Citizen Power

What next?  My jaw dropped when I saw this thing on ABC news the other night.  It’s called the Hotelicopter.  What’s unclear is whether it’s a hotel first or a helicopter first; a joke; or just incredible excess for the filthy rich who have run out of things to throw their money at!

The buzz online is that this is an April Fool’s joke, and maybe that’s true.    ABC news didn’t mention that it was, and their story on it aired 2-3 days ago.  They reported the story as fact.  Why did people assume it was a joke?  Despite peak oil, despite high gas prices, despite global warming, people continue to build massive cars and other machines that run on fossil fuels.   If you’ve ever seen some of the most massive SUVs, they also look like jokes.

They test flew the world’s biggest airplane last year,  so I would not be terribly surprised that they would now plan to fly the world’s biggest helicopter.  I see no actual evidence that this monstrosity isn’t real.  People who are swimming in money have a peculiar talent for ignoring what’s going on around them in the world.  People starving on the streets of America and global warming nearing tipping points?   People without health care, 5 million jobs lost in the last couple of years — Who cares, let’s stay overnight in this  hotelicopter  and  fly 700 miles for the heck of it!

Even so, I have to admit it’s kind of amazing — if it is  real.

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We’ve all seen science fiction book covers that depict cityscapes of the future.  They usually include some type of flying cars or sometimes floating neighborhoods or even floating cities.  Now a form of windmill is being designed that will “float” — or be suspended high in the atmosphere, where the wind is steadily strong, and where they could gather the most power.  It’s science-fiction-y but very basic at the same time.

This windmill, pictured below, is in the prototype stage.  This project is called high altitude jetstream windpower, and it’s wind energy that literally captures the jetstream.  Why do they want to use the jetstream?  Because mid-level wind at a high altitude in the jetstream produces winds of 125-160 mph, so it’s like capturing the power of  a hurricane.

Early designs for these windmills were more like kites. In fact, this type of power has gone through many variations.  All versions consist of some type of flying wind-gathering apparatus that is tethered to something (obviously, or they’d fly away) and they need to be attached to a grid or energy storage facility of some type.  Some versions have been designed to be built out of kevlar, aluminum, or carbon nanotubes.  All the materials used have to be super-strong but very lightweight.
Advantages and disadvantages of this type of power generation include:

Advantages and Disadvantages over Present Ground Turbines (Wind Mills)

Advantages:
* Less visual pollution
* Avoids noise pollution
* Eliminates impact on wildlife
* No CO2 emissions
* Makes maximum use of wind power

Disadvantages:
* High maintenance cost
* Dangerous if they were to fall (yikes!)
* Planes could crash into them, as jets often follow the jet stream

The writer of this blog (me) is certainly not at the G20, (which is starting next week) but plenty of protesters are out there trying to bring awareness of global economic insecurity and climate change to the world.    Thousands are marching for jobs, and justice, and environmental awareness and action.  People don’t often think of economics and climate change as being related, but they very much are. Everything is ultimately related to our climate, the atmosphere, and the weather, as that all affects food supply and jobs and the economy.    As global warming progresses there will be more droughts,  more severe storms, and more severe weather in general. This will lead to more food shortages, more displaced people, more refugees, more homelessness, more unemployment, more social unrest, and more division of the poor from the wealthy.  It may also lead to more wars for resources, disguised as “liberating” people.

I’m a big fan of street protests even though most of them are ignored by the media. But when the G8 meets or the G20 or any group of the wealthy who determine the fate of the poor meets, protesters will be there.  For many protesters it’s just about having a voice and having a say in their fate and futures.  Protesting has always been the ultimate free speech, the empowerment of the average citizen.   In London alone it is estimated that 35,000 people will turn out to protest the G20 economic summit.  The photo above is of the actual protest in London and is from The Guardian.

What are they protesting? Lack of jobs, lack of control, lack of power — what people always protest.  In this case, they are also trying to bring awareness to the need to remake the way the world does things, really and truly fix the economic crisis, and seriously deal with our climate crisis.

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If you think about it seriously you can often find a connection between unusual weather events and climate change.  That’s true of flooding this year already.  President Obama has declared a State of Emergency in Fargo, ND.   The Red River in the area is expected to crest at 43 feet this weekend, which will be a disaster for homes and businesses on this flood plain.  Right now, the flood waters are at over 40-1/2 feet .  Volunteers from across the Midwest are fighting against time to fill sandbags and implement flood relief measures.   Obama recently suggested that the flooding currently happening in Fargo is connected to climate change and that this flood should help raise everyone’s awareness of it.  He may be right.  Flooding to this degree, and it seems to get worse every year, is not how things have always been  in Fargo.

