ordinary citizens just like you and me. They outdo even Exxon for funding junk science to deny the plain facts behind global warming, they want us all to be as addicted to oil and other dirty products as much as possible so they can squeeze us for every last penny we have, and they will stop at nothing to get their way. Let’s not be confused: these billionaires, they are the ones with the keys to the car that is our democratic republic, not you and me the average voter, and not only do they not know how to drive, but they are pushing us straight off a cliff called Peak Oil.

What I wonder most is this: how can these people not realize what they are doing, not only to everyone else, but to themselves as well, by preventing humanity from embracing the clean energy technologies of tomorrow, like wind, wave, and solar power, and by seeking to delay indefinitely the construction of our next generation of sustainable electric railroads that are our last best hope to cure our society’s oil addiction? How are they able to sleep at night knowing the blood of millions is already on their hands, and that should present climate change and oil dependence trends continue unabated, maybe even the blood of billions will be as well? Islands and glaciers are sinking into the sea, which is filling up with acid, killing off the coral reefs and plankton that form the basis for the Earth’s entire food chain, and in the meantime they continue to make us all sick by pouring poison into the skies, rivers, and soil. We are all eating Koch Industries’ detritus, so make sure you transmute that energy into something useful that will help take them down the next time you chow down on some oil-soaked shrimp.

Unlike certain others who seem to have far too much time on their hands and shall remain nameless, I do not expect David and Chuckie themselves to show up in this space to defend themselves, nor even to send their myriad foot soldiers this way to spew vile poison in the comment area on their behalf. I am not even on their radar; to them, I am less than nobody. But that works to our advantage: they are on your radar screen now, and mine too, and now you have their number as well. So now, what are we waiting for? Let’s kick some oily booty and even take some names too while we’re at it.

Posted in Climate Change, Solid Waste, The Ether | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

not on the payroll

Posted by wastedenergy on March 10, 2011

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The Power of a Thousand Suns

Posted by wastedenergy on March 8, 2011

The Power of Ultracapacitors

For the math wizards out there, one of the most promising areas of research in today’s clean energy sector is the ultracapacitor. This novel battery-like machine is capable of charging and discharging at many times the rate of even the most advanced batteries today, and with the advance of nanomanufacturing and advanced nanomaterials, it is possible that they could even store more energy as well.

Image Source: Energy Information Administration

First, a brief explanation of the concept: an ultracapacitor is an energy storage technology that has been around for a couple of decades, but whose potential has only begun to be realized, let alone exploited. It stores electrical energy, but the idea is very different from a conventional battery: rather than storing the charge as chemical potential energy, charge is captured as it sits along a surface area, usually carbon nanotubes or some other nanomaterial such as crumpled graphene. Since an electron occupies essentially no volume, it is able to lie flat along the surface, and so the greater the interior surface area of the ultracapacitor cell, the more charge is able to be stored. Because the exploitable area is based on two dimensions but is stored inside a body built in three dimensions, there is no theoretical limit to the amount of charge that can be stored in a cell of a given volume; the only limit is a practical one, related to how much accessible surface area we can create using the materials available to us and the amount of energy available to be stored in this way.

Current batteries have higher energy densities than today’s ultracapacitors, but since lithium-ion batteries and other advanced battery chemistries are unable to charge at the power density needed for certain applications such as electric bus service, trams, and advanced high-speed rail systems, ultracaps are already being used to replace batteries for these as well as other energy storage systems such as those in hybrid vehicles. Research being conducted at MIT and Argonne National Laboratory is rapidly improving the materials science behind ultracapacitors, and they could easily play a major role in solving the energy storage dilemma and saving humanity from fossil fuel addiction.

Better manufacturing techniques, improved technological concepts and materials, and economies of scale have the potential to dramatically reduce down the cost and improve the performance of such devices, even by orders of magnitude. They can also be used them to store energy from home-scale solar energy production systems as well as the electric grid, to save up energy for when solar, wind, and wave power are unavailable or for when solid or liquid fuel shortages emerge. Altogether, given the proper level of engineering, ultracapacitors can offer tremendous potential, and they beckon examination from those interested in offering technological aids to help solve humanity’s energy crisis.

Posted in Energy Production | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

fracktron

Posted by wastedenergy on March 8, 2011

Posted in Solid Waste | Leave a Comment »

One for a Rainy Day

Posted by wastedenergy on March 7, 2011

OK, so, suppose you’ve got no sunshine, the wind’s not blowing, your battery is blown out, your ultracaps are busted, you’ve got no trashy fuel left to burn, and for some reason even your geothermal flux capacitor is broken, but you still need some energy. What else are we supposed to do?

