Perpetual Innovation

Category: conservation

  • World Water Day: 2021 Valuing Water (Quiz your Water Knowledge)

    It’s World Water Day, March 22, 2021 (www.WorldWaterDay.org).  

    Time to test your water knowledge with a World Water Day Quiz. 
    Some days we wish it would rain. Some days, we
    wish it would stop. But every day, not just March 22, we should stop and
    appreciate the importance of water. How important it is to out our being, to
    our lives, to our living and to our existence.

    Here is my Water Quiz for 2021. It is
    surprisingly hard to develop because the numbers are all over the map. I have 15
    multiple guess questions. Answer them all before starting to Google the
    answers. For which questions do you have a high confidence in your original answer?
    I’m trying to use current stats; different sources give different estimates. Sometimes old news is no longer accurate (maybe it never was accurate). I
    generally used US and US units of measure unless specifically indicated otherwise.
    Answers, scoring and sources will be forthcoming.

    Celebrate the day. Go, drink a glass of H2O.

    Cheers!



  • CO2 xGame Winners in Canada. Losers in USA?

    Wow. What do you do when the horses are already outta the gate?
    What do you do with the CO2 is already into the atmosphere? This is the idea of capturing that 400 parts per million of CO2 out of the atmosphere after it’s already, well, up in the error — oops… I mean — up in the air.
    Here are the winners of the XGames competition on CO2. This $20M competition is to figure out ways to carbon capture and sequester (CCS). Unlike some industrial byproducts, CO2 can have a value (bottling, for example, to give you that happy fizz in your pop).

    Here’s some info on this big competition in Canada: CBC News discusses competition sponsored by Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance and U.S. company NRG.

    One of the 9 finalist, Ingenuity Labs, emulates photosynthesis to remove carbon dioxide from smoke stacks and such. They use a photosynthesis-like process to extract the carbon and make several industrial products out of the extract. True, this is a lot like planting a tree, but you have to wait 20 years for the wood, vs the immediate gratification of industrial products.

    A very cool concept is by Carbicrete. Take out CO2 from an emissions source (say a smoke stack) and infuse it into concrete where the carbon is happily sequestered and it actually strengthens the concrete. (Note that concrete is a leading industrial source of CO2 emissions.)

    While Canada is moving full forward with sustainability initiatives, the US is set to make a major shift in the other direction. Trump’s Pruitt pick for the EPA might result in two departments of Energy. (Facts and miss-facts about Pruitt.)

    The US has never had an energy policy. Carter was the last to propose one. Obama kinda had one, but without any legislative support, he was force-feeding it through the EPA. No matter who you are, that’s not the right way. So the Clean Energy Plan, is about to get the can!…

    That means the the job of the CCS might turn out to be far, far bigger in the future, as we try to burn up the last century or so of fossil fuels over the next hundred years.

    We here at SustainZine consider “conservative” this way: The bestest, cheapest, cleanest gallon of gas is the one never extracted, never processed and never burned. The bestest, cheapest, cleanest tonne of coal is the one never extracted, never processed, and never burned (scrubbing or no scrubbing).

  • Iris From Lowes. PowerMeter from Google

    Iris:

    Setting up a smart home gets a whole lot easier. This helps to monitor the home energy use as a kind of side benefit.

    One of the advantages of doing this security and home management stuff yourself (DIY) is that the likelihood of actually utilizing it, and utilizing it well increases.

    The cost is about $10 per month for more services and longer record times, however?

    This probably can’t replace the home monitoring system like ADT. They live-monitor and use the telephone line (not the INet); The Homeowner’s Insurance company likes that type of monitoring for home and fire.

    Consider using power monitoring with such visual monitoring tools as those provided free from Google’s PowerMeter: http://www.google.com/powermeter/about/

    Simply monitoring power is the key. Two studies reviewed by Google show that a community that engaged in power monitoring had a 71% residential engagement. In a pilot study in Dubuque, Iowa with IBM showed a community realized 11% energy savings simply from monitoring and metering their power usage using SmartMeters… Well, and usage/behavioral changes in usage, of course.

    Just thinking, a little energy savings now could save us all a bundle of money this year and every year thereafter. And, oh, by the way, it would save a lot of impact on the environment. Smart Meters sound smarter and smarter.

    The greenest kilowatt is the one never used at the meter, never distributed down the transmission lines, never generated in the powerplant and the full source never mined or pumped.

    Just thinking.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • “Humans Are Almost Entirely The Cause Of Climate Change” Richard Muller Former Climate Change Denier – YouTube

    “Humans Are Almost Entirely The Cause Of Climate Change” Richard Muller Former Climate Change Denier – YouTube:

    This is a very interesting video/news from MoxNews.

    The Exxon Valdez has an oil spill, has a name change, has a name change, has a shipwreck, has a name change, and is now being dismantled/retired. The wreck, by any other name, is still Valdez.

    NatGas +/-  . . . Not so sure about the Frac’ng story… But hang in there til the end. It is well worth the wait. If it has equal likes and dislikes, then it is probably pretty good!

    Richard A. Muller, the last hold out of global warming, has now come out with a book. Once you remove the noise, the level of CO2 matches perfectly with global warming. It is important to know that humans are the cause, probably the primary cause, of global warming. This is good, kind of. “If we cause it, then there’s something we can do about it.” He didn’t think solar variations, volcanic eruptions, el nino, etc., had longer term impacts. “The carbon dioxide curve was right on.”

    Muller won the MacArthur Genius Grant 30 years ago. He was the last major skeptic on Global Warming. He just completed major research on global warming funded by the Koch Foundation, a ?conservative? group by the Charles G. Koch family, the oil billionair family. Anyone knowing about the funding source, would have been surprised about the results.

    He found last year that Global Warming is real.

    He now has determined that human activity seems to be the predominant cause. The rise in CO2 matches perfectly with the rise in temperatures. Correlation is not causation, but the correlation is very strong.

    Global economic shock to cut back on CO2 emissions? Energy efficiency. And switch away from coal. He suggests NatGas as immediate switch away from coal. NatGas produces 1/3 the level of CO2 as coal. (I’m not so sure about 1/3, I think it is 33% less CO2 than coal per energy equivolent.)

    The big thing is that the controversy of Global warming is dead. It’s a fact. It appears to be perfectly correlated with human factors that generate greenhouse gases (eCO2). So the next debate (or controversy, maybe) is what are we gonna do about it.???

    New version of his book:

    ‘via Blog this’

  • MIT’s 5-part series on the energy & energy efficiency

    MIT 5-part series on Energy scaling up (or scaling
    down in terms of energy efficiency).