Rahul Goswami

The curious return of coaldung fuelballs

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While in the hills of western India last week I saw something I haven’t seen since my schooldays. The something is old-fashioned fuel balls. You can hold one of these lightweight balls in your hand, for they are around 8-9 cm in diameter, their colour a slatey grey flecked with brown. You only rarely see them being sold in the small provision shops in these villages, for the fuel balls are made at home. They require two ingredients: cow dung and coal dust.

China to develop new energy source – combustible ice

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More than 100 countries around the world have found deposits of “combustible ice.” “Combustible ice” reserves on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are estimated to equal at least 35 billion tonnes of oil, which could supply energy to China for 90 years. [Provincial Governor] Luo Huining said tapping this new energy resource should be given high priority in China’s energy strategy.

From counterculture to cyberculture: the life and times of Stewart Brand

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Fred Turner’s book looks at the influence Bucky Fuller had on a range of people, in particular Stewart Brand, who helped create first the hippie counterculture and the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies, then later the cyberculture that grew up around the San Francisco bay area.

Our energy supply: some basics

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If a person were to listen to Energy Secretary Steven Chu or National Geographic, one might think that our energy problems are fairly minor and distant. We can easily add sufficiently renewable energy to substitute for fossil fuels in a fairly short time frame. But if one looks at the situation more closely, one discovers that the situation is quite different.

Church in Our Times: Spirit and Security in the Face of Reality

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We’ve been hearing for years that the mainline Protestant churches are on the wane in the United States, emptying out in an increasingly atomized society. And Catholicism has been clearly weakened by recent internal events. Is the Christian church only a force on the Right in the United States?

Vermont: Neighbors and Online Networks

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When Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife, Valerie, moved from Washington, D.C., to the south end of Burlington, Vermont, in 1998, “we’d landed in what we thought was our dream neighborhood. It was walkable, near the lake, full of trees. But we were having trouble getting to know the neighbors.

ODAC Newsletter – Mar 12

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What do you do if you’re an energy consultancy that finds itself on the wrong side of the peak oil argument just as much of the oil industry and the rest of the world embraces the idea? The solution devised by eternal optimists IHS CERA, hosting a conference in Houston this week, is to sidestep this embarrassing development by simply rebranding the problem: ‘peak demand’.

Food & agriculture – Mar 12

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-Grow your own’ revolution receives major land boost
-Slow foodies are not cavemen
-What’s driving our favorite fruit into decline?
-A Backlash After San Francisco Labels Sewage Sludge “Organic”
-How Locavores Could Save the World
-Increasing Yields and Decreasing Fertilizer Waste on Subsistence Farms
-How food and water are driving a 21st-century African land grab
-Greenhouse project promotes self-sufficiency