late to stimulate

It's late and I'm tired and wandering. As I get older I am remembering my friends, and discovering some are gone.

Transportation in Orbit, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 345, No. 1, 130-142 (1963), George Fox Mott:

Transportation has now no geographical frontiers.

Its role is so vital to modern civilization that it has become more than a service function—it has become a partner of the government, the commerce, and the society which it serves and represents the occupation and livelihood of a large section of the population as well.

Having developed piecemeal, it has been subject to patchwork regulation and is uneven in its performance.

By the nature of the dilemmas facing the industry, transportation administration and co-ordination lag far behind transportation technology. This state is critical today, and a renaissance in transportation has been taking place and is on the verge of great acceleration.

Many leaders in transportation areas are active in planning for and carrying out improvements in transportation policy and operation. Many inequities and operational lags need to be corrected.

Common carriers, the backbone of the system, are operating under financial, political, and manpower difficulties. The rivalry of air and highway carriers has faced the railroads with competition which their heavily regulated quasi-public-utility status has not helped them to meet. Full advantage cannot be taken of technological improvements, due to regulations which are now inequitable or inappropriate or simply unworkable or unwieldy. Labor, from an embattled position at the beginning and during the flush period of transportation expansion, has now become an equal protagonist with management in the transportation system.

Transportation labor and management have not yet reached full co-ordination for total utilization of their resources.

Transportation capital has not been freed of its fetters; costing and pricing have become increasingly unrealistic and inoperative in the market place.

Political pressures now carry equal weight with economic and service factors.

Transport leaders in a pool of experience and knowledge are aware of the imperfections of the system, and many of them have sound plans for replacing dislocation and loss with co-ordination, profit, and the full service efficiency the system is capable of offering.

The last time I visited with George Fox Mott was at the great St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco during the early 80s convention of the Democratic Party. He had been USA Inspector General of Allied Government in Korea and Japan after World War II, and later the Director of the American-Korean Foundation from 1952 until 1962. We were both on the board of Monorail.

A Good Boston Fellow who had known every Secretary of Transportation ever put in office he liked to say.

How Deep Thy Ships?

There's a public infrastructure we don't see, and that's the channels dredged under ships coming to port.

While offering dredges for sale to the Philippines, I remember a story of Ferdinand Marco's brother, perhaps only a story, while in charge of Manila's port dredging. If he liked a company, dredges were regularly sent out to move silt and assure a port of call. If a company didn't 'meet his terms', an underwater mountain was raised near their slips and no ship could pass. It was said that Manila's hydrographic survey moved on a whim and a bank deposit. Ingenious?

765 blog is looking at a new project on an old claw of land in Baltimore. It has all the issues.

Erosion is constantly filling the harbor and the bay. For centuries, dredging has been the invisible accompaniment of transport and logistics. More and more things need to be moved, ships get bigger, channels get deeper, and spoils from dredge are used to build new land and new terminals for larger vessels, which then create even more turbulent churn. Shipping, development, erosion, wakes, and dredging are then caught in a feedback loop, each link in the circle generating more of the next.

Dredging and Port Construction is a large industry.

Ships require deep channels that fill with silt only to require removal. It's a permanent task. Hundreds of millions of tons of material must be removed. Today's port dredges are huge machines that travel from contract to contract or berth nearby larger ports. Great volumes of silt are generated, including millions of tons of toxic plumes.

Billions of tons of sand and soils move along our coasts too. Tides push soils and sand in and out of coastlines and up and down rivers. Sand is migrating roughly parallel to the shore and deposited by ocean currents. As materials migrate, we build perpendicular jetty and groin while dredges pump material back toward shore.

Kudos for Taj Mahal Blues

I roamed into a Lombard Street party in San Francisco forty years ago and began slapping my knees to the blues of Taj Mahal. During a pause, he walked into the kitchen to retrieve two tablespoons and showed me how to use 'em. A wonderful evening.

Taj Mahal, a two-time Grammy winner, will soon be inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

"The blues is played everywhere. There's no place I've been where they don't have blues or aren't interested in blues."

Our focus is where?

A Forum for Alternative Energy Knowledge:

In the United States, we have been trying to build a viable industry out of renewable energies for at least three decades. In that time, we saw it grow in an explosion of interest in the late 70’s and early 80’s, only to die a silent death in the 90’s and first half of this decade. Last year, renewables were once again all the rage; this time with the assumption that they were here to stay. Now, only a few brief months later, when crude prices once again dropped into a temporary depression, the fervor has died.

Why is that?

Are we that fickle? Shortsighted? Irresponsible?

I founded the Energy Management Group in 1978 under an agreement with an association of more than 8000 grocery stores and another agreement to assist 11000 churches to reduce energy cost and impact. There was much enthusiasm until interest rates climbed to double digits, supply side economics became the fashion, and the Wall Street binge roped America. Perhaps throwing our prosperity away is a reply to a complex world with few solutions. Argument rather than vision has dominated public forum and left many treasuries vulnerable to inconsequence and guile. Will crisis and joblessness spark good sense?

Pound-miles and Person-miles

It was easy to be radical in the '70s, the early '70s. We all knew we needed new and no one had yet been made afraid of new ideas or lost their shirt in the game of change.

I and my crew erected an exhibit for the American Institute of Architects 1973 convention in the state's Museum of California History in Oakland (their joke website here). The museum's vast Great Hall became a 'Main Street' with a dozen 'storefronts' on each side as high as 25 feet. Each decade from the 1900's was on display.

Historical pieces and artifacts of each era were props, such as a turn-of-the-century sidewalk clock, a mid-century neon sign or an early retailer's aluminum window frame with it's painted poster of 12 Eggs for 49 Cents, pallets of boxes and a great variety of goods, a classic car. From a collection of photographs, flyers, adverts, drawings and public records spread over a work area the size of a football field, staff and docents edited tens of thousands of pieces over several weeks to display our world for just the few days of the AIA gathering. Money was different then.

A 40ft arch was over the entry, Americaville, painted in red, white & blue. I don't remember if 500 or 1,000 architects arrived opening night. I was enjoying the white wine and truly jumbo prawns. A few architects were angry with this exhibit. I remember their scorn. Most were intrigued and impressed because I remember their quizzical frowns and praise.

The entire large room was showing error, decade by decade, where architecture was losing to planning and planning was lost to transportation.

The exhibits were the actual pieces and records, undeniably easy to see that asphalt and concrete and utilities were the prow of our towns while architectural scale and human living had become an unimportant afterthought. This exhibit disturbed the members, pointing to the destruction of human community, the erasure of detail and art, the dominance of brand and cheaper brands on skies of advertising, the rude criss-cross of highways and stark roads to parking lots, the other tiki-taki, the staccato-timing of human travel, the mechanization of our bones and tissue, the rude intrusion of a handful of mass distributors and their enabling King Car...!

In one century we have re-worked America into a damn grid and a warehouse.

Merely keeping it lit is pilfering our pockets. Confused and bewildered, we truly need GPS gadgets to peek from the sky. It was clear then and it's clear now that intermodal, multinodal and consumer transportation has changed our living more than any penciled neighborhood or artful facade. We said in this 70s exhibit that planning and architecture had lost its potency to become a minor usher on a huge moneyed floor we see all around us.

