Future

Where Are We Headed?

Archive for April 2007

Chinese Sustainable Energy Program

China, with it’s billion and a half citizens, faces a huge challenge. For them, it’s not just a matter of maintaining the status quo, it’s a matter of having a huge population desiring to enjoy a modern lifestyle. They intend to attain that for their citizens by quadrupling the gross national product and doubling energy… (read more)

Rig Zone

Even though in my opinion burning hydrocarbons for energy is the antithesis of a sustainable economy, I’ve added RigZone.com to the sidebar so those of you who wish to keep track of what the oil companies are doing have that resource readily available. If you take a look at it on a daily basis, you… (read more)

Peak Oil

In spite of everything I’ve presented here there are people who still want to buy into the peak oil scam. I’m not sure how much I should try to convince people otherwise because while there isn’t a peak oil situation immediately looming, at least not in the sense that we’ve used up half of all… (read more)

Nuclear Fuel Shortage?

This article concerning a nuclear fuel shortage, on MIT’s website, leaves me shaking my head and wonder what they up to. There has to be an agenda behind this besides a genuine concern over having enough fuel for reactors because if we really had a fuel shortage we wouldn’t be creating a national waste repository… (read more)

Heat Pump Dryers

The Japanese have had microwave clothes dryers for some time. These use microwaves to heat the wet clothes rather than hot air and by doing so they save approximately 35% in energy consumption. They switch to resistive heating for about the last 10% of the cycle to prevent problems with metal objects. For reasons I… (read more)

Trains

This BBC article regarding a new French train speed record got me to thinking about our own railroads. When I was young, other countries citizens were reading about the state of the art developments in our country. Allowing our national railroad infrastructure to deteriorate is a major mistake. Other countries have developed their railroads, electrified… (read more)