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POPSSun + Water = Fuel Michael Grätzel, however, may have a clever way to turn Nocera's discovery to practical use. A professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was one of the first people Nocera told about his new catalyst. "He was so excited," Grätzel says. "He took me to a restaurant and bought a tremendously expensive bottle of wine." In 1991, Grätzel invented a promising new type of solar cell. It uses a dye containing ruthenium, which acts much like the chlorophyll in a plant, absorbing light and releasing electrons. In Grätzel's solar cell, however, the electrons don't set off a water-splitting reaction. Instead, they're collected by a film of titanium dioxide and directed through an external circuit, generating electricity. Grätzel now thinks that he can integrate his solar cell and Nocera's catalyst into a single device that captures the energy from sunlight and uses it to split water.
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POPSNuclear Fusion Will Become Reality by 2011 In its National Ignition Facility (NIF), LLNL will have a laser capable of heating plasma to the absurdly-high temperatures needed for nuclear fusion. The completion of the device is scheduled for 2009, whereas the first test will begin in 2010. Researchers at the lab are confident that, by 2011, they could obtain sustainable and entirely controllable fusion. The year of 2020 was set as a marker for the construction of the first commercial power plant, to employ the new technology. If their endeavors are successful, then the world could see a major transformation, as far as energy production goes. Having a reliable and perfectly safe source of power will virtually eliminate the need for fossil-fuel power plants, and even wind and solar farms will become obsolete. In order for this to happen, governments worldwide will have to make a huge financial effort, to install these energy-producing plants across their territories.
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POPSCoal to Liquids - Gas to Liquids - Linc Energy - Fueling Our Future "Coal is a democratic fuel in that it is spread relatively consistently over the globe". It is far more plentiful than 'natural gas and oil and takes less complex infrastructure than nuclear to utilise'. In the future it will be the energy source of base load electricity, and will fill the 'gaps when renewable and other energy sources cannot meet demand'.
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POPSPOTTY TRAINING THE WORLD The need for proper waste disposal is being discussed at the conference of the WTO, the other WTO. World Toilet Organisation.
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POPS Not So Green Voters Nix Most Environmental State Ballot Measures Coloradans voted for environmentally-friendly Senate candidate Mark Udall. Yet they struck down a ballot measure that would have increased taxes on the oil and gas industries to pay for more goodies such as environmental conservation and clean energy. Opponents of the measure took it as a harbinger of higher energy taxes. Only in Missouri did a green-energy ballot initiative have any success. Proposition C set out to gradually increase the use of renewable energy to 15% by 2021, mandating slow-but-steady yearly increases. That’s the kind of measure that power companies and electricity grid operators like, because it gives them time to absorb the new power into the system without disruptions. Alone among the five environmental ballot initiatives, Proposition C had almost no opposition.
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POPSFrom "War on Terror" to "War of Terror" This war in Afghanistan's not about avenging the 9-11 attacks or preventing new ones. It's about killing local fighters, who fight to rid Afghanistan of unwelcome foreigners from Christian-majority countries. What began as a "War on Terror" has long since become a War of Terror. The Canadians and Europeans have long since tired of it. So have the American people, despite the failure of the corporate media to expose the Big Lies that Cheney and Bush continue to promote in order to justify their Terror War. Seven years down the road, there's no end in sight. No hope except for the "fool's hope" that public opinion in the imperialist countries, plus the inevitable resistance of the Afghans to foreign control, plus the military judgement that the war is not winnable will bring this "good war" to an end. The whole article is worth reading. Clip Song
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POPSTax Credit Victory for Fuel Cell Biz FuelCell Energy, which makes stationary power generators, notched a Beltway win last week with the long-term extension of a tax credit subsidizing fuel cell tech. We mentioned the company's support of the tax credit in this story: http://www.forbes.com/businessinthebeltway/2007/02/14/sunpower-fuelcell-energy-biz-wash-cz_atg_0214fuelcell.html Unfortunately, our bullish call on FuelCell Energy's stock now doesn't look so great. The stock has lost 24%, a hair ahead of the S&P 500's 25% decline, since our story published.
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POPSEPA against limiting rocket fuel ingredient in water (cont.) “This is a widespread contamination problem, and to see the Bush EPA just walk away is shocking,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, who chairs the Senate’s environment committee. Lenny Siegel, director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight in Mountain View, California, added: “This is an unconscionable decision not based upon science or law but on concern that a more stringent standard could cost the government significantly.”
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POPS"World needs a vacation from USA" He called for immediate technology transfer from the West to the Third World, to allow development based on clean technology — stressing the need to “reject intellectual property rights”. funds should not be distributed through the World Bank, which was trying to regain legitimacy by portraying itself as a “climate bank” while continuing to push fossil-fuel-driven development. Confronting global poverty and climate change means confronting US power. “I don’t think the world needs US leadership”, he said. “They should be more humble.” Whether the US achieves its goals “is where we, as civil society come in”, Bello said, suggesting that, by making intervention costly for the US, civil society could encourage a “new US isolationism”. The struggle is, he stressed, global. “The world needs a vacation from the messaianism of the US … A few decades of a self-absorbed US would be very good for the world.”
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POPSWe DO Need More Domestic Energy...BUT... Bush is absolutely right (I can't believe I'm saying that) - we absolutely do need to focus on more domestic energy production to reduce and ultimately eliminate out reliance on the Middle East. He's absolutely wrong however (now that's more like it) when he says we need to get that additional domestic energy by drilling for more oil off-shore. Pretty much all major scientific research - and even a great deal of the public - agree oil is not the answer to our energy crisis. There is only so much oil and any additional drilling will be far outnumbered by the increase in usage that will have occurred when we finally get that new oil online. Could drilling for new oil help lower gas/fuel prices? Sure it could temporarily. But that would only slightly delay the inevitable. We NEED to reduce our energy consumption until we can find alternative and more abundant sources of clean energy to meet our needs.
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POPSPelosi Doesn't Know That Natural Gas Is a Fossil Fuel And then, let's not leave Obama out.v Obama says, "I want to make sure in ten years, no more using oil. Not going to use oil in ten years, I'm going to make sure it happens." How are you going to do that, sir? You don't run the market. "I'm going to make sure we have a million cars running on electricity in ten years." Where's electricity going to come from, bumble brain? You don't want any nuclear power plants built to produce it, where the hell are you going to get the electricity, where we going to get it? We get it from coal. Pardon my incredulity here, folks, but, you know, we always ask ourselves, how in the world do we get these people? Why does neither party have somebody worth voting for half the time?
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POPSPelosi's Farting Up the Wrong Tree Get some bean-o for your gassy ignorance! Cont..You know what else she’d learn if she read that EIA link? She’d learn that natural gas isn’t brought to us by magic fuel fairies but by the same arrangement that brings us oil. She’d learn how you drill for gas using the same equipment as you do for oil and that sometimes we drill for gas and oil at the same time using just one well. She’d also learn how natural gas is carried by evil pipelines, just like the oily pipelines that might endanger caribou if they didn’t like them so darned much. Of course, that all assumes that she’s the least bit interested in learning anything that might demolish her own infantile view of how we get energy in this country and what we’re going to need to do to keep ourselves supplied well into the future. Based on her behavior in the last few weeks, it seems the only thing she’s interested in is making herself a couple more million dollars and scoring cheap political points.
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