In the development game, it's not architecture or design, however pretty or smart each fashion or style. It's TPD. Trips Per Day, the fundamental term that is the actuary of distribution hubs and the feasibility of malls for the proximity of our hastily built homes.
Every product and every person is part of millions and billions and trillions of trips.

Every day developers lure and capture these trips. We ask for very little else. There's much inefficient cost and overhead in this buzz to focus our cash. It will not be fixed by worker payroll or the margins of the Big Three versus Foreign Imports. It's not fixed bullying OPEC's gasoline or being bullied by Cargill's ethanol. Nor with hybrids from mailorder showrooms nor a new trillion dollar electric grid. None of these will make us solvent nor sustainable unless we re-work trips.

An entire shift "back to the land" isn't needed. Bio-fiber tents and solar television and filtering our water through a straw? Power plants or lettuce farms on rooftops may not be needed everywhere, but why not a few? Breakthrough ideas will come along here and there without breaking our future or blindly hoisting another empire atop us again and again. For many of us, local is old and new again. Local foods. Local workspace. Local culture and education. Local humanity. For these, we'll need local leaders again.

Failing to require 'total accounting' is the true free ride. Lifecycle and impact costs, some are runaway, can easily be controlled along with keeping the books on production and distribution and triple-net profits.

Society is coughing up while profiteers and shareholders are long gone. But that's another story.

We waste too much weight and time in distance.

For our goods, for our services, for our work and our fun too, a tremendous first step in our energy and impact crisis is merely counting all the steps. And trips.

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From Wiki, on Trips Per Day

The Institute of Transportation Engineers's Trip Generation informational report provides trip generation rates for numerous land use and building types. The planner can add local adjustment factors and treat mixes of uses with ease. Ongoing work is adding to the stockpile of numbers; over 4000 studies were aggregated for the current edition.

ITE Procedures estimate the number of trips entering or exiting a site at a given time (sometimes the number entering and exiting combined is estimated). ITE Rates are functions of type of development, and square footage, number of gas pumps, number of dwelling units, or other standard measurable things, usually produced in site plans. They are typically of the form Trips = a + b * Area OR Trips = a + bln(Area). They do not consider location, competitors, complements, the cost of transportation, or many other obviously likely important factors. They are often estimated based on very few observations (a non-statistically significant sample). Many localities require their use to ensure adequate public facilities for growth management and subdivision approval.

Other keywords and phrases:

Per capita person trips per day...

The average household trip rate is 11.1 trips per day (all modes), but vary over the week. Mondays are the lowest, with 10.1 trips per day...

Traffic estimates for a planned Wal-Mart suggest that the store won't overburden nearby roads... 2000 trips per day and ultimately over 16000 trips per day, obviously requiring an enlarged roadway...

Increase in vehicles trips per day: (Note: The applicant may be required to provide the necessary engineering studies...)

Americans average 9.7 trips per day per household.

Patents for Free

Xerox is releasing for free 11 patents used for removing solvents from soil and water. Anyone with a contaminated site can use the technology - old gas stations, dry cleaners and chemical facilities - more than 178,000 sites across America.

The process involves removing the volatile organic pollutants directly from the water and soil with a 50-horsepower vacuum. The time saver: both the ground and water are cleaned simultaneously, instead of separately, with the vacuum sucking up 98 percent of volatile organic solvents, such as carcinogenic toluene, benzene and others.

Over 175 firms are releasing patents to help with environmental cleanup. Eco-Patents Commons developed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development puts environmental sustainability patents into the public domain.

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More than twenty years ago I joined with Diamond Shamrock, a Texas oil and chemical firm, to bring new clean up technology to market. They had appointed the nation's first officer of environmental management and had several research programs directed toward decontaminating land. Our goal was to use slurries of newly developed bacteria mixtures to clean contaminated soil under gas stations and refineries.

After many months of testing and promotion, the program failed to bring the technology through regulatory agencies. Instead of robust decontamination, a policy known as 'out gassing' was chosen where land is left fallow for months or years. Removing licensing fees and using tested methods may change the economics and again provide an opportunity for 'true' clean-up of contaminated soil and water.

Frank Emery Cox

One of my 'mentors'.

Oh, the stories.

In 1942 or 43, a staff general came to ask if there was enough Nevada electricity to melt aluminum into bomb bay doors. Frank woke at 3AM and answered positively by 3PM.

In 1944 or 45, believing we wouldn't need aluminum after the war, a staff general came to ask if there was another way increase jobs. Then, aircraft was the only important use of aluminum.

Frank invited 50 officers to watch a P-59 jet try to blow down his new Kawneer aluminum wall, and later proved aluminum at Colorado's impressive Air Force Academy.

Frank helped erect more than 1,500 aluminum and glass shopping centers across the USA.

When he reached 97, I asked if he wanted his work known beyond a handful that called him the 'grandfather of the shopping center'. He answered, "It's just factors. It's just seeing what's needed and putting it there. Nobody needs to learn that more than once."

Humble but proud of one thing, Frank said he was the only American to own a share of the Laphroaig Distillery.

Backyard Airport

Great little movie of a small plane that takes off and lands in less than 100 feet. Small crowd elated. Though private aviation is hampered by extremely high liability insurance coverage, many dedicated experimenters continue to innovate.

http://www.flixxy.com/short-field-takeoff-landing-airplane.htm

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Wanting to reduce remote and tribal poverty without huge industrial cost or impact, more than 15 years ago I set up a program to fabricate 10,000 Short Take Off & Landing (STOL) airplanes in the Philippines. Some components were European, some American, with fabrication planned near Manila.

Because of isolation due to a lack of roads or other access to income, indigenous and artisan regions are hampered, youth run to city slums and locals become suspicious and angry - a permanent challenge for island nations.

Even with a cargo of only 500-1000lbs, for many regions a STOL freight infrastructure is a smart policy.

(But o' woe, it seemed that somebody big in PI was against the idea. There's always somebody big in PI. We learned the containerized shipment of our sample plane was held in Philippine Customs and we were unable to release it after more than two years....!

What? We worry?

While McBush pins laurel you like, Hillary woos paychecks in peril; while Obama readies for our planet in peril, argument isn't enough for tomorrow.

Costs rise and then rise. Warm up to that globally!

After several days exchanging this and that, I find myself wondering how you are, what you're doing, is all OK?

The first OPEC noise of 1973 warmed me to the idea of serving our townships, nation and world by becoming proficient about our energy use and our world's sustainability. California certified the first Energy Auditors in the mid-70s and I was number 84 and brought ideas to 6400 grocery stores and 8000 church buildings to cut ourselves away from oil.

Proficient is the wrong term because what we haven't done has no expertise. Today's OPEC steers a rope around us and neither energy use or sustainability has been made ready. You can say it's greed done it, or unhealthy denial, or tired politics; mere human game.

