Following electric utility deregulation in the 1970s, the jobs of generating electricity, transmitting it over long distances, and distributing it around localized regions have increasingly been done by different entities.
This is happening now, outside of the shift toward alternative energy, but as we generate electricity using more renewable resources–as generation becomes increasingly distributed, to match the locations of inherently local sources of energy–that trend will only accelerate. The day may come when no electric utility generates anything. Instead, it might simply coordinate the movement of electricity between generators and customers. Rather than making and selling electricity, utilities like the municipal utility in Gainesville, Florida, could someday find itself selling the service of making sure that all of the solar panels in town work together in a reliable way, alongside storage systems and mid-size power plants.
If there’s one lesson you should pick up from this story, it’s that alternative energy isn’t only about changing what we put in our fuel tanks or how our electricity is made. Alternative energy is going to alter entire business plans and change who we are, what our responsibilities are, and how we think about ourselves.
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Decentralization of Energy – Maggie Koerth-Baker – Technology – The Atlantic
16 AprGeorge P. Mitchell, fracking, and scientific innovation. – Slate Magazine
15 AprThe shale gas R&D projects assumed a kind of vacuum. The only criteria were technical feasibility and economic profitability, and the innovators failed to consider questions about how the technologies would play out in the real world. What is the long-term fate of the chemicals that remain underground? What do we do with the toxic mixture of fracking fluids and naturally occurring radioactive materials that flows back up the wellbore during drilling and production? How will roads handle the increase in traffic volume that results from the roughly 1,000 truck trips (hauling fracking fluids and waste water) it takes to get each well producing? What are the air quality and climate implications? Can we safely frack in places where people live? What happens when the wells run dry? Is it wise to further commit ourselves to a finite fossil resource that requires such extreme measures to extract?
Why weren’t these questions asked with the same rigor as the technical questions? It is because we have an innovation system that only asks “how to,” not “what if?” As a result, we have enormous powers to change the world and the way we live, but essentially zero capacity to guide those powers wisely or responsibly. We promote transformative research with one hand and clean up its messes with the other. And throughout we lack any clear sense about what needs transforming and why.
via George P. Mitchell, fracking, and scientific innovation. – Slate Magazine.
Open Source Permaculture — Indiegogo
15 AprTo suppor the development of a FREE permaculture resource, click the link at the bottom of this post, read all about the project, and make a contrabution.
Open Source Permaculture
What will this comprehensive resource contain? This project will fund the creation of an Urban Permaculture Guide eBook and the Open Source Permaculture Q&A Website + Wiki:
Urban Permaculture Guide – FREE eBook (circa 400 pages)
This will be the first freely available, comprehensive ebook teaching the use of permaculture in urban spaces! You will find easy to understand DIY tips that can be applied in your flat, tiny backyard, rooftop or community garden, including topics like:
* Indoor and Balcony Gardening – Permaculture Style
* Vertical Gardens
* Tree Crops and Edible Forests
* Guerilla Gardening
* School gardens
* Community Supported Agriculture
* Mushroom log cultivation
* Spiral Herb Gardens & Medicinal Herbs
* Composting and Vermi-composting
* Rainwater collection
* Micro-livestock
* Wind and Solar Energy
* Transportation
* …and much More!
This FREE eBook will also include interviews with founders of successful Urban Permaculture projects and a comprehensive list of FREE online educational resources.
The eBook will be released under a CC BY-SA license.
Open Source Permaculture Q&A Website + Wiki
With the website and wiki, you will have access to an expansive database of trusted resources and permaculture experts at your fingertips, to help resolve all of your gardening and landscaping problems. The Open Source Permaculture Website and Wiki will be cultivated by a community of experienced permaculture practitioners, allowing for a deeper understanding of permaculture and sustainability to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re just growing a tiny container garden or if you’re running a full-fledge urban farm business. Whatever your project is, Open Source Permaculture aims to provide a real, working solution.
Our apocalyptic odds – Environment – Salon.com
15 AprFor example, sustaining our growing numbers and demands depends on a regular and unlimited supply of energy—a supply that, nevertheless, is limited. Approaching its limits means that we need to develop ever more efficient technology to squeeze out the last remains of the fossil fuels from Earth, which, in turn, depends on ever larger investments. However, investors want to see their money back, which proves increasingly more difficult the closer we get to the point of depletion. They have to invest more and more, but as less fuel can be mined, the returns become less and less. Approaching the point of depletion, investors will gradually draw their money back in order to reinvest it into something more profitable: at this point, a positive feedback loop starts up; more and more investors withdraw their money, this loop destabilizing the societal system as a whole. Energy shortage will destabilize this system because energy is the main constituent of our body, our numbers, requirements, and infrastructural organization.
In fact, the decreasing trend in the energy returns on investment was already apparent in the early 1990s, a trend which continues to the present day and which may develop into the feared financial and economic positive feedback loop. Food will be more expensive to produce, leaving the poor in jeopardy. And so on.
