Currently viewing the tag: "renewables"
We need a system of cooperative public-private infrastructure financing, a national infrastructure bank. But we also need to use that fabric of cooperative investment and output to foster specific areas of major improvement to our national economy. The model could be replicated across the world, but the US is uniquely positioned to deploy this [...]
The fossil fuel saturation problem, known to states like Texas as an ongoing “energy emergency”, means we need to be actively searching not only for alternative fuels, but also for investment opportunities where we can build in drivers of more generalized prosperity, i.e. a restored and strengthened middle class, and accelerating returns in productive capacity.
At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we held the first of our series of Climate Talks, to explore with more depth and more detail some of the intricacies of the climate crisis, including social, philosophical and political, dynamics, and the way we frame our perception of global-scale phenomena. It was a construtive conversation, from four points of view, each of which was able to benefit from a kinship of interest, so that whether we were discussion environmental justice, political solidarity, economics and collaborative politics or Villanova’s ongoing commitment to reducing its carbon footprint, there were ways to deepen and broaden our understanding of each facet of the problem from each of the different perspectives.
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.
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.
Pres. Obama addressed the nation last night from the Oval Office, on the tragedy unfolding across the Gulf of Mexico, and issued an impassioned call for the entire nation to rally to the cause of breaking its “addiction to fossil fuels”. The president’s vision goes beyond the question of “energy independence”, which tends to favor expanded offshore drilling, to a push for a comprehensive transition to clean, renewable sources of energy and the phasing out of carbon-based fuels.
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.
The new stadium built for the World Games 2009, located in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung City, is being hailed as a landmark example of environmentally friendly building design. The stadium is rimmed with a partial canope roof that trails off into the surrounding promenade and is clad in 8,844 solar-voltaic panels, to generate electricity. The solar complex [...]
Pres. Barack Obama today visited the Interior Dept., noting it was once called in jest “the Department of Everything Else”, a government agency with responsibility for nearly 1/5 of the entire land area of the United States. He professed his intention to task the Interior Dept. with taking major steps to help build green infrastructure for an energy economy based on solar-voltaic and wind-turbine-generated energy.
Each information transaction, sometimes as exemplary, sometimes as single element added to a sweeping aggregate of historical sway, is a precedent, which can motivate, influence or redirect the push of future happenstance. And, we must take note, every transaction involving matter or energy contains information, traces of a history of its coming into being, and generates a “footprint”, a trace of its appearance and its transition into something beyond the transactional moment.
At a time when major U.S. companies are announcing job layoffs almost daily, the renewable energy industry is hiring new workers every day to build wind farms, install rooftop solar arrays, and build solar thermal and geothermal power plants. The output of industrial firms that manufacture the equipment for these energy facilities is expanding by well over 30 percent a year. These investments both create jobs and help prevent climate change from spiraling out of control.
The issue is not, as so many would like to believe, whether carbon-based fuels are affordable to the end-user. They are not. The total costs per gallon of gasoline are estimated at more than $11, covered by government subsidies, public-private research funding, tax incentives, military spending, public health funding, and funds devoted to cleaning up the ill effects of pollution. Capitalist markets need not be dependent on unsustainable excesses in resource use, but we are in the current global economic crunch, because they have been.
The Hot Spring is forming an ongoing research community project to develop zero-combustion energy sourcing technologies. The first phase of the project entails filling in the conceptual space of the zero-combustion paradigm for energy generation. Next, we propose thinking toward the “jump generation” technologies, which emerge from advances still not in practical application, but which will enable us to vastly expand the energy-productivity of our resource base.
President-elect Barack Obama said yesterday in his weekly radio address —now also a video staple on YouTube— he has already tasked his economic team “to come up with an economic recovery plan that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January 2011″. Obama has long pledged he would incentivize development of a green-energy economy, as a response to the imperatives of economic sustainability, job-creation and reduced environmental impact. The president-elect added that “it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job-creation”, ostensibly a first building-block in what may be a broader economic recovery, which he hopes will be in full swing before the end of his first term.
China is choking under a thick covering of contaminants produced from burning carbon-based fuels for industrial production, power-generation, and transport. Environmental degradation is so rampant that much of the northwest of the country is being lost to rapidly expanding deserts. And desertification threatens the already shaky balance between China’s available arable land and its skyrocketing demand for cheap food. Policy makers and market theorists in China and abroad should be thinking about whether that desert can produce something to help China escape the mounting environmental and public health cataclysm.
The state of Texas has approved a major new project to build transmission lines for wind power, with funding in the amount of $4.93 billion. Already the national leader with 5,300 megawatts of installed wind-power generating capacity, Texas will, when the infrastructure development is completed in 2013, have more wind-energy capacity than Germany presently does.The project is a major step toward freeing the American economy from high-contaminant power generation.
As gasoline prices were escalating seemingly without hope of stalling or coming down, due to all-time record oil prices, and in the context of a severely weakened consumer economy, we found ourselves confronted with a major challenge to the basic assumptions of the dynamics of our economy. We have seen, in just one [...]
With gasoline prices at record highs, and the strain on a weak American economy already at an extreme, Pres. Bush is pushing Congress to hold an “up-or-down vote” on renewed exploration of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) before its August recess. Opponents protest that none of any oil found there would be available for production for 10 to 15 years, and the OCS plan is an attempt to deliver oil firms an otherwise unjustifiable gift, taking advantage of the pressurized situation of exorbitant prices.
Food prices are skyrocketing. Initially, many put the blame on the rising demand of biofuels in the transport sector, but bio-ethanol is far from the only thing driving up food prices. New diets, soaring oil prices and climate change are all in the complex soup of explanations behind the recent development putting food beyond the reach of the planet’s poor.
The former vice president of the United States, Al Gore, yesterday announced an ambitious goal, which he says the nation can meet, of transitioning its entire domestic energy production to clean resources by 2018. The speech marks a major moment in the process of transition to the green technology boom, which will be the next step in the ongoing economic development of the United States and the world. Gore, however, warned that failing to meet the challenge to date means “the United States of America as we know it is at risk”.
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