Perpetual Innovation

Category: sustainability

  • BioLite BaseCamp Stove | Turn Fire into Electricity by BioLite. Saving lives, one stove at a time. Kickstarter Funded project.

    Repost from IPzine…
    BioLite BaseCamp Stove | Turn Fire into Electricity by BioLite — Kickstarter:

    I love it. But only 62 hours to get in on the KickStarter offer. They are at twice goal with $800k+ and 3,000 backers.

    Yes, it was DARK in Miami, when Hurricane Andrew came through South Miami/Homestead on August 24, 1992. Well, afterwards really. It would be weeks before most of us would get power. So bar-b-q grilling was the norm. That was not quite as much fun after a week or two without baths and without air conditioning. Little or no ice and warm drinks. Muggy and humid.

    You did want to cook, obviously, but all the heat from the grill was the last thing we needed.

    But a really cool cooking stove popped up in New York. A tiny stove the burned wood (or charcoal) and produced focused head for cooking. No need to cook the cook too.


    This technology works wonders in countries where there is little or no electricity, and wood is often scarce, and the smoke from open cooking causes some of the world’s worst health issues (probably only exceeded by water/sanitation).

    You gotta see how far the technology has come. This is a BIG stove, relatively, that generates electricity (USB power) and has battery. It has an internal fan, to fan the fire so it can produce some serious heat possibilities — especially given the ability to focus the flame.

    This version comes with an LED light so you can see what’s cooking at night.

    As they say, this is the first version of the BaseCamp that is crowd designed. When you jump in on the crowd funding at KickStarter (BaseCamp) you will get a free carrying case.

    You also get the warm-fuzzy feeling of knowing that this technology will save millions and millions of lives in energy starved countries.

    All very very cool.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • BioLite BaseCamp Stove | Turn Fire into Electricity by BioLite — Kickstarter

    BioLite BaseCamp Stove | Turn Fire into Electricity by BioLite — Kickstarter:

    I love it. But only 62 hours to get in on the KickStarter offer. They are at twice goal with $800k+ and 3,000 backers.

    Yes, it was DARK in Miami, when Hurricane Andrew came through South Miami/Homestead on August 24, 1992. Well, afterwards really. It would be weeks before most of us would get power. So bar-b-q grilling was the norm. That was not quite as much fun after a week or two without baths and without air conditioning. Little or no ice and warm drinks. Muggy and humid.

    You did want to cook, obviously, but all the heat from the grill was the last thing we needed.

    But a really cool cooking stove popped up in New York. A tiny stove the burned wood (or charcoal) and produced focused head for cooking. No need to cook the cook too.

    This technology works wonders in countries where there is little or no electricity, and wood is often scarce, and the smoke from open cooking causes some of the world’s worst health issues (probably only exceeded by water/sanitation).

    You gotta see how far the technology has come. This is a BIG stove, relatively, that generates electricity (USB power) and has battery. It has an internal fan, to fan the fire so it can produce some serious heat possibilities — especially given the ability to focus the flame.

    This version comes with an LED light so you can see what’s cooking at night.

    As they say, this is the first version of the BaseCamp that is crowd designed. When you jump in on the crowd funding at KickStarter (BaseCamp) you will get a free carrying case.

    You also get the warm-fuzzy feeling of knowing that this technology will save millions and millions of lives in energy starved countries.

    All very very cool.

    Keywords: Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, genius of crowds, kickstarter, invention, sustainability, renewable energy, health,
    ‘via Blog this’

  • Invest Yourself – Roaches, Never Just One

    Free Investment Newsletter | Invest Yourself:

    I really like what they (Robert B. Rinear) say on the currency. That all seems very very
    true.  The currencies in the world are
    all crap. The best may be Japan and they can’t keep the Yen low enough to be a     competitive exporter so it is wreaking havoc on their economy…
    The Yankee Dollar is a piece of crap. But we are less crappy then the
    Yuan or the Euro.  We are the best house
    in a slum-blighted neighborhood. 
    You can only have all the currencies in the world artificially low for
    so long. Especially if all the effects are compounding, year over year. I
    really do think that real assets, like land and gold, will slingshot into the
    stratosphere sometime rather soon, say 1 to 3 years.
    But the same thing that they complain about, the talking heads at CNN,
    they did themselves. Go look at any of the databases, since recorded history,
    on any of the measures you chose, and you will see that the global warming is
    very real, and accelerating. It also     coincides well with populations explosion and industrialization.  And it is a compounding effect. Panicking certainly doesn’t make
    sense, but ignoring facts and data supporting global warming means the “hoax”
    is on you.
    Give a look at: https://www.skepticalscience.com/
    (Real science and no crap, discussing the real facts and actual data about
    Climate Change & Global Warming. It is very real by every measure that is
    measurable.)
    Want to know about Sustainability, look at my book (www.TinyURL.com/SustainYBook/) created
    from live Wikipedia links on Sustainability. The Intro is by Elmer Hall and created the
    dynamic links to carefully selected Wikipedia articles (pages). The pages in
    this book represent the best, most current and most accurate single source of
    information related to sustainability and climate change in the world.

    Sustainability. The world currencies are not!… 
    Ever growing greenhouse gas emissions,  sustainable we are not.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • Day Light Savings Time… And Energy Efficiency… and Sustainability

    While you are are staying up late, thinking about saving time and saving money…
    Give a look at the past blog post here on EE and DST and California’s discussion about Daylight Savings Time.

    This is the heart of sustainability: things that we can do right here, right now, to move toward more sustainability. Some of them might be only small changes, like adjusting the clock to start earlier in the day, when sun gets up earlier…

    One other idea is to move to LED lights. If 10% of our utilites comes from lighting, and LEDs will save us about 70%…. That cuts about 7% of our electric production. if utilities are about 2.5% of our $16.15T GDP… That’s $28B per year. Every year. As a perpetuity at 5% interest that would be a half trillion dollars ($565B). These are rough numbers, but the concept holds up nicely.

    GDP Factor $16.15
    		 T
    $ Energy 2.50%  $  
    403.75     		B
    % Lights 10%  $    
    40.38     		B
    Savings 70%  $    
    28.26     		B
    Perpetuity 5%  $  
    565.25     		B

  • Chris McKnett: The investment logic for sustainability | Talk Video | TED

    Chris McKnett: The investment logic for sustainability | Talk Video | TED:

    Chris McKnett gives a wonderful talk on investing and the idea that all investors should start looking at ESG (economic, social and governance). The economic is obvious, profits. Social is the impact to people in general, and governance is corporate social responsibility (CSR).

    Generally the research shows that there is no downside to being socially (and environmentally) sustainable. But in the long term, some of these companies that are irresponsible can be expected to lag behind.

    Chris implies that as an investor it could be (?is?) irresponsible to invest in companies that are and continue to be non-sustainable. The point is that the downside risk is dramatically increased for non-sustainable companies and those that don’t aggressively plan related to their non-sustainable ways.

    Maybe an example would be having a lumber-based business where you are chopping down the trees. A sustainable plan would be to replant at the rate of usage. At a minimum, you should find another country with too many trees, so you can get past the inevitable lumber crunch on the horizon…

    One of the beauties of this talk is that it focuses on just the financials of the sustainability issue. If big institutional investors started seriously considering the sustainability of their investors, then it would become front and center to all investments everywhere.

    The problem with non-sustainable business practices is that they always, always, have negative externalities associated with them. And we all bear the costs of their negligence.

    ‘via Blog this’