But I can say I've failed too. For example, a reverse polarity electromagnetic engine might travel further on a cup than gas engines on a barrel, but I failed to finish a prototype to prove it (if I could). Why? Because incredulity tore me to ribbons. A simple pencil can turn a house toward the sun to soak up enough heat to reduce monthly drain. I designed passive solar in the 70s - chilly Lake Tahoe, others in Sonoma and Marin - to demonstrate what light or mass can achieve, what convection delivers and array can bring. But paying for incredulity costs more than buying innovation. Two samples of one hundred....

I shouldn't mention I worked to put gold mine claims on Federal waters of the SFBay with a tug, a barge and a windmill to remove colloidal precious particles using wind and electrolysis and accretion with a sideline of selling the cleaned water before it's lost to the Pacific. Nor that I promoted electron sterilization to thwart radioactive food irradiation. Or molecular sieves for inert gas refrigeration to ship strawberries and asparagus in bulk. Or closed loop industrial pallet and crate recycling instead of our third rank waste of trees. I've already told you about soy diesel to urban bus lines 25 years ago! So said this much, you should know the cheapest new transport system on earth is to suspend transit over our existing roads; airway already bought. Incredulity stops it. A few samples of dozens....

Stop losing things to wrong people, people. I'm too old to want much now but you should look for earnest folks and get out of the house and tinker with your friends. Soon.

Credulity needs you. It's time to be what you're believing.

Learner to Learner

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched telemedicine as a requirement for manned space flight, squeezing a stream of images into radio audio circuits and later for telephone lines.

Telemedicine consultation was used over Intelsat after the devastating 1989 earthquake in Soviet Armenia. In addition to assist scans, technique allows transmission of x-rays, nuclear scans, ultrasonic imagery, thermograms, electrocardiograms or live views of patient. Also allows conferencing and consultation among medical centers, general practitioners, specialists and disease control centers.

Much of the progress at JPL relied on the work of Glen Southworth's several patents and equipment that he developed at his firm Colorado Video, such as his 1970 camera and scanning processor.

"Paper and pencil are wonderful inventions, watercolors and oil are cheap. But let's look at it closely - these techniques are millennia old and we're in an electronic era. Video image creation and manipulation is fast, fascinating, and capable of effects never dreamed of by daVinci or Michelangelo."

Glen Southworth enjoyed birdwatching and turned his cameras toward the sky to chart bird flight activity.

He wrote about his patent,
"I've had more fun with this device than anything else that I've worked with and I continue to find new ways of looking at the world.

"Use a television camera to look at the sky, and watch what's going on with a TV monitor. We're no longer restricted to those nice summer days, but can be puttering around the house, or even be at work if you have a window and a view of the sky."

JPL's 1984 spinoff with Southworth's Colorado Video introduced business and industry to teleconferencing, cable TV news, transmission of scientific/engineering data, security, information retrieval, insurance claim adjustment, instructional programs, and remote viewing of advertising layouts, real estate, construction sites or products.

"Why waste time at the airport and rack up travel expenses when you can hold that business meeting over the Internet?" Another pioneer at NASA, Elliot Gold says, "Teleconferencing isn't just for replacement of travel," emphasizes Gold, noting that reading books wasn't replaced by radio, radio wasn't replaced by TV, TV wasn't replaced by other video technologies. Teleconferencing, quite simply, he says, "is for holding certain types of meetings that couldn't be held by any other means."

I've just noticed that Glen Southworth passed away in 2006. Glen has been acknowledged for his efforts, receiving several awards including the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Engineering Award.

In the early 1980's I worked with Bruce Sullivan, an officer of the pioneering text service called "The Source", who introduced me to Colorado Video. We pioneered 'slow scan' video as "telestrategic industry", showing workable remote visual connections using unfiltered phone lines and radio. We demonstrated the technology all over California.

During the oil embargo of the 70s, the National Science Foundation predicted that as much as 20 percent of business travel could be displaced by teleconferencing. Video conferencing has since vastly improved and today a web meeting is more than a curiosity. Companies that provide equipment and service for remote conferencing are thriving.

It seems to take forever, but a new infrastructure is emerging, partly to enable IT and Internet transactions and increasingly to improve communications and reduce both costs and the excess use of fossil fuels.

Writing about Green Thinking on his blog, David Tebbut says "I think the bottom line is for everyone to start thinking in terms of input-process-output. (Sound familiar?)

"In a fractally sort of way, this can be applied from macro to micro level.

"From the company looking at what it's doing right down to an individual, they are all capable of looking at what resources they draw on, how they exploit them and what outputs result, both good and bad. IT can raise its game...

But, to radically reduce costs and alter our environmental impact, we don't just need to reprogram our computers. We actually need to reprogram our brains."

Counting Killer Whales

The Pacific Northwest, especially near Alaska and along the Queen Charlotte Islands is wet, more wet, and then it rains.

From early May until September in the early 1960s, I counted both trees and killer whales among the coastal islands and inlets. Of 150 summer days only 11 were dry.

I was paid to survey forests, to audit old growth trees and count new seedlings, but I was more than eager to cruise the channels to visit and count the Orca.


To live in these wilderness forty years ago, there were no eco-tours, kayak trips or government funded biology jobs. And I was too young.

I was 16 but I'd told the loggers in Sandspit I was 18 and raised with a chainsaw wearing nail bottom boots, joking that if hired I was ready to start in the dark. After a few months of logging, labor and learning, I took over the timber survey, a job that required boating among the islands.

During each day navigating not far from from shore but often many miles from camp, pods of orca whale would pass through the ocean straights and often very near my small inboard boat. I'd stop to drift quietly as they slowly passed. My breath would stop; a sensation of awe fused in the terrific experience of being among creatures so fitted in this great earth.

Intensive field research of the orca whale began in the late 1970s, finding three distinct type of orca that circulate the coastal waters. The 'resident' whales, with a shorter fin, can generally be seen during the summer from Alaska down in to Puget Sound. The more aloof 'transient' whales hug close to the entire western coast of North America. There's a smaller number of 'open ocean' killer whales, often nicked and scarred because it's believed part of their diet is shark.

The northern coast of the Pacific is rugged. I was amazed as the mountains met the sea as if an entire continent had been squeezed. Our beaches, grasslands and forests to the line of rock and snow were in one view, from ocean to mountain top, as if compressed into a shorter box.

I found it easy to climb these peaks yet I nearly fell into a crevasse while crossing a flow of ice. Trembling but holding strong to an edge, I was shunning the nightmare I would be found years later as my bones melted through the bottom.


The endless precipitation has lifted robust and endless forests, now among the most critical and endangered rainforests on earth.

These dense forests are western red cedar and spruce on pre-glacial land almost 14,000 years old that stretch from Oregon to Alaska. Among 100s of islands south of Alaska, many so close together I could squeeze my boat between them only at high tide, the Haida have survived at least 9,000 years.

In this bountiful damp, from southeast Alaska to the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, the Haida developed a unique and strong culture in equal clans of the Raven and the Eagle, legendary for their art such as 'Raven Releasing the Sun' or "Raven Stealing the Moon",







Haida believe Humans are a direct result of the supernatural and natural. A first contact explorer noted that the "Haida were so intertwined with the super-natural world before contact that we used to have to sing and dance hard to prove we were human."


