Ephemeral Ruminations: Copenhagen Update: European Countries Agree to Construct Offshore Wind Supergrid | Sustainability | Fast Company

Copenhagen Update: European Countries Agree to Construct Offshore Wind Supergrid | Sustainability | Fast Company

Nine European countries--Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Ireland--signed the "North Seas' Countries Offshore Grid Initiative," a plan to create an offshore wind power supergrid in the North and North West seas. The plan means interconnection between the power grids in Europe allowing for electricity sales. In this case it's wind power in Ireland being sold to the rest of Europe. The article also mentions Desertec, a plan to put solar panels in North Africa to send electricity to Europe. On one hand this is way cool support for renewable energy. On the other hand Desertec begs the question of why not use North Africa's solar power for their benefit, rather than ship that power to Europe.

Copenhagen Won\'t Be Enough -- Only a \'Human Movement\' Can Save Civilization from the Climate Crisis | Environment | AlterNet

A strange cloud envelops human civilization as its leaders fail to take the measures to protect it in Copenhagen that they themselves endorsed just five months ago. A child under 13 today can expect to live into the 2080s, by which time civilization as we know it will have disappeared if we continue to fail to reduce carbon emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050, according to our climate scientists. What will occur in Copenhagen thus continues a pattern seen since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Scientists there were anguished that the treaty only sought to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. None foresaw that the treaty would be ignored and that world emissions would be 40.8 percent higher (and U.S. emissions 19.8 percent higher) in 2007 than in 1990. We live today as if in a trance, conducting business as usual in times so unusual that they pose an even greater threat than 20th-century wars that killed more than 100 million people.

Algae-based fuel gets a boost from the federal government. - Environmental Capital - WSJ

Sapphire Energy has received about $105 million in grants and loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy - part of some $600 million in outlays to 18 experimental biofuel sites across the U.S. Sapphire says it will use the money to further its laboratory work and build algae ponds in the New Mexico desert. The company says it can produce an algae-based equivalent of crude oil that can be processed into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel at traditional petroleum refineries ? thereby taking advantage of existing infrastructure. algae fuel blends have been successfully tested in airplanes and cars. The remaining question is logistics: how to raise, collect and crush enough fat-rich algae cells to replace significant quantities of crude oil at an acceptable price.

Meet the Billionaire Brothers Funding the Right-Wing War on Obama | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

They're the 9th richest people in America and they're pushing hard to upend President Obama's progressive agenda. Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama's progressive agenda. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year. David and Charles are also responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded in part by Koch foundations, has waged an underhanded campaign to falsely charge that a set of hacked e-mails somehow unravels the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David, helped to found the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. The John Birch Society harnessed Cold War fears into hate against progressives, warning that President Kennedy, Civil Rights activists, and organized labor were in league with communists.

Homeland Security Embarks on Big Brother Programs to Read Our Minds and Emotions | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet

Half-baked Homeland Security is spending millions to develop sensors capable of detecting a person's level of 'malintent' as a counterterrorism tool. The program is right out of the supposedly canceled Total Information Awareness program aka big brother incarnate. The idea is to detect (at a distance) physiological cues of malintent, enabling police to arrest people based on malintent before they can act on it. Conceived as a cutting-edge counter-terrorism tool, the FAST program ("Future Attribute Screening Technologies") will ostensibly detect subjects' bad intentions by monitoring their physiological characteristics, particularly those associated with fear and anxiety. FAST includes include "a remote cardiovascular and respiratory sensor" to measure "heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia," and other sensory stuff.

Printable, Moldable Batteries Made From Paper and Nanotubes | Wired Science | Wired.com

Scientists have made batteries and supercapacitors with little more than ordinary office paper and some carbon and silver nanomaterials. That performance is largely due to paper?s porous nature: at the nano scale, paper is a tangled matrix of fibers. This vast surface area helps inks stick, says Yi Cui of Stanford University, coauthor of the new work. The paper acts as a scaffold, and the carbon nanotubes act as electrodes that electrolytes in solution react with.

Stanford prof pops lid on paint-on battery tech ? The Register

A "one-dimensional" nanomaterial liquid which can be painted onto walls or pieces of paper to create working batteries. "If I want to paint my wall with a conducting energy storage device, I can use a brush," says Yi Cui, materials engineering prof at Stanford. "These nanomaterials are special," he adds. "They're a one-dimensional structure with very small diameters." The paint can handle very rapid discharge rates, 200 kilowatts/kg, and CUI says it's very durable too; able to stake 40,000 charge/discharge cycles, maybe ten times as much as a normal li-ion job.

U.S. Energy Secretary Announces $350M for Clean Energy Tech in Developing World

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has announced an international agreement that will see developed nations give $350 million to developing nations. The Renewables and Efficiency Deployment Initiative (REDI), plan will fund technology in the developing world, including solar lanterns, standards and labels for energy efficient appliances, and online clean energy communication tools.

Huh? Is this something the developing world needs? Yes many need better lighting (aka solar lanterns) but standardized labels and standardizations? It's not clear that this is solving any problem.

Also the problem wasn't really caused by the developing world but by the developed world. As the developing world develops their energy and pollution intensity increases so it would be best for them to adopt clean tech from the beginning rather than have to retrofit afterwards like we're doing.

Our Gas Will Soon Have More Ethanol | Autopia | Wired.com

The ethanol industry wants the Environmental Protection Agency to increase the amount of ethanol blended with gasoline from 10 to 15 percent. Is this a good idea? Of course the ethanol industry wants this, it means more business for them. But there are a ton of considerations about ethanol which makes it seem a bad idea. Ethanol production has a poor energy return on investment. Ethanol production requires a lot of land. Ethanol production competes with land and resources for food production. Bleah.