drbunsen, posts by tag: development - LiveJournal

I'm forming an opinion about the recently proposed emissions trading scheme.

I'm beginning to think that it is far more than merely not good enough: it's a disaster, for both the economy, and the environment, and will have the worst possible outcome for both.

( follow the stupidCollapse )

Inspiring success story of a village and a couple of NGO workers making biofuel.

Here we were hoping to compete with the big oil producers in the back yard of a small village and using an untried collection of old car parts, old pipes and taps attached to a used chemical container, all put together in an image downloaded from the internet.

Via afrigadget

Hey all - no time for blogging it as yet! It's been nuts. Meanwhile you can check my photo log at my drbunsen user account on flickr.com. For some reason the photos are in reverse order by date, so start at the end and work back or use the tags.

More ASAP!!

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture.
...
More than half of the world’s population lives in a democracy of some sort, although only some 13% reside in full democracies. Despite the advances in democracy in recent decades, almost 40% of the world’s population still lives under authoritarian rule

There's a link to the full report and methodology at the bottom of the article.

Australia ranks 8th out of 167 countries, between Luxembourg and Canada. The US of A doesn't make the top 15; nor does the UK.

Why geeks will save the earth has an interesting angle on the breakdown of compassion when dealing with large numbers of suffering people ( more than 8 ) and why those with a certain Aspergery outlook can engage with the concept of mass deprivation more constructively.

An interview with Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming; an exploration of the fragmented world of environmental and social justice organizations.

Which loosely ties in with Kate Crawford's recent book Adult Themes (review), and discussion thereof.

And here's Hugh Mackay on his 50 years of social research.

A few energy related links:

Want a safe, cheap hydrogen source for your fuel-cell or conventional internal combustion engine car? How about making your H2 on the go from potato syrup? A tank full of enzymes does the trick.

How about some really cheap hydrogen, from atmospheric CO2 and water? Using old, no-patent technology (pyrolysis) get your H2 from woody plants, suck that naughty greenhouse gas out of the sky, and get free soil conditioner (charcoal) into the bargain.

How to economically power up India's 519,570 villages (over 50% of homes)that are still without electricity? We don' need no steenkin national trunk grid and nuclear power. The answer may lie in renewable, community-based distributed grids, i.e. village scale grids powered from wind, solar, biomass etc.

How about some zero-carbon refrigeration, that any village plumber/welder could knock up? No moving parts, runs for decades, no electricity required, just a source of low grade heat (ie solar etc) for an hour or so a day.

Bikes banned on trains in your city? Import a US$399 Chinese bike that folds into a suitcase. Or wait for the no-doubt more expensive American recumbent that folds into its own trailer.

In other news without links: Renault to release a car for US$2,500; the Mexican compressed-air/fuel hybrid car gets commercial release in Europe.

Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future


Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday April 9, 2007
The Guardian

Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse
weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role
of Marx's proletariat. The population of the Middle East
increasing by 132%, and a new Little Ice Age grips Europe.
"Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists
groups.

This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence
team ( Read more...Collapse )

Well, I noticed the image disappeared from my previous entry about the Meraki Mini, a $50 WiFi access point the size of a playing card that can run a pretty complete unix. So I went to their site to look for a new image to link.

It seems they've morphed from a mere hardware seller into a project "to bring affordable Internet access to the next billion people", sponsored in part by Google. At least according to their rhetoric. And you can still sign up to order the cheap goodies.

As some of you will know, I've been following the biodiesel and biofuels industry for some time. Recent developments using algae as the feedstock are exciting.

Consider:

1. Sunlight + algae + CO2 + nutrients. Stir, wait, extract.
2. 10,000 gallons per acre per year - compare canola at 140/ac/y and soybeans at 48/ac/y
3. Doesn't displace land for, or consume, food crops - can be grown in sealed or unsealed ponds on marginal land, rooftops, ocean ponds, salinated lakes, and inside smokestacks.
4. Sequesters carbon either at source (in smokestacks or piped into ponds) or from the atmosphere. Net reduction in CO2 emissions is the same, however the concentrated CO2 available at source increases fuel yield dramatically per $ invested and per unit area.
5. Can be retrofitted to existing plant. No need to separate CO2 from other gases in the waste stream (barring toxins) before capture.
6. Does away with all that messy and expensive liquefy, transport, pump underground crap.
7. Can produce both diesel and ethanol.
8. Waste products can be used as stock feed supplement, fertilizer or feedstock for the algae ponds.
9. A two tonne reactor can produce 10 million gallons (approx 240,000 barrels) per year, can be mass-produced and transported to site.
10. Reactor cost is thus down to around $0.10 per gallon capacity
11. Small plant scale allows village/farm scale, franchise and other flexible deployment models, including production close to distribution/use.
12. Trivial modification to existing engines and distribution system compared to either hydrogen or electric.
13. Algae made the fossil fuel we're using now in the first place :) [1]

There isn't enough waste fry oil in the world to displace even 1% of fossil fuel used for transport. Conventional crop feedstocks would require a huge proportion of the world's farmland. It seems like only algae makes biofuels for transport a serious proposition at present.

Further reading

[1] probably

Interesting article about the human-power system for the MIT $100 laptop project. They've done away with the integrated handcrank and gone with a separate 20 watt string-pull system. The laptop uses 2 watts, so a minute of cranking gets you ten minutes of use.