Today it's the totem pole and the bighouse of the potlatch that top the unique character of these varied tribes, and they too are great creatures also fitted to the earth.

Europe's new renewable power grid

Sustainable power and new green developments might become the most imaginative and largest projects in history.

Ecotality discusses a new power grid for Europe, Africa and the Middle East that proposes 1,000 renewable power plants for 100 billion watts of power. For comparison, Britain’s total electricity generating capacity is 12 billion watts.

More than a 100 steam concentrator solar power stations will each require 1,000 mirrors over a square kilometer. Many sites will include adjacent desalination plants to provide desert countries with fresh water. Many new hydro, biomass and geothermal power plants are also planned.

The project is being managed under the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Corporation that is admitting that its current rate projections are double what Europe now pays for power from coal.

Along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, Libya is adding similar intercontinental-scale engineering with its plans for the world's largest green project.

Restoring the ancient Greek city of Cyrene - taken by the Romans around 631 BC to begin their empire - is a focal point of the project. As well, Libya will install 136 miles of sustainable improvements along 'one of the few remaining undeveloped coastlines in the world'.

Over 2,000 square miles will be developed, much irrigated by the nearly completed Great Man-Made River Project, which has held the record as the world's largest engineering project for many years.

In a labyrinth of 1,000 miles of pipe - many 25ft. diameter concrete pipelines - the deep aquifers of north Sahara and of the Atlas Mountains are bringing unlimited irrigation and fresh water as far north as Tripoli. It was said that upon completion of the agricultural build-out, Libya could export up to one third of Europe's daily demand for fresh produce!




During the mid-1980s, I helped manage an export contract of over $250million large diameter iron pipe to be made in Arkansas for 450 miles of this project, but the sale was denied because of an economic embargo against Libya. Whether Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea, or recently, Venezuela, it's always smart, sometimes a required duty, to request advice and authorization from OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the US Department of the Treasury, before considering any activity with states that are not 100% friendly to the USA.

Our motive at the time was to keep the last public works iron pipe manufacturer in the USA from an inevitable bankruptcy. We knew that several larger US firms were working on behalf of Libya on the project, as well as several allies. The idea was conceived in the 1950s by Brown & Root - which moved its division to London to remove itself from the rules of the embargo.

After considerable lobbying, we found that President Reagan's Secretary of the Treasury James Baker was in favor of our entirely civilian export proposal, but Vice President George Bush was strongly against it.

It's my opinion that, unlike his son's willingness to invade, the senior George Bush sought to subvert economic activity in any radical state, oil-funded or otherwise, and that he maintains his belief that economic embargo are potent US foreign policy tools.

But using economic embargo has serious distractors too. Unlike the isolation caused during an embargo, over many years Europe has maintained relations with volatile states and finds it far easier to restore and develop normal relations.

Green is slow

From the mid- to late 80s, I helped set up biodiesel distribution systems in northern California.

From Procter & Gamble, which was pooling its oilseed farmers across the grain belt, we had millions of gallons ready to ship via cross country rail to tank farms throughout the region.

We went everywhere. Our first fleet targets were to convert the various bus systems of the San Francisco Bay Area to soybean diesel. AC Transit of the East Bay and the Golden Gate bus system of Marin/Sonoma were the most willing. Several federal grants and other incentives were arranged to offset the cost per gallon against high volume commodity diesel fuel.

After many attempts though, after many presentations, reports and meetings, there really was insufficient interest and never a vigorous commitment to adopt new and unfamiliar supplies. Even if managers would leap to the vanguard of 'green', ordinary diesel was cheap, and easier. Several administrators chose a few 'showcase' projects, but it seemed to me these so-called trials were merely self-satisfying politics; conversations for insider cocktail parties, or new items on a resume.

Many are now realizing that fuel from food crops may not be best in the long term, perhaps neither clean nor sustainable, yet finally San Francisco is trumpeting its new 'green'.

But they're actually 20 years late!! Now you know, as it's said, the rest of the story!

SAN FRANCISCO fleet is all biodiesel
[link]
30.nov.07
New York Times
Carolyn Marshall

San Francisco -- Claiming it now has the largest green fleet in the nation, the city of San Francisco this week completed a yearlong project to convert its entire array of diesel vehicles — from ambulances to street sweepers — to biodiesel, a clean-burning and renewable fuel that holds promise for helping to reduce greenhouse gases.

Using virgin soy oil bought from producers in the Midwest, officials were cited as saying that as of Friday, all of the city’s 1,500 diesel vehicles were powered with the environmentally friendlier fuel, intended to sharply reduce toxic diesel exhaust linked to a higher risk of asthma and premature death.

I got a kick out of the shrewd 'power words' sprinkled throughout, as if written by savvy politicians and not merely simple reporting at the NYTimes - words such as 'green fleet', 'virgin soy', 'friendly fuel', and these zingers too: 'toxic diesel' 'risk of asthma', 'premature death' !!

Why age discrimination is illegal

While in my late thirties, a 73 year old business partner said to me,

"Old men do things that young men think there is not enough time for."

Isn't that the very best and often true?

Travel up

Too many look for ideal transportation, but our solutions do not need to be fancy.

I believe that a 'true' monorail is an overlooked transportation option.

An iron track suspended over an existing road is the most effective transportation option available.

The right of way is already purchased.

An iron wheel on an iron track is tremendously efficient. Track and beams are both inexpensive and common.

Suspending a weight costs less than lifting a weight. Rights of way are costly and too many transit ideas, such as BART or Maglev, lift a costly roadbed into the air, but suspending weight over existing roadway requires far less engineering.

A monorail is simple and easy corridor. Cargo and passengers, containers or cars, are moved along ordinary pathway.

Developing routes over existing roads is developing unused air. There's the saving and the wealth.

Is Burma for sale?

In a silly attempt to buy Burma and shunt the junta into becoming wealthy corporate shareholders, I wish my efforts had been successful twenty years ago. But I still wonder if a mercantile approach in Myanmar wouldn't be effective. Greed has colors other than the saffron and blood red we see today. But I can tell you that companies and institutions vacated Burma when conditions began to affect their brand and reputation, and that's the color of yellow. Levi's was sewing jeans. Macy's fashion. Union Carbide held on for a few years. There's a neon list of top firms that made it easy for the pickup truck pythons to strangle Burma. They just walked away. What now?

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Simon Tisdall at The Guardian states:

Western governments are right to condemn the repression in Burma. But for the most part, their actions, inaction and indifference have strengthened the generals - and they should take their share of the blame for what is happening now.

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Buying off threats is not customary, but it's cheaper.

We would have saved 100s of billions buying Saddam Hussein.

The former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar kept notes and recorded his meeting in Crawford, Texas with George W. Bush. He's "revealed a previously undisclosed initiative to avert war in Iraq by spiriting Saddam Hussein out of the country." Cost? A bargain at one billion.

Full story here.

The end of village

In most racks of records, it was the same albums over and over... but Village Music took a more intimate approach to inventory becoming important to many in the music business and cherished in its community.

