Well-Tended Fires Outperform Modern Cooking Stoves
Despite technological advancements since the Industrial Revolution, cooking remains a spectacularly inefficient process.
Biomass
The Energy Sustainability Dilemma : Powering the Future in a Finite World
Most of the easy energy is gone. Are we heading for a dead end?
Bioenergy – A Disaster for Biodiversity, Health and Human Rights
A new, global rush to embrace biofuels—for transport,heat, and electricity—is a growing threat to ecosystems, wildlife, human health, and the climate. The trend poses the danger of increased commodification of forests, greater competition between food and energy markets, and even more pressure on the world’s rural poor that depend upon local biomass for their energy needs.
Swedish eco-village hosts role-play of life after peak oil
In early October, the eco-village, Änggärdet, Sweden, hosted two days of Live Action Role-Play (LARP) along the theme of life 2016-2027, post peak oil and post economic collapse. Players got the opportunity to explore what various scenarios would be like, including being commaned into a work detail bu the military to harvest the last remaining potatoes by hand, and by joining a self-organised, worked-by-hand co-housing combi-farm.
Bioenergy, TLUDs, and our 2012 stove camp
Both Solar Bob and Doc agree that trying to get charcoal-burning cultures like Haiti to give up making and burning charcoal is a lost cause, not worth spending much time on. We are less convinced of the hopelessness of conversion, having the card up our sleeve of eCOOLnomics still to play. Pop Culture can marry Mother Earth. We can make it cool to sequester carbon in the soil.
Energy – Aug 10
-Zero Blade Turbine Could Revolutionize Wind Power Industry
-As Coal Sinks, Renewables Soar: Emissions Report Shows Start Of Clean Energy Transition
-Counting the carbon cost of the EU’s woods
Bioenergy – Apr 18
-A Little Independent Energy Experiment on the Prairie
-Analysis raises atmospheric, economic doubts about forest bioenergy – report
-NASA one step closer to turning algae into fuel
Energy in East Africa
In most East African countries access to electricity is very low. Besides electricity, there is a basic need for energy. In Eastern African countries most of the energy consumed is produced from traditional solid biomasses, such as the burning of wood.
The search for combustibles begins early in the morning, includes several hours of walking, and, in cases where no trees are to be found, digging for roots with bare hands; in some regions this activity is accompanied by the constant danger of violent and sexual assaults. In areas where there is no wood left for burning, cow dung or other waste is used for fuel.
Deep thought – Dec 30
– The Economist: How Ernest Dichter, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing
– Corporate monopolies ‘may dominate green economy’
– Ugo Bardi: The invisible toothpaste: overselling science
– The Arctic Will Burn
ODAC Newsletter – Dec 9
OPEC head Abdullah El-Badri warned European leaders on Wednesday against imposing sanctions on Iranian oil, stating that the 865,000 barrels a day which goes mostly to Southern Europe would be difficult to replace. Global supply is already tight and oil prices remain stubbornly high despite the chronic Euro-crisis…
ODAC Newsletter – Oct 21
As temperatures dropped in Britain this week, the political heat over rising energy bills intensified. Prime Minister David Cameron hauled in the utility bosses and demanded action. Cameron claimed “everything that can be done will be done to help people bring their energy bills down…
Review: The Global Warming Reader, edited and introduced by Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben’s latest book is a well-chosen and arranged collection of climate-related writings by the likes of James Hansen, Al Gore and George Monbiot, which McKibben edits and introduces. Significantly, the book contains writings by Inhofe and his ilk as well, the better to understand “the lines of attack climate deniers have used over and over,” in McKibben’s words,