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"Renewable Resources"
As top environmental scientists and diplomats gather to discuss the rampant and accelerating depletion of plant and animal species, a top U.N. official says the current trend-lines governing human civilization are “destroying life on Earth”. As more of the world’s vital rivers (the Yangtze, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges, the Colorado, the Nile, to name a few) run dry for part of the year, tributaries and arable land are drying up, and plant and animal species are going extinct at record rates.
That’s what’s at stake in this debate. We can go back to the failed energy policies that profited the oil companies but weakened our country. We can go back to the days when promising industries got set up overseas. Or we can go after new jobs in growing industries. And we can spur innovation and help make our economy more competitive. We know the choice that’s right for America. We need to do what we’ve always done – put our ingenuity and can do spirit to work to fight for a brighter future.
Whenever legislation to price carbon starts to gain traction, the fossil fuel industry trots out this talking point: “It will kill jobs and ruin the economy.” In this paper, however, HotSpring Network founder and Citizens Climate Lobby volunteer Joseph Robertson ties together numerous reports and case studies to present a different picture, one in which the transition to clean energy will produce new jobs and provide a stimulus to the economy.
Solar power is one of the most promising and unpredictable forms of clean energy, because light and heat are so diverse in their effects and so fundamental to our interactions with energy. Innovations in harvesting solar power have come fast and furious over the last decade, with miniaturization to the nanoscale of light-sensitive particles able to capture solar energy. Now, a Norwegian company has developed a system with “metal nanoparticles embedded in a transparent composite matrix that can be easily sprayed on”.
While BP’s CEO has been relieved of his post and replaced with an American, the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is now in its 100th day. While BP’s clean-up operation is proudly declaring it “cannot find” more than a few barrels of oil to skim, reports from the Gulf suggest the mass of the oil is now floating under the surface and dispersed at the molecular level.
Carl Safina’s detailed TED talk on the fate of the Gulf of Mexico explores some of the unseen victims and impacts of the BP oil spill. He demonstrates how dispersants have made the spreading oil slick into an unrecoverable mess that is too pervasive and too blended to be cleaned. Fresh from a visit to the Gulf, Safina explains that the ongoing environmental disaster is building in severe biological trauma to the ecosystem of the entire hemisphere.
Professor Paul Ehrlich —of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences— says waste generated by human consumption of energy and industrial processes is the single greatest brake on human development; energy is abundant, but there is not enough absorption capacity in nature to safely continue generating waste from energy consumption.
Switzerland-based Solar Impulse has achieved the first-ever 24-hour solar-powered flight, flying both night and day on solar power alone. World Radio Switzerland reported “History is Made: Solar Plane Makes it through Night”, and the first manned nighttime solar flight is a major technological achievement. The plane was flying, as company partners and engineers have said, at the limits of the technology.
Bracken Hendricks, from the Center for American Progress, discusses the national project to build a clean-electricity “smart grid” for the United States. The first component is “a large-scale, multi-state, high-voltage transmission infrastructure” to deliver electricity from clean-electricity generation sources (like wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal steam wells), with the second key feature being a smart grid that connects consumers to the wider transmission infrastructure, so homes and businesses can also serve as clean energy generation sources, feeding power back to the grid efficiently and reducing electricity costs.
Solar Impulse, a revolutionary aerospace engineering project based in Switzerland, is closing in on the technological readiness to stage the world’s first ever night-time flight of a zero-fuel, solar-only airplane. On the aircraft’s third full flight, the design team was looking at “the expansion of the flying envelope of the airplane, which is to fly faster, to fly at low speed, to fly at greater bank angle”, in order to understand the behavioral mechanics of the airplane and to know where improvements can be made that will allow for anywhere-anytime, night-or-day solar-powered flight.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) this week called for a move toward building consensus for a scaled back version of the climate legislation pending in the United States Senate. Two possible models, given the nature of the Kerry-Lieberman proposal, as written, would be to either establish at the federal level the kind of cooperative emissions reduction strategy already adopted by a coalition of states across the northeast or a limit on total carbon emissions from power plants only.
The Citizens Climate Lobby is a national non-partisan, non-profit organization, working to organize citizen volunteers, by state, county or Congressional district, to lobby elected officials for a strong emissions reduction plan that will prevent catastrophic climate change and speed the transition to clean energy. On June 22 and 23, the CCL team took its message to Capitol Hill, meeting with 45 different members of Congress, or their energy and climate staff, in both the House and the Senate.
There is nothing ideological about the issue of renewable energy resources. Proponents tend to care about the health of the natural environment, which motivates their wish to see renewables replace high-polluting resources like oil and coal, but the technologies, the fact of their economic viability and their usefulness for society at large, are not in any way a matter of ideology.
The Sandia National Laboratories have achieved a landmark breakthrough in solar-voltaic power-generation technology. The snowflake-like “solar glitter” uses 100 times less material to produce the same amount of electricity as today’s standard 6-inch square solar cells. This achievement of ultra-miniaturization now has the potential to move solar-voltaic power generation to the forefront of the clean energy revolution, and help speed the transition away from carbon-based combustible fuels.
The quest for the most fuel-efficient vehicles has entered a new phase, with major government private-sector investment in research and development for industrial-scale commercial production of a new class of gas-electric hybrid vehicles and EVs (all-electric cars). Swiss-based Solar Impulse is building the world’s first 100% solar-powered airplane, an achievement that will revolutionize the travel, industrial production, transport and fuel sectors.
One day, recently, I saw a fire-engine, crawling its way through a stop light, sirens blaring, hulking its way to provide the noble service of putting out someone’s fire or performing some other rescue operation. It was pouring a dark grey exhaust from one side, looking shiny new and well cared for, but obviously lacking advanced exhaust filtering or clean-energy drive technologies.
In a tucked-away corner of the New Zealand coastline, a couple, both architects, Lance and Nicola Herbst, have designed a self-sustaining “off-the-grid” home that lends flavor and mood to everyday living. Their cedar-clad bungalow is designed to interact with the natural environment and optimize its use of resources, such as energy, water and nutrients.
Pres. Barack Obama has proposed a national high-speed rail program that would develop eight to ten regions for high-speed rail (currently, only the so-called northeast corridor, running from Washington, DC, to Boston, through Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, has a regular high-speed service), as part of a phased-in long-term economic recovery plan. The rail project comes into play also as part of Obama’s plans for a comprehensive energy-sector overhaul, aimed at reducing carbon emissions.
The Labour party government of the United Kingdom has announced plans to establish an aggressive overhaul of national energy markets, shifting to 40% low-carbon energy sourcing, across all industries, by 2020. The energy secretary, Ed Milliband, will be given control of allocation of electricity across the energy grid, in an effort to speed the green-energy revolution to allow the UK to meet its legally-binding agreed emissions cuts of 34% by 2020.
Swiss-based Solar Impulse unveiled this month the first ever 100% solar-powered airplane with global reach. The HB-SIA is the culmination of six years of daring research and hard work. The aim of Solar Impulse is to demonstrate the ability of solar power to enable a plane to fly around the world with no combustible fuel.
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