B.B. King brought his bus several hundred miles after a performance in Nevada to spend a few hours shopping here.

Top artists from around the world stopped here, and many of the legends of California music such as Ry Cooder, Santana, Bobby Weir, Bonnie Raitt. Even the continental Mick Jagger. Click here for a larger version of this grand picture.

Now stars and fans are saying a bluesy goodbye to a great, great record store.

Village Music in Mill Valley, California is closing after fifty years, along with thirty-five percent of America's small record stores that have closed since 2003.


I lived in Mill Valley and spent years enjoying the downtown village culture.

I crafted a retail store across the street from Village Music that sold only custom and used blue jeans, built a stunning nursery store called 'The Park at Old Brown's', plus an espresso cafe nearby known as the "Be Here Now Cafe" - way 'a-head' of its time.

It took awhile to find a willing old barn before I brought a truckload of weathered redwood planks to hammer on the walls of the Sweetwater Saloon.

One of the most well-known and relaxed music establishments in the USA, unless outside the door when a famous group or rock star came to town, the Sweetwater desparately needs help - a surprise 30-day lease termination after 30 years of paying rent!

"Bottom line is, I can't pay the rent here."
Northern California village culture has taken a beating from development pressures, perhaps more than any similar region as San Francisco quickly and without notice became a global financial center. Local folks in Marin County have paid skyrocketing prices that today only a mono-culture of the very rich can comfortably afford.

A forgotten use of oil

Five hundred miles north of Montana is the Alberta Tar Sands, site of a booming oil economy that is changing the industrial structure of western Canada.

But there had been a previous economic boom in the area.

First Nations Cree used the sticky surface deposits of tar to waterproof their canoe. When Peter Pond arrived in the 1770s, he quickly created a new commodity for traders and boat builders across North America.

“Peter Pond stalked into the hall, a pack of dogs at his heels. The gray-haired giant had not shaved in weeks, his buckskins were stained, and he was badly in need of a bath.

"But his natural dignity was overwhelming. He ate a large venison steak, a platter of bear-bacon, and a moose liver. He insisted his dogs be given fresh meat, too.”

From the Peter Pond Society:
Peter Pond (1740-1807) made the first maps of North America west of Hudson's Bay. The European frontier was his trading post on the Athabasca River near today's oil sands projects. [area wiki]

While a co-founder of the Northwest Company, Pond had inspired Alexander Mackenzie to become the first European explorer to reach the Pacific Ocean overland across North America in 1793. Thomas Jefferson's famous Lewis and Clark Expedition reached the Pacific in 1805.

Incidentally, as well as fur pelts another principal frontier product was making pounded meat called pemmican, longer lasting and more nutritious than today's jerky. Flattened by pounding with stones and mixed with fat, the dried meat was a food staple for decades, commanding top prices and diverting the use of tallow from the candle market. Trading posts aggressively bartered for pemmican supplies using liquor, tobacco, powder, balls, knives, awls, brass rings, brass wire, blue beads and trinkets. [An insightful story of frontier pemmican here] An odd use of frontier animals was spreading beaver tail fat on a canoe to lubricate its speed in the water.

NB:

My great grandfather is honored as a 'Royal Canadian Gentleman Adventurer of the Hudson Bay'. While giving steps and river journeys across then wilderness from Tennessee, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and the provinces Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, he looked for lands where folks could settle.

The story I remember from my grandfather is his father's pride in discovering the waters, land for crops, and ridges of good defense near the land now known as North Battleford, Saskatchewan.

In those mid-1800s, think a moment why a good name for a settlement would be North Battleford. Telling fellow pioneers of a place in the wilderness where its lands will feed you, he also said it will help defend a likely battle and you may escape at a place to cross the river.

Rampaging Particles and Dr. John Gofman

There's the journey of our Earth and its magnificent shields against high-energy particles. And there's the journey of the cells in our body with the risks we encounter from speeding particle energy.

While thinking of conversations with Dr. John Gofman, remembering, after he's left us at the age of 88, the grand realm of the invisible is lifted to the top my day.

It's a stunning exercise to teach my brain that mass is not what I perceive. Thoughts are marvelous, thinking is tremendous, living is fantastic and exploring the vast infinities of form and energy is pure fun. The moment is eternity.

After posting about John Gofman in Sunburn and Bowling Balls, I found this article at Counterpunch where Russel D. Hoffman writes in 'My Favorite Scientists':

"He was the best, and so naturally, the nuclear industry hated him, denounced him, tried to discredit him, and, whenever possible, ignored him.

"They hated him because they could not disprove his theory that low level radiation was a lot more harmful than officially recognized, and potentially deadly down to the last radioactive atom.

"Gofman never was discredited, and his research stands. Radiation is dangerous down to the last decay, and Gofman is our hero. His work on the Manhattan Project should have made him a hero to the rest of society, as well, but America doesn't like anyone who questions the standard dogma of the nuclear age, so he was never recognized for his contributions to our understanding, or his vital contributions to the war effort."

Are we listening?
Biopact reports that 250 new nuclear power plants have been approved in our rush to offset fossil fuels.

"Because of the serious price increases for oil and gas and growing awareness of the need to mitigate climate change, nuclear has become an attractive option. Several countries are investing heavily in the technology.

"According to the World Nuclear Association, 28 new plants are currently under construction, construction plans for 64 others have been approved and another 158 are planned for the near future. The bulk of these projects can be found in China, Russia and India.

"In total some 250 new plants are in the pipeline, against the 440 that currently dot the planet.

We must make every effort to diligently restrain and control radiation in our environment.

The impact of radiation is complex physical, chemical, and biological events. In seconds, there's damage to DNA, proteins and more. In minutes, the cell changes genes and proteins.


"Time has proven Gofman correct about low-level radiation. Over the years the accepted standards have become more stringent, not less. On three separate occasions the International Commission for Radiation Protection (ICRP), which draws up the rules for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has tightened up the standards.

"In 2005 Gofman was finally vindicated in full when the National Academy of Sciences, after a five-year comprehensive investigation, released a 700-page report that endorsed what he and a few other brave scientists have been saying for many years, namely, that all radiation exposure is cumulative and adds to the risk of cancer.

"The notion of a safe dose is an oxymoron."

To manage radioactive discards from power plants, medical devices and weapons for tens of thousands of years is a challenge I do not believe humanity can easily achieve.

But much is achieved every day as choices become increasingly clear while we transit from an industrial revolution toward our sustainable frontier.

Sunburn and bowling balls

This is a roundabout post in memory of Dr. John Gofman, the 'father of the anti-nuclear movement'.

A nanosecond is one billionth of a second.

In a billionth of a second, light travels one foot.

A picosecond is a trillionth of a second.
One millionth of one millionth of a second.
A billion times faster than a second. [wiki]

That's the time taken for light to move one millimeter.

Our cells can be damaged in a trillionth of a second.
By scanning DNA molecules, by looking over the molecules using equipment that can "see" the position of the parts of us that are rapidly vibrating at these incredible speeds, scientists have seen DNA get 'sunburned'.

The damage happens with astounding speed -- in less than one picosecond, or one millionth of one millionth of a second. The journal Science, reported that the damage depends greatly on the position of the DNA at the moment the UV strikes the molecule.

