I recently stumbled upon this video:
It’s about a building in Burkina Faso that cools itself by using a curved roof with an air gap between two roof structures. Continue reading
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I was working in my car under one of those carports with solar panels on the top of it.
I realized you could probably increase the power output of these structures a lot by adding panels to the sides of the roof structure: Continue reading
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“It’s a reminder that the US is endowed with enormous oil reserves. Our industry should never be underestimated,” said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group.
This is hilarious.
I know we’re not serious about climate change. I mean, most electric vehicles I see driving around aren’t designed to be super efficient or to maximize for range. I’m pretty sure many of the EVs I see are SUVs or large-ish sedans.
🤦
Utilize nuclear power? Become more energy efficient? FORGET THAT! Let’s produce MORE oil! Let’s do EVERYTHING wrong – all the time.
I swear to God this decade is a disaster.
You can read more about it here:
The United States is producing more oil than any country in history
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A while back I did a calculation to see how long it’d take to charge an electric car with solar panels. The answer I came up with was something like 5 – 7 days. Bummer.
But then I started thinking about this again, but from a different angle. What if cars just collected solar energy all day. Is it worth it?
Most cars around here just sit in the sun ALL DAY. Might as well be collecting energy right? Continue reading
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I did a quick video last night looking at California’s energy supply. I wanted to see how much natural gas we’re burning to produce electricity (for the entire state). Welp, we’re burning a lot of natural gas to supply California’s electrical needs. I was hoping that renewables would make up most of our energy supply, but for yesterday, that wasn’t the case. Continue reading
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Porsche has announced that they plan on building a carbon-neutral fuel refinery in Chile. Thanks to Chile’s sunny, windy climate, Chile makes for an ideal location to generate carbon-neutral fuels.
Well, you can capture CO2 from the atmosphere and hydrogen from water to make almost any hydrocarbon you can think of. It’s just a matter of chemical processing and some input energy to do the work. If you have carbon-free energy from wind and solar, you’re able to produce carbon-neutral (maybe carbon-negative) combustible fuels.
And that’s a good idea. It may turn out that it’s a lot easier and perhaps less expensive than conventional oil drilling and oil refining. It’d be hilarious if it turned out to be the case, because honestly, this concept and science aren’t new. The only thing that’s somewhat new is solar, which means we could have been making this fuel in the 1980s.
To me, this is the most immediate need. Most conventional power plants on the West Coast of the U.S. burn natural gas to make electric power. Why not swap that out with carbon-neutral synthetic fuels (or syngas)?
Many cities and states have carbon-neutral goals that are coming down the pipe. This might be the quickest way to achieve those goals. Electric power plants provide the base load consistently to their customers and users. Wind and solar are great, they just provide consistent power and most of the infrastructure just isn’t in place. But if you want to hit carbon goals quickly, a carbon-neutral fuel makes the most sense since you don’t have to create smart grids, or build hundreds of square miles of solar panels. Just switch fuels.
Let’s hope that the U.S. government puts some emergency pressure on getting this technology going ASAP.
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I’m spending a lot of time this year ramping up my tree planting initiative. I’m most likely going to merge it with my business objectives over at Judicious, Inc.
Last year I had a 100 tree goal and hit it!
This year I want to do 1,000 and also see if I can get some other companies to match me. It’d be cool to try to get 1,000 companies on board!
The main reason why I chose this tree planting goal is to reverse my carbon footprint. So the first thing I needed to look at was my own carbon footprint.
There are a lot of carbon footprint calculators online. I chose trees.org/carboncalculator/ to start off this analysis.
Here’s what I came up with:
Gasoline
I have this weird habit of only putting in $25 in the tank each week. Around these parts that gets you about 7 gallons.
Air Travel
I really don’t do much air travel these days. I have kids that go to school so traveling just ain’t a thing in our lives. We did do Hawaii this year so I put down 5,000 miles for the round trip.
Trains and Subways
I never use em.
Electricity and Gas Usage
I used 250 kwh a month in my calculations and multiplied by 12 (I’m rushing here this morning, please let me know if I botched that!).
I have no idea how much gas we use. I don’t think we use that much. I grabbed 125 therms a month off the SoCal gas website (from their example bill).
This particular calculator ignores this which is a big part of your carbon footprint.
Well, there’s a specific calculator for that at: carbonify.com/carbon-calculator.htm
My carbon footprint apparently ranges between 15 to 30 tons a year and I need to plant around 150 trees a year to offset this. Now of course, there’s a ton of debate on whether or not trees help offset your carbon footprint. Trees obviously use CO2 to grow, however, they also release CO2 when they die. In my mind, it’s better to have an organism like a tree taking out CO2 and increasing the number of trees to do that every year. Think of trees as carbon storage. Instead of it being the atmosphere it gets locked up in a tree – from anywhere to a few years to a few decades. It’s a rate problem.
Additionally, reforestation has tons of benefits for wildlife, local climate, preventing desertification, etc. Reforesting, deforested areas is a good idea.
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When it starts to get hot around Southern California you’ll notice more and more people sitting in their cars with their engines on just to run their air conditioning.
I just came back from lunch and I saw three people doing this in two different parking lots. With that sample, that’s a lot of people running their engines in parking spots all over California right at this moment. I’d say that’s easily 10,000 stationary cars burning gasoline right now. Continue reading
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UPDATE 1/10/2022: NASA Detects Lattice Confinement Fusion – Lol. In this century you call UFOs “UAVs” and cold fusion “lattice confinement fusion”. If something ever gets a bad name, just rebrand!
I was twelve in 1989.
Somehow I had heard about cold fusion way back then. It was in the news a lot that year and considering I only had access to a handful of television channels, I probably absorbed some of the noise going on with the cold fusion hoopla. I also surrounded myself with a decently sized crew of nerdy kids, so that probably helped. Continue reading
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