This page from North Dakota State University shows past flood photos.  It seems there have been Red River floods in the past but not as frequently as now (which is almost every year).  There were big floods in 1969, 1975, 1984, 1989, 1995, 1997, and then in 2001, 2006, and 2009.  Some of the flooding is being blamed on blizzards this year.  When I lived in Moorhead there were blizzards every year, but no major floods. In fact, the photo here is of Moorhead, only a couple of days ago.

But the floods in Fargo are probably doing a lot more in the U.S. to raise awareness of winter and bad weather, because no scientists are really coming out in the media to show cause and effect of rapid melting in the spring, or what might be causing this flooding.  I have noticed rapid melting gradually in the last 5-6 years, because I live in central Minnesota.  For the last 3 springs my unattached garage and much of my backyard has flooded.  My garage in particular has filled with more than an inch of water from melting snow.  This started happening a few years ago, no matter how much snow we have had.

Spring use to come gradually to Minnesota, but now it comes suddenly.  One week it’s below freezing, the next we have a string of days in the 40s and 50s.  This may be  caused by solar flares, (according to my crazy Congresswoman ) but I really doubt it.  (That last comment was sarcasm, in case you missed it).

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Earth Hour is Saturday, March 28, and it seems like such a nice idea, doesn’t it?  Turn off your lights for an hour, starting at 8:30 pm where ever on earth you are.  This is a world-wide “event”.   The purpose is not really to save energy, but to raise awareness.  It seems kind of a round-about way to raise awareness.  Why not write about climate change, talk to people about global warming and energy,  instead of sitting in the dark?  Well, the dark can be fun for an hour, I guess.  You could always pretend it’s 1809 instead of 2009.  But many people will light candles, because it’s the middle of their evening and it will be dark.  Put down those candles!   They emit more carbon than burning your lights the usual way, with electricity.

It would be better to plan on taking a nap for an hour, or just hang out with no lights, or use a flashlight, or maybe only light one candle, because candles are extremely inefficient light, and they are basically pure hydrocarbon.   Candles are carbon-negative .  Sure, I love candles too.  Candlelight is romantic and glowy, making everything look nice, but candlelight  also pollutes more than many sources of electricity.   According to Eco-Geek , candles are ten times worse for the environment than regular lights!  It takes 40 candles to produce the same amount of light as a 40-watt light bulb.  They waste most of their energy on heat because they burn at such a low temperature, and provide very little light.

On the original EarthHour.org website, they suggest you do all sorts of carbon-intensive things afterwards and seemingly, during Earth Hour, when you are supposed to have your lights off.  Take photos, upload photos, upload video, etc.   If you are turning off your lights for Earth Hour, why not turn off your computer, your TVs, and all your carbon-using things?  I get the feeling a lot of people are just going to be sitting in front of their computers in the dark on Saturday. That doesn’t sound any more useful for fighting climate change than doing that with the lights on is.

Celebrate Earth Hour responsibly.  Why not go outside and look at the stars?  If all goes well, there will be less light pollution for an hour, and more stars to see as a result.

What’s really funny is “25 activities to do in the dark during Earth Hour”.

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On Monday, March 23, President Obama spoke specifically about clean energy, and described plans to spend about $59 billion in economic stimulus funds and $150 billion from the federal budget to promote a  clean energy future.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, (aka the stimulus bill) officially includes $39 billion the Energy Department and $20 billion in tax incentives for clean energy.  Even so, Obama didn’t say a lot that we haven’t heard before.  In fact, he mentioned cap and trade and energy again on Tuesday night during his press conference.  He’s a big fan of cap and trade (I’m not). I think we need to take more drastic action.

But the most interesting part of the speech were the remarks made by MIT President, Susan Hockfield, said before the President spoke.  She described our current energy problems as:  rapidly increasing energy demand, energy security, and solving the climate change crisis.  Hockfield called clean energy an historic investment, and said the stimulus bill makes a major investment in energy stimulus,  including 6.5 billion for R&D, which to her was the most important part, being the president of a major and prestigious university known for its research.

She called the stimulus bill the largest and most important investment in technology since Sputnik inspired the launch of the Apollo program.

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I just got a very distracting, very energetic puppy named Gracie. She’s a 6-month old Puggle, which is half beagle, and half pug.  She is a major handful and is cutting down my computer time drastically, so far, but I don’t think that will last. She is just getting used to her new home and to her new masters (of the universe), which means I’m chasing her around the house a lot and cleaning up messes, when we are not going on walks.  So far it has rained every day which has made the walks wet, muddy and overall a lot less fun than they should be.