Striking a molecule?
That's what Dr. John Gofman was warning us about.

A pioneer at Lawrence Livermore and the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a pioneer on the health effects of radiation, a co-discoverer of uranium-233, and an articulate and effective critic of the safety aspects of the U.S. atomic energy programs, Dr. Gofman traveled the world with this warning,

"Most particles go right through us. But we truly need to worry about the occasional 'bowling ball' that can wreak havoc as it collides with one of the molecules in our body."

Dr. Gofman passed away this week at the age of 88.

His obituary in the LATimes says that John Gofman was "Often called the father of the antinuclear movement, Gofman and his colleague at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Arthur R. Tamplin, developed data in 1969 showing that the risk from low doses of radiation was 20 times higher than stated by the government.

"Most of their conclusions have subsequently been validated, but critics say the risks have been ignored by an electric power industry that sees nuclear energy as a pollution-free alternative to fossil fuels and by a medical industry that continues to use much larger amounts of radiation for medical tests than are required."

Dr. John Gofman (second from left), the first Associate Director for the Biomedical Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is shown discussing an abnormal chromosome pattern in malignant cells.

"He always stood up for the integrity of science," said Charles Weiner, professor emeritus of the history of science at MIT.

"He was really an original voice" in the debate over the risks of nuclear power, Weiner said, "someone who was an insider in nuclear weapons production who was very highly regarded by leaders in the field . . . and who brought credential, credibility and authority."

Until his death, Gofman's position continued to be that there is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation.

"Licensing a nuclear power plant is, in my view, licensing random premeditated murder."

Dr. Gofman was familiar with atomic radiation. He created some of the first plutonium, the raw material used by Robert Oppenheimer for the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project
.

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John Gofman was a strong and gregarious man that I very much enjoyed as a friend. I distinctly recall our conversation about random particle 'bowling balls' that can destroy a cell or propel it into accelerated growth as cancer.

As a craft builder in the early 70s, I spent much of a year creating interior trim and custom furnishings for his San Francisco home. The extensive interior was hand built of almost 100% coastal heart redwood which ironically ended my construction career because of sequoiosis, a pulmonary disease caused by long term exposure to particles of redwood dust.

The space inside an atom
Here's more about atoms and particles. It's true that most cosmic particles and atomic radiation will pass through us, as well as natural background radiation from the earth.

Proportionately, there is more empty space between an atom's nucleus and its first electron than between the Sun and Pluto!

When you figure out how to use this awkward page at Phrenopolis, you'll see an atom from the inside. You'll gain an elementary sense of the space inside an atom. The author says,

"I used to think that things like rocks and buildings and my own skeleton were fairly solid. But they're made up of atoms, and atoms, as you can see here, contain so little actual material that they can barely be said to exist. We are all phantoms."

Update:
Here's a YouTube exploration of the space inside an atom and why particles go through us, most often.

This video segment adapted from A Science Odyssey uses models, vivid descriptions, and analogies to explain the structural integrity of matter at the atomic level.

Centenary of Scouting

The Scout Movement is 100 years old.

Around 40,000 youngsters from 151 countries are taking part in the biggest jamboree in the history of scouting [wiki]. The first Scout Camp of twenty boys was opened in 1907 by the Movement's founder Robert Baden-Powell.

Now there are millions of girls and boys, men and women from every race, religion and culture. Scouting for Boys by Robert Baden-Powell went on to become the 20th Century's fourth highest-selling book

A Merit Badge for Squirrel Stew?
As well as knots, the Scouting movement helped me learn to make squirrel stew while out in the winter bush. It froze so fast I used my hatchet to slice extra helpings into a red-hot skillet. I learned to spin near the fire to keep both sides of my body warm, and to laugh with friends to heat the night air inside our lean-to of spruce branches.

My Scouting years were in northwest Canada about 45 years ago where learning handy skills was essential. What great fun! What serious effort! The catalog of education, the challenging tasks, with young and earnest allies! Scouting helped me grow. I am grateful.

When a trillion sensors rule

Our world will soon be populated with trillions of machines.

David Clark, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped develop the internet, believes that in 15 or 20 years' time the network will need to accommodate a trillion devices.

A million seconds equals 11.5 days, a billion seconds is 32 years and a trillion is 32,000 years.

These ideas have been floating around for years, variously known as “ubiquitous computing”, “embedded networking” and “the pervasive internet”. The phenomenon “could well dwarf previous milestones in the information revolution”, according to a 2001 report entitled “Embedded, Everywhere” by America's National Research Council, part of the respected National Academy of Sciences. A report by a United Nations agency in 2005 called it “The Internet of Things”. More at the Economist.

It's beginning now.
Popular Mechanics: "everything that could benefit from a microchip inside will have a microchip inside".

Machine communication will become part of the fabric of life.

Several years ago I was developing uses for systems based at Cybersensor, Inc. Now defunct even after a fast rise to Wall Street, for a short time the firm promised to introduce a simple, low-cost, internet-enabled wireless communications for companies seeking monitoring and control of diverse types of equipment or systems. "There's a whole ecosystem of hardware, software and service guys springing up." (New York Times 26 Jul 2004)

New Daedalus, a new blog about 'intelligent architecture", is asking What if you owned an intelligent building? For business parks in the San Francisco area, I promoted intelligent building systems in the early 1980s. Calling it 'smartitecture' under my Telestrategic Consulting firm, seminars introduced developers to time- and service-controlled buildings, including security, facilities and utilities management, of course, but also private telecom, tenant data and office services.

Buildings, roads, farms and animals, our homes and cars, i.d. tags in our dry cleaning? We are entering another revolution - in controllers.

But no fresh fruits and vegetables

Sally Peck in her post The Slaughtered Lamb tells us about purchasing food in London with a very little cash.

She points to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a report by a fellow journalist who "joins the millions of Americans working for minimum wage and describes her experience. Her income barely covers survival, she nearly ends up in a shelter, and she applies for government food aid, which ends up including things like candy bars but no fresh fruits and vegetables."

Good ol' government of error!

It's not only government food programs for the poor where we are failing. While eagerly pilfering pay checks, the marketplace is failing as well. Several studies show much lower quality food is put on sale in lower income regions - and often sold at at higher prices than folks pay in wealthier regions.

We may invest more for outlets selling costly food than wholesome food. Guiding farmers from the helm of the city of New York, candidate Rudolph Giuliani has made this an issue in the past. Clinton's Agriculture Secretary has made this an issue, saying that too many neighborhoods pay more for lower quality food.

The quality, variety and cost of our food supply is a persistent signature of our social growth, and our shortcomings. In the long view, I know we are most often improving our human lot, but there are many haunting errors.

Several studies show much lower quality foodstuffs are put on sale in lower income regions. There are tremendous improvements and for much to be grateful, but our producers and vendors can easily neglect providing quality and price for most of us and the poor of us

It surprises me always while scouring a retail store for nourishing food only and good price only. Were these the only food category, the store might be ninety percent smaller! If we were to replace products that entice and profiteer with only products of top value and mere goodness, excess shelf space might cause a national commercial land crash.