Don’t trust corporate charity – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com
13 AprOn the surface the increased attention big business seems to be paying to general social welfare would appear to be a positive development. Major corporations go out of the way to ease the burdens of normal citizens, in the process dulling some of the harsher aspects of modern capitalism and earning for themselves PR boost. However it bears asking the question, as many good and well intentioned individuals there are sitting in the C-Suites of major companies, what would cause them to expend huge amounts of resources on pursuits which seem to have nothing to do with what their organizations are legally created to do? …
The answer lies in the reality that whatever these organizations put back into the communities in which they operate, communities which are often struggling under the weight of collapsing infrastructure, they expend far greater effort to ensure that they avoid paying their share of tax into public coffers. By avoiding taxes these companies ultimately help eliminate social services, a simulacrum of which they then provide in the form of charitable donations and other public outreach. The company keeps the funds it would’ve otherwise lost to tax and earns PR credibility for its supposed altruism, while the public loses out on the tax revenue which rightfully belongs to it
via Don’t trust corporate charity – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
Occupy Returns to Its Roots With ‘Sleepful Protests’ | The Nation
12 AprNow let’s sleep on the sidewalks outside banks, but within legal limits. No big camps, just modest sleep-ins:
The concept of sleepful protests combines Occupy’s two most powerful elements: physical occupations and the targeting of Wall Street, thereby alleviating one of the major criticisms of OWS, which was that the occupations of parks and squares is too far removed from the movement’s actual targets.
When people see Occupiers sleeping outside a bank, the natural question for them to ask is “Why this bank?” And that allows the protesters to segue into an explanation of what Occupy is and what they stand for.
via Occupy Returns to Its Roots With ‘Sleepful Protests’ | The Nation.
Why Trees Matter – NYTimes.com
12 AprTrees are dying, in large numbers; we’re killing them. But we know relatively little about the roles trees and forests play in sustaining the world. What we are learning suggests that, in killing trees, we are further endangering ourselves.
… what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.
In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.
Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral.
Renewable Energy Advances in the U.S. Despite Obstacles – NYTimes.com
11 AprThe outlook on solar is good, for now:
Many business executives, policy analysts and investors say there is a robust future for domestic solar energy distributed in medium-size arrays and on commercial and residential rooftops, especially in markets with high electricity prices or strong mandates, like Hawaii, California and much of the Northeast.
The low cost of solar panels, whose average price dropped 50 percent last year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, has helped. So have new financing methods that allow owners to lease systems long term, cutting their current electricity costs with little or no upfront investment. Last year, about 1,855 megawatts of new photovoltaic capacity was installed, according to a report by the association, more than double the 887 megawatts of the year before.
Despite having lost the program that allowed developers to recoup 30 percent of their costs as a cash grant, the solar industry is still eligible through 2016 for a tax credit to be taken over five years, making its future seem in some ways more solid than that of the wind power industry, even though it far outstrips solar already.
Wind is iffy:
Although wind has some of the same advantages, development faces a different set of challenges. Unlike solar power, which can operate efficiently on a small scale, wind projects often make economic sense only if they are huge, but they can end up generating electricity far from where it is needed, throwing up the political, logistical and parochial hurdles of streaming electrons across county and state lines.
Still, plans for enormous projects are beginning to move ahead. One such project, by Clean Line Energy, which develops high-voltage transmission lines, would create enough capacity to take 3,500 megawatts of wind power from Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota to Illinois and states to the east.
via Renewable Energy Advances in the U.S. Despite Obstacles – NYTimes.com.
Ban ‘Pure’ Speculators of Oil Futures – NYTimes.com
11 AprToday, speculators dominate the trading of oil futures. According to Congressional testimony by the commodities specialist Michael W. Masters in 2009, the oil futures markets routinely trade more than one billion barrels of oil per day. Given that the entire world produces only around 85 million actual “wet” barrels a day, this means that more than 90 percent of trading involves speculators’ exchanging “paper” barrels with one another.
Because of speculation, today’s oil prices of about $100 a barrel have become disconnected from the costs of extraction, which average $11 a barrel worldwide. Pure speculators account for as much as 40 percent of that high price, according to testimony that Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of ExxonMobil, gave to Congress last year. That estimate is bolstered by a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Gambling with economic security – Michael Lind – Salon.com
10 AprAny rational person would prefer the security of government-funded retirement and unemployment insurance to the insecurity of private retirement accounts and unemployment accounts. The truth is that Social Security and government unemployment insurance are far better deals than the universal capitalist alternatives.
In addition to being a bad deal for ordinary people, the push to increase stock market participation by the majority of Americans has had bad effects on the economy as a whole. At the root of the volatility of the global economy in the decades leading up to the crash of 2008 was an excess of global savings and too little wage-enabled consumption by ordinary people in developed and developing nations alike. This problem had many causes, including the strategy of Asian mercantilist countries of suppressing the incomes of their workers and the diversion of the gains from economic growth in the U.S. into rewards for shareholders and CEOs rather than higher wages for workers.
via Gambling with economic security – Michael Lind – Salon.com.
Truth and Traditions 