A lot of people will try and tell you the only way to balance things out is with natural gas. Well, that might not always be the worst idea in the world, but first check thyself, forst you wreck thyself. Should we really be using natural gas as the first option, as so many people seem to be suggesting? Is it really going to help us transition to renewable energy? I find the proposition dubious, as you probably know by now. Moreover, natural gas is too valuable to be wasting trying to replace coal and oil. We might actually need it for those moments when the lights all but go out.

And, it’s not exactly as clean as some folks might be trying to tell you, either.

Well, we sure fracked that one up.

So, what can we do to cut these guys down to a more appropriate size?

Let me give you my thoughts on a big part of the answer.

Hydropower. Like trashpower, it’s one of those things that gets trashed a lot by otherwise well-intentioned environmentalists. Don’t get me wrong: there’s been many an ecosystem that’s been wrecked before being checked by huge dams. But just like with waste-to-energy, with better living through technology, we can not only fix the problems that were making it dirty before, we can also make it a powerful ally in our quest to rid the world of dirty energy. But what do I mean by that exactly?

Hydropower is good for many things, first of which is providing a steady lightening of the load for when your other sources of lightning power won’t fire.  Let’s have a quick look at the Netherlands as an example. They know how to do it up proper, when it comes to both liquid and gas (sidebar: they also recycle half their trash, and burn the other half – for energy). First, they know how to save their gas for when the time is right. Compare them to Britain, which Thatcherized its gas industry and is now facing an energy crisis of epic proportions that might be fixable only with a nuclear fix, at least in the short term. I still have faith that they’ll get the offshore wind and wave power figured out, though – they have some of the best resources in the world, once they figure out how to tap into them. The Netherlands, on the other hand, owns the largest gas field in the North Sea, the largest in Europe even, instead of letting it own them via corporate control. The country has long had a penchant for demanding individual sacrifice for the greater good, though not so much that the State sucks all the flavor out of life. They’ve done a good job of conserving it and of actually tapping into the smaller, scattered fields first, so as to save the best for last. Eat your heart out, Bakken Shale and Kochheads everywhere.

Not only that, but they’re actually finding more of it all the time. The good stuff, too – no fracking required. What can I say, the Dutch know how it’s done. Keep burning that eternal flame.

But enough fire for now - let’s get to the water part.

Water, water, everywhere. We’re going to get wet. Lest you think those crazy Dutch were only about the windmills, let me be blunt with you: they know how to roll with the tides as well, and also a little thing about rolling on a river. They may be living in Flatland, but they’ve still got quite a bit of hydropower going on in their own little world too. And monster dams big enough to block out the sun aren’t the only way of doing things either: if you’ve never heard of microhydro, well, it’s time for you to get crackin’ and frackin’ on a little bit of your OWN research. Talk about untapped potential!

That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t something to say about big hydro as well, since sometimes, as she said, you better go big or go home. Just look at what America’s Hat has to offer up, if we can only manage to get some transmission lines past those confounded nimbies. Power to the people, anyone?

Think classic was the only way I could do it? Here’s a little new wave that might be up your alley, and I’m not talking wave power, although that’s great too. Inspect this gadget, and I’m willing to bet you’ll go WOWZERS, or possibly even YAKAWOW!!! The dreaded Dr. Koch has got nothing on this one. I’m talking, of course, about the variable speed water turbine. We’ve been fangling this one for a while, but it’s ready to roll out now. You see, one of the problems that tends to arise is when the water level falls, and the pressure drops out. The solution? Add a turbine that can go at any speed and still pump out juice. Inconsistent generator speed got you down? All it takes is an extra flux capacitor to smooth out the output a little bit. So simple, you can even do it yourself.

Hey, hipster techno fans out there, I got the news: this time, we’re keeping the lights on. Wouldn’t want to miss out on that quadruple rainbow, now, would ya? As for me, I’m always on, even when I’m out cold. Five stars. Heads up. Look out below. Shoot past the moon, reach for the stars. Forget the rivers you thought you knew, try a waterfall instead. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.

I HAVE THE POWER OF A THOUSAND SUNS!!!!!!!!!!

Posted in Energy Production, The Ether, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Slice and Dice

Posted by wastedenergy on March 5, 2011

This is my diss track. Scrubs, you see, get no love from me. None whatsoever. Not a drop. Not even once. No energy wasted, and once I’m done with this one, the pigeons will be squirming in their borrowed shoes, and no further diss will be necessary.

How many Dicks does it take to frack to the center of the earth and make it pop? Answer: only one, and he used to be the CEO of a little company called Halliburton. These same bad boys who brought you boys back in body bags and $20 canned meals not fit for dog food not only cemented BP’s bad drill job in place to make the history books, but also invented a little process called fracking, you see. Lest you think they were coming along with a brand new ride, as so boldly pronounced by Exxon and their ilk, they invented it in 1947. That was before we even invented the hydrogen bomb. Talk about primitive!

