Australian MP sets river on fire
Jeremy Buckingham, a Green Party MP, took a dingy out on Queensland's Condamine River, about 220km west of Brisbane, and set the river on fire with a barbeque lighter. The river is filled with methane...
View ArticleTar sands production in Canada pretty much shut down by Fort McMurray wildfire
Almost all of Canada's tar sands production has been shut down by a raging wildfire in Alberta's Fort McMurray region. Oil production in the region will only start up again when it is "absolutely...
View ArticleCanadian government thinktank warns that renewables will gut market for...
For a decade, Canada's previous petro-tory government prosecuted scientists who publicly reported their results without first passing them through the party's commissars, almost as though reality had...
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Dakota Pipeline decision delayed to Sept. 9, thousands of indigenous...
In Washington today, District Judge James E. Boarsberge said he will not issue a decision on a legal challenge by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Dakota...
View ArticleWhat technologists can do about climate change
Bret Victor complained on Twitter that technologists were wasting their imaginations, energy and talent on things that wouldn't matter after climate change reduced the world to a drowned cinder; his...
View ArticleWhat is "design fiction?"
I've been writing "design fiction" for years (see, for example, Knights of the Rainbow Table), and when people ask me to explain it, I say something like, "An engineer might make a prototype to give...
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FBI hunts suspect in rare analog espionage case targeting Houston energy firm
With so many recent reports of hacks, software theft, and cloud-based security breaches, this "physical world" espionage case seems all the more mysterious. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is...
View ArticleHow much energy can dust-sized computers harvest from sun and motion, and how...
Pete Warden reports in from the ARM Research Summit, where James Myers presented on "energy harvesting" by microscopic computers -- that is, using glints of sunlight and the jostling of motion from...
View ArticleTrump's five most "anti-science" moves
Scientific American summarized five of Donald Trump's "major moves many see as hostile toward science." They are: • Trump’s pick for head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has actively...
View ArticleLargest coal-fired power plant is shutting down. What will Trump do now?
Trump made a big deal about saving the dying coal industry. “[We’re] bringing back jobs, big league. We’re bringing them back at the plant level. We’re bringing them back at the mine level. The energy...
View ArticleKentucky coal museum installs solar panels because conventional energy is too...
The Kentucky Coal Museum in Benham, KY, spends $2,100 a month on electricity; to save money, they're putting in 80 solar panels, which will save them $8,000/year. When Southeastern Kentucky Community...
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Photovoltaic venetian blinds
These SolarGaps prototypes are interesting ways to harness sunlight as it's being blocked. Note: the video is heavy on the promotion and light on the tech specs, but it's a neat idea. Via their site:...
View ArticleThinking of the history of life on Earth in terms of "energy epochs"
Olivia P. Judson's paper in Nature, The energy expansions of evolution, presents a novel, beautifully written and presented frame for looking at the history of life on Earth: as a series of five...
View ArticleOil industry is running out of employees, because millennials
The oil industry is mired in a recruiting crisis because its workforce is aging out and millennials don't want to work for an industry that is destroying the planet they were hoping to live on. The...
View ArticlePassive cooling panels beam air conditioners' exhaust-heat into space
Skycool Systems is a Stanford spin-out that uses panels composed of "layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver" to convert the waste-heat from air-conditioners' heat...
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The climactic conclusion to DONG Energy's awesome name
A brand manager at Dong Energy finally convinced them that their company name might be getting in the way of their messaging. They will be Ørsted from here out. It's actually a pretty cool reason as...
View ArticlePromising energy storage technologies for our renewable future
When the wind is blowing, the great plains could generate enough power to supply all of America, but storing and moving energy to supply those places where the wind isn't blowing, the sun isn't...
View ArticleThe problem with nuclear waste
Nuclear energy produces less carbon dioxide than any other any source (including solar, wind, and geothermal). But nuclear waste is extremely poisonous, and leaks are inevitable. Wendover productions...
View ArticleHow much energy does Bitcoin consume, and can it improve?
After Digiconomist's analysis of the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain went viral, Timothy Lee at Ars Technica provides a much-needed reality check in the form of...
View ArticleHomebiogas: easy, clean, climate-friendly way to heat and power your home...
Yesterday, I saw a demo of the Homebiogas bioreactor: it's essentially an artificial stomach that uses colonies of microbes to digest your home food waste (it can do poop, too, but people tend to be...
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