t r u t h o u t | The Story of Electronics Video

President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt commenting on seeing the Grand Canyon

Read more about the US National Parks and President Teddy Roosevelt at http://www.nps.gov and  http://blogs.nashualibrary.org/reference/2009/09/leave_it_as_it_is_1.html

Cool factoid of the day from the article: “More moisture typically evaporates from rainforests than from the ocean. The Amazon rainforest, for example, releases 20 trillion litres of moisture every day.”

How can forests create wind? Water vapour from coastal forests and oceans quickly condenses to form droplets and clouds. The Russians point out that the gas takes up less space as it turns to liquid, lowering local air pressure. Because evaporation is stronger over the forest than over the ocean, the pressure is lower over coastal forests, which suck in moist air from the ocean. This generates wind that drives moisture further inland. The process repeats itself as the moisture is recycled in stages, moving towards the continent’s heart (see diagram). As a result, giant winds transport moisture thousands of kilometres into the interior of a continent.

…conventional desalination and reuse technologies use substantial energy. “forward osmosis,” exploits the natural diffusion of water through a semi-permeable membrane. Their process “draws” pure water from its contaminants to a solution of concentrated salts, which can easily be removed with low heat treatment — effectively desalinating or removing contaminants from water with little energy input.

The concentrated salt solution is probably a mixture of ammonia and/or carbon dioxide dissolved in water. The ammonia and CO2 are later easily boiled off and reused. The energy required for this quite less even low-cost solar heaters may be sufficient.

On the other hand I come from India which depends on coal for over 50% of its electricity production and is ramping that up to cope with chronic shortage of energy.

Nevertheless, I believe that safer and more environmentally friendly alternatives can be available if the real-cost of fossil fuels is factored in. It is a tragedy that economics taught in school and practiced in the world does not account for the environmental cost of the natural resources we consume. It is probably time for new economics, for now the check out the article from Time:

The “clean coal” campaign was always more PR than reality — currently there’s no economical way to capture and sequester carbon emissions from coal, and many experts doubt there ever will be. But now the idea of clean coal might be truly dead, buried beneath the 1.1 billion gallons of water mixed with toxic coal ash that on Dec. 22 burst through a dike next to the Kingston coal plant in the Tennessee Valley and blanketed several hundred acres of land, destroying nearby houses. The accident — which released 100 times more waste than the Exxon Valdez disaster — has polluted the waterways of Harriman, Tenn., with potentially dangerous levels of toxic metals like arsenic and mercury, and left much of the town uninhabitable…..

A draft report last year by EPA found that the ash contains significant levels of carcinogens, and that the concentration of arsenic in ash, should it contaminate drinking water, could increase cancer risks by several hundred times. “This is hazardous waste, and it should be classified as such,” says Thomas Burke, an environmental risk expert at Johns Hopkins University…
“You can’t talk about clean coal without dealing with this problem,” says Eric Schaeffer, the director of the Environmental Integrity Project, which just came out with a new report finding that there are nearly 100 other largely unregulated wet dumps like the Kingston facility across the U.S.

In reality, we can’t really talk about clean coal — it doesn’t exist. Though the coal industry is right to point out that it has improved filters on coal plants, sending less traditional pollutants like sulfur dioxide and mercury into the air, the toxic waste that remains behind is only growing. The biggest advantage of coal power has been cost — in most cases, it remains much cheaper than cleaner alternatives like wind, solar or natural gas. But the cheapness of coal depends on the fact that external costs — climate change, or the health impacts of air and water pollution from coal — remain external, paid for not by utilities or coal companies but society as a whole. The coal industry itself estimates that taking better care of fly ash could cost as much as $5 billion a year — and if the government imposed a tax or cap on carbon dioxide, the price of coal would certainly rise.

From Time Magazine | Exposing the Myth of Clean Coal Power

1) Scale. How big is the global economy relative to the global ecosystem?
2) Stress development over growth. That is, make the economy better at satisfying human needs, not simply bigger.
3) Make prices tell the ecological truth.
4) Account for nature’s services.
5) The precautionary principle. This is just the age-old wisdom of “first, do no harm” and “look before you leap,” but applied to public policy toward new products (like chemicals) and technologies that could pose serious risk.
6) Commons management.
7) Value women.

In this talk, energy guru Amory Lovins lays out his plan for weaning the US off oil and revitalizing the economy in the process. It’s the subject of his book Winning the Oil Endgame, and he makes it sound fairly simple: On one hand, the deadly risks of continued dependency, and on the other, some win-win solutions.

Environmental scientist David Keith talks about a cheap, effective, shocking solution to climate change: What if we injected a huge cloud of ash into the atmosphere, to deflect sunlight and heat? As an emergency measure to slow a melting ice cap, it could work. Keith discusses why it’s a good idea, why it’s a terrible one — and who, despite the cost, might be tempted to use it.

UPDATE: Removed embedded video due to broken link.

Here is a small extract from the post at WorldChanging:

Amazonian Dark Earth, or terra preta do indio, has mystified science for the last hundred years. Three times richer in nitrogen and phosphorous, and twenty times the carbon of normal soils, terra preta is the legacy of ancient Amazonians who predate Western civilization. Scientists who long debated the capacity of ‘savages’ to transform the virgin rainforest now agree that indigenous people transformed large regions of the Amazon into amazingly fertile black earth.