She has so far attempted to eat all sorts of things she found outside that are very bad for her, (including cat poop) which has made me see that having a dog is going to be quite a bit more gross, and demanding of my full attention, than my 2 old cats are.  So if I miss a day or two in writing online, she is the reason.  It’s hard to even read a newspaper with her around, online or the paper kind.  And talk about energy. This puppy has energy to spare!  If we could find a way to capture and store it, she could probably power my appliances, at least.

She is  learning basic puppy commands and so far all she knows is “sit”.  She lies down on her own though without being told.  She leads me during walks, and that’s not good, especially since she will eat anything and everything that looks interesting.  I even took somebody’s old piece of gum out of her mouth today.  If anyone know how to keep her from eating everything in sight, let me know . . .  I do feed her a lot of really good puppy food!

And I am quite sure that “slobber” is a noun because it’s all over her toys. . . .

The billionaire Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens likes to claim that his natural gas scheme will get us off our dependency on “foreign” oil and make us safer.  He’s wrong about a lot of things, but he’s especially wrong about natural gas. He’s usually talking about liquified natural gas to run big semi-trucks when he discusses natural gas.  Liquified natural gas, or LNG, is natural gas that has been cooled down to minus 260 degrees F, which condenses it into liquid, and then it can be shipped and stored in refrigerated tanks.  It takes a lot of energy to convert LNG to it’s liquid form and then more energy to transport it in a cooled state so that it stays liquid, and in its liquid form it’s basically nearly entirely methane.  And despite the insinuations of Pickens, no natural gas is a renewable, and it’s also not an alternative fuel in the usually understood sense.  It’s a polluting fossil fuel that will run out someday, but for now, there is a huge boom in natural gas as more and more people use it for heating their homes.  Expanding the use of it to burn in big trucks is an especially bad idea.

Besides the fossil fuel part of natural gas, we have to consider whether or not it’s safe, and this takes us back to the foreign oil and terrorism connection.  Many countries that allow us to buy their oil and gas are currently not countries that the US has made a point of becoming equal partners or friends with.  The US has, in its recent history, even started wars for fake reasons, for the purpose of taking whatever fossil fuel resources a country has,  or for controlling its pipeline accesses, etc.   Obviously, starting wars does not make friends, and it has definitely decreased our “safety” where these countries are concerned.

Now it’s being pointed out that the natural gas is also a potential safety concern. LNG is usually safe to transport, and stable, but since it’s 90% methane, it’s highly combustible, which is another way of saying “explosive”.  There have been explosions involving LNG; though so far, not very many.

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The tiny Tata car is admittedly cute and compact, and I wish I could have one myself — but only if it were electric.  And why couldn’t it be — it’s small enough and looks lightweight enough to go pretty far on existing battery technology.   Unfortunately, the new small car from the Indian automaker that’s on the market right now is futuristic looking but still runs on gasoline, getting about  54 mpg (very respectable for an old fossil-fuel burning engine) So, it’s a throwback to all the other combustion engines out there.  Overall, I’d say Tata Motors is doing pretty good with emissions compared to other car makers though, especially American ones.  And it’s not a bad car, as cars go.   It’s actually got some room in it.   Tata Motors is also doing well with sales already, as India’s largest automobile company with revenues of US $ 7.2 billion in 2006-2007.

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Tonight is the season and show finale of Battlestar Galactica,  in my opinion the best sci-fi show to ever hit the airwaves.  I would not have written that 8 years ago, when I still thought Star Trek TNG was pretty much the pinnacle of TV sci-fi; or 7 years ago, when I loved Firefly, but BSG has surpassed them both.   Of course, movies used to be another matter altogether, but with the introduction of BSG, that changed too.  The show has always had movie-quality special effects, and movie-quality writing and acting. The show just took TV to another level completely, and even made me get plasma screen HD envy.  But alas, I still have my little 20″ TV screen, and it doesn’t do justice to a show with such walloping great production values.

I won’t bother to review the  show. You either like it or love it, or you don’t like science fiction, in which case I can’t change your mind and won’t try, even if BSG was and is far more than science-fiction.  It’s human drama at its finest.   I have never seen anything like this show on TV except for the long-defunct “Firefly”, the 2002 sci-fi show by Joss Whedon.  That show also had great writing, acting and special effects, but it was on FOX and didn’t even last one full season. Still, I was a huge fan.  Battlestar Galactica came very shortly after it and included some of the hand-held camera effects, and similar quick cuts in action.  Actually, I’m not a fan of the quick cuts but I like the hand-held effects because it seems more like you are there in person viewing the battle scenes, etc.

