Vid - Bill Mckibben

Bill Mckibben Is a name that comes up a lot, on the sites I read anyways, so I thought I'd watch some more of this video and actually liked it. I haven't even seen it all, as its long (55 min), but the parts I watched were very interesting. Some things he talks about are the relationship of happiness to economic growth, how close communities determine more about our happiness then I would have thought, and a lot of Q&A at the end on varying other topics.

More problems embedding video clips here, so this will open another window which will actually be better as it has the links on the side to skip chapters.


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The video - More Peak Oil

More Peak Oil

It seems that global Warming has a competitor now for Headlines.... Fortunately each camp essentially has the same goals of moving us away from Oil and onto alternatives, one because of economics and one because of global climate change, its kind of a win win when you look at it like that, however this is probably not a win win situation in the slightest.

The first movie on this post from Celsias is very well put together and very doomsday which I like. check out the full article here. or you can watch the video above... yes its in a different post cause blogger is broken or something.

3 or 30 years is not really that much time, 3 years from now ill just be getting out of school which doesn't give me much time to prepare, the way I want to prepare. I need time to build up funds after finishing school to buy some land, to build an earthship or in the very least a passive solar home, off the grid, setup a garden, and maybe have some animals. purchase the needed solar and wind generators or if I'm lucky a micro hydro system.

In simple terms If the 3 year camp is right we are really screwed, if the 30 year camp is closer then at least us procrastinators have some time to develop a strategy and put it all together.

I may enjoy the Doomsday/Conspiracy Camp some.....all the time, but lets hope they're wrong.

Peak Oil

It took me a while to understand this whole peak oil thing, I attempted once to blog about it, but didn't feel as though I was doing a good job at explaining it, in simple terms it's when the world peaks at it highest amount of oil production, and then starts on a downward slope because there's just not enough oil in the ground to continue on an upwards slope.

The reason I bring this up now is because of a really good article on Groovy Green that talks about more then just peak oil, and why gas prices are so expensive right now.

Peak Oil will affect us all, like it or not, with or without my dream electric car, oil is used for more than just making gasoline.

Solar

China may have a lot of problems, but at the same time the country is making huge strides in Renewable energy, with Solar prices coming down and mass production going way up in the last year and even more scaled up in the next 2-3. read here.

Solar Energy contains the highest potential of possible energy capture of all Renewable resources, the problem of course is advancing the technology to capture all of the potential energy, they say that "The earth receives more energy from the sun in just one hour than the world uses in a whole year" and with prices expected to come way down, the time it takes to regain your investment will also come way down.

Also don't forget that electricity is not the only energy to be captured from the sun, the heat that can be captured to make hot water is actually a very efficient technology, and can be used to heat the home with, or just for your basic hot water needs, with some units even able to heat the water on semi-cloudy days. In some cases an over sized system could produce so much hot water that the water would boil inside the tubes causing them to explode ( bad setup ).

Combine these technologies with a passive solar home and a large thermal mass (read Earthship), to capture even more of the suns energy, and you've got yourself a pretty decent setup using just the energy from the Sun.

There are limitless ways to use the suns energy, so why haven't we, and why don't we use more of them. the sun gives us free energy every day, and instead we ignore its potential and continue to build structures that actually try to block or avoid the sun.

Sorry, I had to rant today and get it all out.

In Wheel motors

If you follow the electric car movement you've probably seen these, or at least there concept before, they provide more HP and more torque then a centralized electric motor and accompanying drive train. They, in many ways are the perfect design for the electric motor, and we may ( stress on the "may") see these soon on a car coming from ZAP. lots of questions still to be answered, I notice the diagram says a 10 minute recharge however no one knows what battery technology they will be using or how they aim to pull it off. A company like ZAP most likely isn't gonna be doing any of they're own R&D so they'll be using another companies technology, and could mean either a lower or higher price tag, given they didn't have to invest capital into the R&D in the first place.

latest article on this from TH

I hope they can but really at this point it's just another dream, that may not come to fruition.

Water???????????

This is a post from TH, I don't know about you but I'm still hoping someone updates it saying that the picture is a fake or some other reason for the colors. I like khaki even more today.