On June 23 in New York City,  John Todd, one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute,  received the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award for his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World, a practical plan to remediate Appalachian coal lands with

An economy built on environmental restoration, carbon sequestration, renewable energy and ecological design

He wants to apply his decades of experiences with Eco Machines for water remediation to cleaning coal slurries and rebuilding healthy soils from the slag.  He has outlined a process that goes from waste and water treatment to reforestation with a full renewable economy based on biomass and local wind power.  With his experience building Agricultural Industrial Ecologies, as in Burlington, VT, he proposes a regional succession of industrial ecologies that can provide healthy lives and environments for larger populations over centuries if not millenia.

Full report at [pdf aert]
http://challenge.bfi.org/...

This is an edited repost of a rant I wrote as a comment in another diary, but I presumptuously fancied that it merited it's own diary posting, simply for the purposes of advancing discussion.  There are more erudite and authoritative voices in the community who can address the science and the ethics behind each of these suggestions, so I am only offering a precis of my pet peeves about the toys which have characterized the American lifestyle for the past forty years which I find to be completely indefensible today.

And please note that I recognize my own hypocrisy. My generation is responsible for the bulk of the mess we currently must remediate, as my twenty-four year old son is so keen to point out often and repeatedly.

I just received this public information release from Gary Hooser's office and I must say that it makes me proud of the state and of Senator Hooser.  I live on the same island, just down the street from the good State Senator and I commend him and our state legislature for taking the lead in this type of legislation.

I've been hearing about an MIT (student) project to build low-cost solar concentrators using off the shelf materials since January when the project was part of the Independent Activities Period.  (IAP happens in January and anyone from a professor emeritus to a student to a janitor can offer a non-credit course.  It is a hold-over from the student demonstration days of the Sixties™ but less and less of interest is happening during IAP as the years go by.)

Yesterday, I went to see their prototype.  Their breakthrough is not in technology but in materials.  They use standard mirrors that sit in a frame so that they "sag" into a shallow parabolic shape and focus up to 1000 suns on a black coil which can then heat water to as high as 400º F.  This is "low" temperature steam, capable of providing process heat but not enough to run a steam turbine.  The machinery that moves the concentrator to track the sun is an off the shelf TV satellite dish motor.  The model I saw does not yet have an automatic tracking system but, again, off the shelf components are available.  It is an impressive machine.

Saturday, June 21 there will be a

SOLSTICE SOLAR PIZZA PICNIC

at the Somerville Growing Center
corner of Summer Street and Vinal Avenue just outside of Union Square
from high noon to 4 pm.

See the solar water pumps and Growing Center PV system,
the solar peace sculpture,
solar cookers in action,
and solar toys.

Network, learn, and start a solar project of your own.

A Boston Area Solar Energy Association event.

This afternoon I listened offhandedly (while doing much else), to the rerun of Fox News Sunday, and offhandedly heard Virginia governor Tim Kane saying something like:

Obama's plan is to tax new businesses and green businesses at 0%, while raising the capital gains taxes for other capital gains.

My jaw dropped open. This is news to me.

However, if this is the case, it's astonishingly smart. Which is, of course, the sort of thing I've started to expect of the Obama campaign.

But I've been searching all I can, and not finding anything outlining this program. Does someone have a link? I think this is possibly a Presidency-maker.

Why do I think it would it be smart? Five fundamental reasons:

I touched off a bit of intra-diary controversy not so long ago when I posted, in response to nyceve's diary about Health Insurers requiring women to get tubaligations after a C-Section delivery, that I didn't really have a problem with the idea of sterilization after someone had had a child (probably didn't say it in quite the right tone). Of course HR's abounded, outrage was had, rejections and denouncements flew.

I later went back and posted a clarification which included this personal tidbit:

I asked about getting a vasectomy at 23 and was told by a Doctor he couldn't do it because I was single and young. Even though I don't want kids, and have no desire to breed copies of myself, and won't date women that want kids I still couldn't get it done. Just in case I might suddenly get hit on the head with a blunt instrument and turn into a Middle Class Bourgeois douchebag.

So, as a white, urban, educated male, I at least practice what I preach. Or tried to without much success.

Jonathan Soli is a high school senior from Albert Lea, MN.  For two years he has been working on a device that electrolyzes water and injects the separated hydrogen and oxygen gases into the air intake of an internal combustion engine.  This results in a 27.7% increase in fuel efficiency and a 28.6% decrease in CO2.  So far he's tested it only on lawnmower engines but he is also building a small vehicle which he estimates will get over 800 miles per gallon and hopes to experiment on an automobile engine if he can find one he can afford.

Here's his video presentation from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair:
http://intelpr.feedroom.com/...

Here's his local TV station's report on his work:
http://kaaltv.com/...

One high school student, Daniel Burd, figures out how to accelerate the decomposition of plastics and now another is making high efficiency internal combustion engines.  Will high school science save us?

I'm no fun at parties anymore.

I'm like that guy whose only conversational gambit is to talk about the Spassky-Fisher match of 1973. Or the geek who has discovered SecondLife or WorldOfWarcraft. Or the airhead, who only wants to talk about celebrities, and other virtual worlds.

Or more to the point, that guy who has recently converted, and sees everything through the lens of the revealed.