While Republicons and Decepticrats were both dicking around trying to figure out how to make a quick buck for the private stash, the good people of America were paying the true price for their shenanigans: once again, oil in the water, in this case countless millions upon millions of gallons of the freshest stuff instead of fire on the salty seas. Well, what’s a headache and a few bloody noses here and there? A small price to pay for cheap natural gas, right? Well, not so much on that cheap part. ‘Cause it wasn’t just the good Americans who paid that price: I got news for you tea party types, there’s more than one way for a cat to catch a mouse. And by that, I mean there’s more than one way to subsidize drilling: environmental externalities aside, it was the shareholders who were paying that two or three times the price on the futures market for each thousand cubic feet. Fiscal conservatives? Hardly, these guys have a mountain of debt all the way to the Kingdom Come they’ll be sending us all to climb on our own two feet if they have their way.

Speaking of which: did you know these guys want to cut funding for the next-generation energy technologies we need to save our skin? Yes, that’s right, apparently the future is a low hanging fruit to some, and they don’t mind picking it right off the tree before it’s even gotten to its full size, let alone ripened. Apparently, anything that slices even a dollar off the profit margin of Koch Industries is considered bad for America. Well, it’s certainly bad for general motoring, that much we know without a doubt. The conspiracy to which I refer, of course, is the attempt to de-fund the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This would be roughly the equivalent of ending the Space Program at Mercury.  We may be abusing plastic like it’s our job, but remember that if it weren’t for public sector investment in science and technology, we’d never have the stuff in the first place, and I don’t just mean trashy bags, but the also what lets me tell you this over the tubes right at this very moment. Let’s hope these boys get caught Red-handed just like the CIA with their friends in the Taliban and left and right, but mostly Right, all over South America. Talk about Forbidden Fruit! (Sidebar: do I even dare mention the extraterrestrials? Nah, save that one for another day. First things first.)

And if that wasn’t enough, they dare not touch those Red State agricultural subsidies either, oh, no sir! When it comes to pretending to be pound-wise, these guys have even the old Reagan, Reagan II, and Reagan III and IV administrations beat! Oh yeah, I went there, and I’ll even go a step further: everyone’s beloved Saint Reagan was even worse than Bush II. Sure, he may have had the gift of gab, but just because a pigeon can cluck doesn’t mean he has anything to say. His vision for America included painting red stripes right over the blue background for the stars, and I don’t mean a smooth brew from Jamaica: we’re talking red and white bottles of high fructose chemical poison processed from the fruits of God’s Green Earth. If only we had the foresight to support real green agriculture, we might be eating a lot more fruits and vegetables, but corporate criminals get first dibs when it comes to government handouts, so it’s not just the price of wheat going up these days, but cabbage and tomatoes too. Shrub, grandchild of the famous friend of fascists, may have taken it to the next level in dropping a cool trillion on fruitless wars in the Mideast, but his ideological predecessor and the source of his worst Dicks and Donnies was the one who set the stage. Reagan invented neoconservatism, and you just can’t top that when it comes to Worst President Ever.

Last, but not least, I’m willing to bet some private waste management contractor has some skin in the game when it comes to the recent dicing of the Green the Capitol initiative. And de-funding the EPA, whose total budget amounts to a mere handful of billions, isn’t exactly the best way to balance the budget. Remember, not every office has its head in the sand like the one that lets the haters keep hating on waste-to-energy so much: these are the folks who make sure our rivers don’t catch on fire and air doesn’t contain enough smoky soot to choke a camel. Next time you need to pull off a balancing act, try using your head instead.

Look at that, I even managed to hit all seven categories, and then some. Eat your heart out, double rainbow, I got sixteen ways ’til Sunday to call out a Scrub and make him run crying back to the hole he came from! Speaking of which, it might be time to return to our ongoing discussion soon. But ah, as the Good Book says (and a little bird or two as well): to everything, there is a season. How I do love Spring!

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, The Ether, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Mislead By Example

Posted by wastedenergy on March 2, 2011

Pro Tip for all those wannabe budget slashers out there: Kimchi is not a low-hanging fruit, even if you can’t pronounce it (pro tip #2: it’s pronounced how it’s spelled, and it’s easier to figure out than your last name, Mr. You-know-who-you-are).

“Not helping my buddies in the oil business makes me sad.”

In case you missed it, the Houseteria now looks a lot different from how it did during your last visit. Gone are the recycled paper takeout trays and biodegradable eco-plastic cups and utensils, the myriad eye-catching compostables and recyclables receptacles to grab both your attention and your waste product. In their place now stands a mountain of garbage-to-be, in the form of styrofoam cups and Teabaggers.

What more is there to say, really?

I know, it all amounts to peanuts in the end. But don’t you think our Hill of beans should hold up their end of the bargain?

 

This post brought to you by:

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Energy Consumption, Solid Waste | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.