A reader sent me a plan to turn low-skilled people into electricity generating machines, claiming that employees could be paid a reasonable wage.  But his math is wrong.  A human being produces about 80 Watts with his muscles, e.g., bicycling.  That’s  80 Watt-hours each hour = .08 kWhs each hour.  At the U.S. average electricity price of 11 cents/kWh, he’d be creating less than a penny of electricity an hour.  I know we’ve hit hard times, but I don’t think we’ve quite reached that level.

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Whenever I speak on renewable energy, I’m careful to leave my audience with a sense of the “tough realities.”  We all want simple answers to our questions, but in the case of clean energy, none exist.

There are dozens of different flavors of solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal, each improving in terms of cost and efficiency, but at different rates.  There are economic issues, as none of these flavors can compete with the dirtiest form of coal, if we don’t take into account the “externalities” like lung disease and environmental damage.  And Lord knows there are political issues, where we have serious candidates for president of the U.S. who, if elected, boldly pledge to dismantle our Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy.  If this occurs, it would effectively end the efforts of the largest economy on Earth to migrate away from fossil fuels and nuclear. 

Here’s another in a series of infographics that attempts to put all this into perspective. Hope you enjoy.

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I wrote a piece recently questioning the wisdom of our leaders’ ignorance and abandonment of basic science. I  could have chosen from a few of the presidential candidates, but I happened to single out Rick Perry, who hung onto his aspiration until very recently:

Rick Perry dismisses evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it.” Isn’t that a remarkable thing for a man to say who wishes to be taken seriously in the 21st Century? In the circle of biologists, the theory of evolution has the same status as Newton’s universal gravitation and Einstein’s relativity have among physicists.

On climate change, Governor Perry tells us: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

The idea that thousands of scientists are conspiring in secret to perpetrate a hoax is preposterous, and the second part of Perry’s statement is patently false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Moreover, the evidence is becoming stronger, not weaker.

To this, frequent commenter Mihai Grumazescu wrote:

I read somewhere that about half of the Chinese government is made of engineers and scientists and Germany’s chancellor was a chemical engineer – why wonder why they understand which direction to take instead of wasting everybody’s time with senseless political rhetoric? By negating all advances in science, America, through its elected representatives, is heading straight to the Stone Age. The enemy within is way more efficient than any external threat. There was a time when incompetents and illiterates were losing – now they win in a big way.

Unfortunately, I think Mr. Grumazescu has nailed this: incompetents and illiterates really are winning big — and that should be enough to scare anyone.

I don’t know precisely what it takes to become president of the U.S.  Certainly, requirements include incredible rhetorical skills, an unparalleled ability to memorize information to disgorge it in speeches and debates, and especially the enormous backing of money and power – from one or more sources that see you as a meal-ticket in terms of policy/legislation.  I guess it’s hard to expect anyone to be good at everything, so maybe I should be more lenient on politicians. But I know a ton of high schoos kids with a better grasp on science than any one of these people. Shouldn’t that be a point of concern?

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Earlier today I watched this wonderful documentary, “Patent for a Pig,” outlining Monsanto Corporation’s plans to genetically modify each of the major food items, and patent the modification, enabling them to control essentially all the food on the planet, “from seed, to field, to fork” — a line from the film. (If that sounds far-fetched, you may want to check it out.) 

While I watched, thinking: man, this is really well done, I realized that I’d love to do something of this quality in the field of clean energy.

But there’s a minor problem: talent.  While I know a fair bit about the energy situation facing us here, I know absolutely nothing about filmmaking, and I don’t have the capital sitting around to hire a team to outsource all this.

Are there any volunteers out there who might want to partner with me on the development of such a film?  There have, of course, been some very visible pieces that have touched on important aspects of the subject: Who Killed the Electric Car?, An Inconvenient Truth, Fuel, Crude, etc. But it seems that no one’s made a solid, definitive treatment of the technology, the economics, and the politics of energy.

If you have a little bit of Steven Spielberg, Ken Burns (or, dare I say, Michael Moore) in you, and a bit of time on your hands, please let me know.

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I like the position that my friend, physicist and engineer Wally Rippel takes: “I have the bar raised very high for ideas that appear to violate the laws of thermodynamics or mechanics or electricity and magnetism, or quantum physics — but I do not throw the bar away.”

I’ve come to adopt this, which I translate as follows: If an idea violates the laws of physics as I understand them, I’ll need to see a working model.  Do not expect to raise money – even a dime – to build a model of something that is theoretically impossible. You’d be surprised how frequently I’m forced to have this conversation.

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I had fun with the first one, which looked at the history of renewable energy on this planet.  The second one, which pointed out that all energy on Earth has come to us as a result of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, was even more interesting, in that it inspired a bit of controversy among certain religious folks that I hadn’t even imagined when I put the idea together.

I’d like to see this bloom into a dozen such graphics over the coming year or two.

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My team at 2GreenEnergy and I are having fun with these infographics on energy, and I think they serve a useful purpose in presenting a few of the basics on the subject at a high level – appropriate even for relative newcomers to the subject.  If you have a spare minute or two, I’m wondering if you’d like to make a suggestion for the topic of future energy infographics.

Here are a few ideas of my own:

• Global climate change – predominant beliefs of its causes and effects
• Alternative fuel vehicles – the pros and cons of each
• Concepts in energy efficiency
• Countries with progressive (or backward) energy policies

Again, I’d appreciate any direction you may be able to provide.

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At the rate of a few times a week I’m asked about global climate change, and I provide a brief summary, including the concept:

This is complicated. No one knows exactly how changes in the constitution of our atmosphere will affect global temperatures and weather conditions. I can tell you a couple of things for certain, though: 1) Special interests are working overtime to paint this picture in their favor. 2) The vast majority of climate scientists warn us that this is a very large and serious threat. 3) If there is a problem, as these people almost uniformly tell us, it’s going to be a runaway train, i.e., something that will be much harder to fix later than it would be now. 4) Prudent people buy insurance to protect themselves against devastating events — even if those events are of low probability; they don’t need to be certain they will have a house fire to buy fire insurance. The analogy here is very strong.  

As of today, however, I tell them one other thing: Take 12 minutes out of your life and watch the late climatologist and Stanford professor Stephen Schneider’s video on YouTube.  I wish there were a way to get everyone on Earth to check this out.   

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I remember making the hour-long drive due north from Trinity College in 1975 (in Hartford, where I was an undergraduate at the time) to Amherst to listen to guest lecturer Timothy Leary. When he took the stage, Dr. Leary immediately gave us the mnemonic “SMIILE” by which we could remember the three elements of his talk, if we cared to, for the rest of our days: SM = Space Migration, II = intelligence increase, and LE = life elongation. I’m not sure I’ve seen a great deal of intelligence increase since the 70s; in fact, I could more easily argue the opposite. But the other elements of Leary’s talk seem to be walking into full bloom.

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