In my case, that lens is cascading, endless bad news about species collapse, environmental degradation, peak oil and gas and phosphorus, toxic breaches and endocrine disruptions, and climate warming leading to ocean acidification. It's the human-made horrors of the last century.

Freeman Dyson, an extremely accomplished scientist and fine writer, has a review of two books on global warming at the NY Review of Books:

A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies
by William Nordhaus
Yale University Press, 234 pp., $28.00

Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto
edited by Ernesto Zedillo
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization/Brookings Institution Press, 237 pp., $26.95 (paper)

As a preface to his review, he raises a very significant point:

...about 8 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year. This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.

I met Robert Lange at MIT at a lecture on international development.  He's a Brandeis physics professor who has been working since November with Jongowe village on the island of Tumbatu about a mile from Unguja, one of the major islands of Zanzibar.  There are no roads, electricity, cars, or bikes on Tumbatu but there are two villages.  Jongowe is one of them and consists of 625 households with several thousand people.

Through the International Collaborative for Science, Education, and the Environment, Inc. (The  ICSEE) and its Village Projects, Professor Lange is helping the village install more efficient stoves then certifying and selling the resulting carbon credits to buy small solar electric systems, a process already proven in Eritrea and Ghana.

These solar electric systems cost about $100.

BBC reports that this year, after nearly a decade of stability, methane in the atmosphere has increased.  Both wind and isotope analyses indicate that the source is probably the Arctic wetlands, melting permafrost.  "Some stations around the Arctic showed rises of more than double" the global average, 0.5%.

Nearly 60% of atmospheric methane is man-made:

herds of cattle and other ungulates, rice production, and leaks of natural gas from pipelines, according to the IPCC. In addition, natural sources of methane include wetlands, termites, oceans, and gas hydrate nodules on the sea floor.

Methane contributes to tropospheric ozone, another greenhouse gas.  Low atmosphere ozone is also a primary source of smog.  Reducing methane in the atmosphere would thus have a double benefit.

We need more thinking about methane sequestration and the methane cycle.

I have been sending out a high volume of action alerts from environmental groups to my email friends lately and I would like to explain some of the reasons why I think they are important and that responding to the environmental crisis warrants urgent attention.

(The following diary is not actually mine, but was written by Melanie, my wife. She has a degree in physics, and is now pursuing a second degree in environmental science with an emphasis in aquatic systems. She will have diary privileges next week, but we wanted to post this sooner. If this is not acceptable under dKos rules, please let us know. We will be sure to identify ourselves appropriately in the comments. -patrickz)

It happened almost a month ago, as I was sitting out on the lawn in front of one of my college's many plain, modern and depressing edifices, eating lunch, sipping my latte and reading P.J. O'Rourke on the Wealth of Nations with a dandelion tucked behind my ear. The book is fun; it's interesting. O'Rourke's conservatism comes out often, but most of the time I can brush it off. It's nothing personal, he's a humorist. Then I come across a certain phrase. I can't remember the precise context (something snarking about wetlands, I think), but he used the term 'ecological activists'.

1. A politician who is running for office changes his stance on issues to match whatever public sentiment is current. He morphs to appear to be one of the crowds of whatever voter group he is campaigning to, no matter how wildly divergent each is on issues and core values. He indulges in innuendo, attacks by surrogates, half-truths, mud-slinging, and outright fabrications about his opponent. Would you expect this person NOT to use those tactics if he wins office?

2. In a future scenario, food supplies worldwide are tightening. China comes to the US grain market determined to buy a huge amount and announces it will pay 50% more than the current market rate for a bushel of US wheat. Would you expect free-market multinational agribusinesses to honor their obligations to maximize shareholder profits or  sell to US food processors for less profit?

The 2008 winner of the $100,000 Buckminster Fuller Challenge is John Todd with his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World, a blueprint for a post coal era and carbon neutral economy in the coal land regions of Appalachia.

The plan includes
detoxifying the trillions of gallons of coal slurry with eco-machines designed to render the material harmless to the environment and local populations as well as to create beneficial products from the treated slurry solids

and
replacing Appalachian coal with renewable resources like Appalachian wind and woody biomass for power and products in a regional agro-forestry ecological land management system that includes all the various sectors of society.

The plan is replicable and scalable, designed to  be carbon neutral if not carbon (and methane) clearing through the use of basic ecological design principles.

John Todd was one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute and has been building eco machines and living structures for forty years.

Vinay Gupta, developer of the Hexayurt Project, a $200 shelter that can be built in about two hours, has a new idea:

The Global Swadeshi Network is a group of people examining infrastructure and technology from a "right-livlihood" perspective, based on Gandhi's concept of swadeshi - "self-reliance, or standing on your own two feet."

He wants to combine Gandhi's Goals with Fuller's Methods as he explained in his vision of the future, "The Unplugged":

Gandhi's model of "self-sufficiency" is the goal: the freedom that comes from owning your own life support system outright is immense. It allows us to disconnect from the national economy as a way of solving the problems of our planet one human at a time.

 
Solar IS Civil Defense
Like this solar LED light and AA battery charger

or this solar/dynamo am/fm/sw radio, similar to the ones US and NATO forces have distributed in Afghanistan.

Solar IS Civil Defense
and, after all,  
we are at war.