We can be distracted. Our efforts are drawn to entertain our profitable customers, today's plutocracy, leaving a great number of folks gathering not the bacon but the drippings under the so-called 'wealth effect'.

The last decades seem writ for the elite - more wine than grapes. I think we lose our purpose when we rely too much on doing too much for fashion and cash rather than for the prosperity of the entire community.

It's a better day when we celebrate better living: better peaches, better apples, better berries... and always better prices to us all.

In the 1970s, I co-founded a food purchasing cooperative - a "food conspiracy" in Marin County - that organized community volunteers to discover regional farms and top quality producers in the San Francisco Bay Area. I quickly learned what we were not getting in our local supermarkets. These days, the local food movement is a growth sector, as it must be, although we must be aware that local food may not be either the highest quality or the most ecologically produced.

What's unknown?

A bit about the many, many arrangements we can find in every bucket.

Before California Assemblyman Bill Filante made a bid for Congress in 1992, we enjoyed several conversations about our culture and how poorly we understand probability.

Random numbers are misunderstood as folks buy lottery tickets of astronomical odds. The late assemblyman was staunchly against government lottery, not merely because State lotteries pilfer pockets, but because he worried about a wasting of purpose.

Government, he asserted, must never operate a program that will require ignorance of its citizens.

We must teach each other the vast difference between what's likely and what's random. After pulling the handle for a few coins, we must learn how ingeniously we convince ourselves that the next bet will deliver a few more coins and, as if lubricating Providence, one more bet will gift our riches and our deserved relief.

We make errors whenever we believe what we fail to measure. We too often make errors of assumption in our gambit to read trends and decipher patterns. Major policy changes and significant spending are often based on quick conjecture that we trammel into winning consensus. We easily let ourselves tweak models by removing complexity, ignoring ambiguity and failing to capture fringe events.

We trick ourselves if we do not understand probability,
because we find reasons where none exist.

Discovery is most often by accident. Many breakthrough inventions were unintended. It may be that randomness has better luck than most research.

Is it better when we try to evaluate stock markets? Known by 'The Black Swan' and reminding us about the unsteadiness of circumstances, Nassim Nicholas Taleb may be Wall Street’s principal dissident. [wiki]

"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know...."

Replying to eager investors, Taleb accounts for upsetting conventional views when he says, "Let us understand the true odds of financial ruin, so we can enter the markets prepared." His book Fooled by Randomness is selected by Fortune as one of “The Smartest Books of All Time”.

Some say Taleb's caution requires a new understanding of what we call heroic...

"The truth is that we associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb back from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong. That is the lesson of Nassim Taleb and the lesson of our volatile times.

"There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.” – Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, April 2002

Arlene Goldarb says that Taleb’s sense of our problem is that we do not know how much we don’t know. "What Taleb has already given me are much better reasons than my own instincts to do two things I’ve been advocating loud and long: distrust predictions and question theories."

Thinking about how we look at our historical achievements, she repeats Taleb's assertion that '... almost all of the discoveries that have had tremendous impact on our culture were accidents in the sense that they were discovered while searching for something else. He's said, "most of what people were looking for, they did not find. Most of what they found they were not looking for."

Forbes has published an essay where Taleb reminds us again that, "Things, it turns out, are all too often discovered by accident--but we don't see that when we look at history in our rear-view mirrors. The technologies that run the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used in the way intended by those who invented them. Even academics are starting to realize that a considerable component of medical discovery comes from the fringes, where people find what they are not exactly looking for.

The Economist reviews The Black Swan, noting that "Humans are bad at factoring in the possibility of randomness and uncertainty. We forget about unpredictability when it is our turn to predict, and overestimate our own knowledge."

The Telegraph says "it turns out, we humans prefer to work with predictions and forecasts, even when they are nearly always wrong."

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The above is primarily a re-post from 2006. I've been thinking about whether we gamble our future and I remembered Taleb's warnings about certainty.

As if policies are randomly drawn out of a hat to only deter criticism, I've been annoyed about the quickdraw corn ethanol policy that may inadvertently be causing massive increases in feed and food costs. I've been worrying about commodity inflation as improving living conditions around the world legitimately increase demand while we fail to install adequate productivity for our basic industries. And are we spending more to be green than living well with less?

I've been worried about our governments. Too many players are relying on simple popularity and I worry that ordinary majorities do not look deeply into issues and too easily can lift the foolish. To be a wise population, we need adequate knowledge and robust discussion. Otherwise, we fib about weaponry and see threats in our shoes, treat rare disease and ignore pestilence, favor the elite and ignore the desperate....

We seem to be convinced that we can fund a war against a random event. In puny numbers, ugly terrorists are costing us the budgets of centuries because their unknown steps and devious surprise is the power of their terror. It's the old saw about the enemy we know....

We've shown that we do not honestly account for unknown factors.

The other night while playing remote roulette, I saw Donald Rumsfeld on television declaring there were many factors evaluated while establishing our current policies for war. He said something similar to this:

'We have considered the known known and the known unknown.
We just don't know about the unknown unknown.'

Western states need a fuel crop

Camelina, a plant that flourished in Europe about 3,500 years ago, could become a major source of biodiesel, and is now planted - if not harvested - on millions of acres of marginal farmland from eastern Washington state to North Dakota. Camelina can grow in arid conditions and can produce more oil from its seeds for a lower price

Targeted Growth, a Seattle biotech firm that's working to increase camelina yields "radically." The company hopes to produce enough seed - about one-third the size of sesame seeds - to plant 1 million acres of camelina by 2009. [story]

Steven Guy, a professor at the University of Idaho and a crop-management specialist, was quoted as saying, "This is the most exciting crop I have seen in my 30 some years in this field." [archived 5/30]

Montana farmer John Sheldon said he believes camelina will be a huge boon for Montana agriculture. "I can easily see getting 1,000 pounds per acre." {with a 3/64th inch screen on the combine!)

This fuel yields chart compares a long list of crops. Useable in our current fleet, corn produces about 18 gallons per acre of alcohol for fuel blending with gasoline. Rapeseed biodiesel output is as high as 127 gallons. The easier to grow, lower input camelina produces 62 gallons per acre.

Pacific states, most significantly California, have strict sulfur emission regulations. However, sulfur acts as a lubricant in diesel engines, so something has to take its place. This is why some states require a biodiesel blend. Biodiesel produces significantly fewer sulfur emissions and still lubricates diesel engines. Western states pay $3 a gallon for soybean biodiesel.

About 85 percent of the biodiesel in the United States comes from soybeans grown largely in the Midwest and costly to ship west.

Almost ten years ago I was promoting Proctor & Gamble soybean biodiesel, the nation's largest vendor at the time. Extensive presentations to urban transit systems such as AC Transit and Golden Gate Transit were designed to start moving our nation's fuel matrix toward a diversified domestic production.

Top prize at Inventors Hall of Fame.

There is no logical reason to use a drop of fuel, or a watt of energy, to heat or cool any home or building attached to the Earth.

Just below the surface, within reach of the average basement, is an infinite reservoir of heat that never drops below 50° F.