This show is famous not only for its quality but also for  how it mirrored a lot of the dark times we suffered as a country after 9/11.  The show took everything much farther of course:  an existential threat of being wiped out by a scary enemy, the tough decisions, the wars, the following ethical concerns of torture, capital punishment, holding captives, and much more.  There were alliances with good guys and bad guys, there was disloyalty and treason, and there was even a thrown election!  Remember the President cheated in order to win her election by throwing out some votes!  It seemed this show had a mirror event for everything we were going through, but of course, they were floating out in space with many fewer choices than we had.

I will mourn the end of this show for a reason related to that — as the war in Iraq is ending, so is BSG, so it will probably be the fate of the show to forever be tied to the so-called “war on terror” in peoples’ minds.  That’s too bad, because even without our own events the show would still be great.  It was one of the darkest, most confusing, most ethically-challenging shows of any type that I can recall.

And just to tie this slightly to my “power” theme — did you know they only ate algae-created food?  This might be our future, if we manage to move to becoming vegetarians, and then say climate change-created droughts cut down on the food supply drastically.  We might need to turn to the oceans for our food supply, and that might involve algae.  (or, gods-forbid — Soylent Green .  Let’s hope it never comes to that!).

They also powered their ships with “tylenium”,  a substance that doesn’t seem to exist.  The closest I can come to finding out what the frak that is, is a reference in a book discussing a “dimethylacenaphtylenium ion”.  Since I have no idea what that is, I can’t even write about whether or not it’s a plausible source of energy!

If you have never watched BSG, I would not start with the finale.  For the rest of us who have, the finale promises to be an amazing ride.

This may or may not be the first — and last — photo of the first unofficial astronaut bat.  On Sunday, the shuttle Discovery launched into space on a two-week mission to bring supplies to the International Space Station.  Unfortunately for the suit-less and helmet-less bat, he was launched into space also.  The bat was last seen clinging to the foam on one of the external fuel tanks.   According to CNN and NASA, they noticed the bat and brought in a wildlife expert who said it appeared the poor little thing had a broken wing and possibly a wounded right shoulder.  There was no way to get him down or off the fuel tank, so the space shuttle had to launch with him on it.  Shuttle launches occur near the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, so bats are not uncommon in the area.  NASA officials revealed that another would-be astronaut bat was spotted on a tank in 1998, but that one flew away as the shuttle began firing up its rockets.  This bat sadly could not fly away, so it clung on for a ride into space.   (see more about the shuttle mission below).

The shuttle mission had already been delayed 3 times due to suspected fuel leaks, so they needed to lift off when they finally did, bat or no bat.  The doomed bat has inspired tributes and much sympathy online from animal lovers and NASA watchers.  The following video is one of the most touching, set to music from the last Star Trek TV show “Enterprise”.   (Enterprise is also the name of another space shuttle).

The mission of this shuttle was even more important than the bat.  The 7 human astronauts delivered the fourth and final solar panel segment of the ISS’s solar array, and after it’s installed, it will add a full 50% more power to it.  The new array will make the ISS the 2nd most bright object in the sky now, after the moon.

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Contrails or chemtrails — if you ever look up at the sky on a bright and otherwise non-cloudy day, you might see the criss-crossing of jet contrails.  Sometimes they form patterns that seem so obviously designed they enter the category of “chemtrails”. That means, to people who study these things, that they were put there for a purpose.  The purpose varies, depending on the people or group who are studying them.  One (reported) purpose is to fight global warming, and another purpose could be for “population control” (whatever that means) and another purpose to these that I have read about it claims the government is trying to poison us or alter our behavior with chemicals.  To what end?  I tend to not believe conspiracy theories that have the government always trying to kill us.  (If they are trying to kill us, they are doing a terrible job of it.)  I just don’t believe the more nefarious reasons for chemtrails.  Whoever is spraying these chemicals into the air, if they are actually for a purpose, probably do not have a deadly purpose in mind but may be trying to alleviate global warming a little bit.  If they are not doing that, maybe they are spraying for insects, or maybe they are seeding clouds for it to rain.  There could be a hundred reasons to see emissions in the sky.  The mess in the skies and the clouds being created by this is referred to by many people as “global dimming”, and it’s true that it adds to that, but so does any regular smog or pollution.

Whether chemtrails are done on purpose is another thing that is being debated. I have seen variations of them myself and I think they are usually just plane’s and jet’s contrails that show up more on some days when the atmospheric conditions are just right than on other days. But they are definitely altering the sky’s composition.

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