There is no logical reason to use a drop of fuel, or a watt of energy, to heat or cool any home or building attached to the Earth.

Just below the surface, within reach of the average basement, is an infinite reservoir of heat that never drops below 50° F.



The night-day cycle is more than ample to raise that temperature into the comfort zone, with a simple shift in Time. The use of daytime heat at night, and nighttime cool by day, is made possible by Thermal Inertia, and the engineered Lag-in-Time is a property of the thickness and Specific Heat of the solid wood walls.

Michael Sykes' "Enertia" building system traps solar energy to produce homes that heat and cool themselves.

The system contains spaces between the walls that are connected to a sunspace that stores solar and geothermal energy.

That sunspace contains cellulose, lignin and resin seeded with mineral crystals that release thermal energy over time to heat a home. During warmer months, the process is reversed and the structure instead absorbs heat from home appliances and people in the home.

An air flow and access channel, or Envelope, runs around the building, just inside the walls - creating a miniature biosphere. Here solar heated air circulates, pumping and boosting geothermal energy from beneath the house, storing it in the massive wood walls. Thermal inertia causes the house to "float" between the cycles of night and day, and even between the seasons.

"When I first became aware of the greenhouse effect, I was surprised to learn that the building and heating of homes was the biggest user of fossil fuels," Sykes said in a statement.

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Although the Enertia system uses new and advanced methods, the use of natural air movement has long been known to be a positive approach to energy conservation.

I designed a home for South Lake Tahoe using the convection envelope method in 1977. The plan angled the house on the lot in order to orient the longest part of the design toward the sun for full exposure. Heat-absorbing metal roof panels were elevated above the roof cladding to create a vast air duct - an air furnace. The rear, colder wall of the home was a hollow, two foot air duct to create a wall-size space for downward return air during winter. The flowing air from the rear wall fell over a crawlspace filled with tons of clean boulders to hold heat in their thermal mass. A system of automatic temperature sensitive greenhouse-style slats controlled air movement near the roofline and at the floor. In the hottest of summer, the heated air would vent upward and outward at the ridge, pulling colder ground air into the home from underneath the bottom flooring.

The house was built, but without these solarized innovations. It was too difficult to get a permit from the town and to convince the owners and their contractors to follow through with this unusual approach to reducing power bills.

Power utility firms disappoint

The power grid is frozen.

If power utilities were farmers, we would be both poor and malnourished.

The Clean Energy Venture Summit included a session on the Utility of the Future where a panel that included Austin Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, Green Mountain Energy, IBM and others discussed installing systems for monitoring and regulation [of course] and optimizing overall efficiency. [worldchanging]

While reading the Summit's results, weak and self-serving responses to our energy challenges, I noticed a tone and style I've heard many times before: 1) Moaning about complexity and overhead. 2) Burden-shifting to the consumer. 3) Delivery of little but a plea for more funding.

Power utilities remain an entrenched position adept at extra billing and fees.

"It won't be easy to implement - it's a complicated problem to combine an energy bus and an IT bus for every structure.

"There's also major load swings we're just beginning to understand...

"...such as load reduction through pervasive implementation of energy-saving light bulbs

"...and load increase as pluggable hybrids start appearing.

"...once we've solved the problem of energy storage.

Our utilities are not prepared. After decades of readiness, this is all we can expect???

How many times have we heard utilities prognosticate? How many pledges have failed? How poorly does this sector perform next to peers in other parts of the economy?

If a new light bulb is needed, it's needed to brighten up our power companies.

About 1978 I organized seminars for Sacramento's SMUD power utility and PG&E that introduced remote tiered metering, demand management systems, conservation management for commerce and consumer, as well as separate sessions to explain photovoltaic and wind power options.

After applause and coffee, one decade, two, three pass by.

Time and again, our utility firms have been invited to the game. Time and again, they've polished the brass and failed to blow the horn. Optimizing overall efficiency, indeed!

Be forewarned. Let's not replace our lightbulbs all at once! Our utilities can't stent the load reduction!

People are not policies

One of the phenomena of the last many years is evaluating our society by pondering vast systems of economic and government policy. It's become a populist game of game complexity. But for our economy and our society, what we measure and the policies we argue are increasingly not helping us.

Lately we try to insert perhaps immeasurable factors into social theory such as climate, population, old age, healthcare, religion, resource extraction, globalism, corporatism, elitism, terrorism, corruption, and war.

We revive hero's invigoration from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and his sidekick Frederich Hayek. We disdain market intervention where it hits the ground as if laissez-faire will release a random invention to save us like a lottery will relieve us.

We assure our correctness by citing periods of growth or decline in terms of a government's memorable clumsiness or predictive wit. We argue that Rome was not in a day, nor America's centuries, nor China's revival, nor migrants crushing over walls. To smooth charts and re-draw irregularities, we look to rules and law not to inspire principals but to sink pirates, as if preserving intellectual property can collect the cash we need in our crowded world.

I think our risk may swing on these armchair abstraction.

As we tweak economic algorithm to save our West, we look to succeed with more than widgets by designing more widgets, by promoting widget propriety, or, Orwell forbid, by enforcing widget pedigree. But none of these are fundamental to where we walk with our widgets along the boulevard of our lives.

To compete with a billion scholars overseas, we will not succeed by trading acres of expensively trained personnel explaining digital services to movie and media consumers. Nor will we sufficiently grow by grabbing a theory in science or a breakthrough in a lab, even if we cajole every genius and savant from every agriculture in our schools. Nor will we sufficiently entice the world to support us by selling only loans, leverage, audits or insurance; nor automated stock acquisition, automated traffic compliance, automated window cleaning.

These approaches are merely trading 19th Century factory industrialism with 21st Century centrist institutionalism. As China and India and others grow, while we are scurrying against terror, we fail to admit to ourselves that the day to day fashion of leaders in the West is to merely worry where our diplomats will be pleasantly greeted.

Most of us are building and rebuilding the wishes we can reach - a workable economy of our own local and regional arrangements. It's from here where we can build a more effective economy. It is not, I assert, organizing ourselves in a stadium of human waves to compete on behalf of company or government whim. It's from where we stand that we can support a greater economy worldwide.

There are so many challenges to answer, but before we evaluate our tasks, we should know our targets. When we talk economics and government, we too easily omit our day to day living where we must invent a workable if not pleasant human community.

This recommendation doesn't ignore macro activity but propels increased activity where it's acutely required. Most of us have not abandoned usefulness to each other. Most are employed in teams that are smallish and active and smallish and changeable. Most are willing participants in our future.

For us nearby, and for all around us, our new infrastructure makes new economy possible. A better economy may follow a broader understanding of our potential but a less wide way of managing it. Social initiative and healthy community may be our best policy and the first requirement of education.

Our next economic opportunity may be to invent more attractive living. Now, that's something we can sell!

Each can reach,
so reach to each -
the best restitution
for any institution.

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I was a founder of Community Renewal, Inc., a small 501(c)3, that encouraged county and municipal leaders to focus their efforts less to complying with larger entities and instead to helping their communities reach their potential - to discover and create "the dream" of residents.