Anthonares

I know, I haven’t blogged here in almost a year. It’s been a busy one: a new daughter, job interviews, attempting to finish my PhD, and flipping a condo on the side (into a down market, now that’s courage–or something). Nevertheless, I plan to keep this blog active and return to it in full force eventually. Before that day comes, though, here’s a small thought.

Just a few minutes ago, I was working on writing some computer code and doing unit conversions. I happened to think, “I wonder how much energy is really in the human diet?” So, figuring that we eat about 2,000 Calories per day (or kilocalories, with a small “c”), that works out to about 2.3 kWh.

At the rate I payed on my last electricity bill, that’s about $0.25 worth of electricity. That means that more energy is required to power a 100 Watt light bulb for 24 hours than to “power” a full-grown adult human being. An average house in the US requires around 40-50 kWh of electricity, with an occupancy of about 3 means that we each require more than 5 times our own energy needs just while at home. Add to that time at work/school and the imbalance reaches an order of magnitude.

And then, there’s the energy that we require for transportation. If the average American drives 12,000 miles at 25 mpg, then it takes about 25 kWh of energy just to haul us to school, work, soccer practice, and the grocery store.

Our manufactured goods contain tremendous quantities of embodied energy, or the energy that goes into their production. For that matter, so does our food. Viewed in bulk, the sum total of US energy production per capita is about 250 kWh. So, simply to provide for the needs of a being that requires a mere 2.5 kWh of energy per day, 100 times that amount is consumed by US citizens.

Yet the greatest joys in life, and those that sustain us and provide the most meaning, are the simple interactions we have with others. Our friends, our families, our children and spouses, and even our colleagues at work are those whom really deeply matter most of all.

To reduce our energy consumption, perhaps the biggest step we can all take is to turn off a few lights, turn off the TV and computer, and invite a few friends over. They’ll use less energy, and everyone will be a whole lot happier.

Those following the waning “debate” over anthropogenic global warming (AGW) will have noticed a change in its flavor over the last two years. 2005 was the year in which the remaining few credible scientific arguments against global warming in general were eliminated (see this post). Now, even the skeptics, or at least the honest ones, admit the warming is real. The last bastion of true skepticism lies in arguments based on solar forcing of climate, which Real Climate has been methodically debunking.

Indeed we have reached a point at which even most politicians, Sen. Imhoffe excluded, agree that global warming is probably human-induced. That, in itself, is a tremendous triumph for science. There are those who will argue that it’s too soon for scientists to celebrate, but I’m willing to pop the cork a little earlier than some. Nevertheless, I think we’ll see a very large number of books published examining just why it was so hard for scientists to convince the public and policymakers of their conclusions. That is partly the theme of Al Gore’s new book, and of the talk he gave last December at the annual gathering of the American Geophysical Union. But Gore is still on the front lines, so to speak, leading the charge to eradicate the deeply entrenched public skepticism of AGW. Unfortunately, that public skepticism is still being fueled by popular anti-science works like Bethell’s PIG Guide to Science that, while long discredited, still remain on bookshelves.

But this blog is mostly about looking forward, and the trend I see is that the head of the AGW skepticism movement has long been severed, the body just hasn’t found out yet. There is one aspect of the entire phony debate that bothers me the most, and its one that will very likely survive long after AGW is publicly accepted. How is it that the public came to so easily discard the work of so many scientists?
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In case you don’t come to this entry steeped in the space-related blogosphere, suffice it to say that many, many entries have been written about what space advocates need to do to push our cause to the general public. So, to communicate intellectually to an audience what we advocates generally view much more emotionally, we use analogy.

The most popular analogy floating around right now is to relate the NewSpace industries to the beginning of civilian general aviation (this isn’t to ignore the long played-out comparison of space exploration to that of the 15th century New World). The sub-orbital companies are the barnstormers of a century ago, flying for the sake of flying, and opening the public’s eyes to general aviation. Government air-mail contracts of yesteryear become the COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) of today. And of course, the maturation of civil aviation into the ubiquitous industry it is today becomes the hope for the future of NewSpace.

Here’s to hoping that analogy is soon retired. As recently noted by self-described NewSpace contrarian David S. Portree, the analogy isn’t any good. Portree views this errant analogy as an overreach–I view it as overly limiting. Instead, I’ll present a new analogy while recognizing that it is imperfect: the advent of spaceflight is very much like that of the boat.

Unfortunately for this new meme, history has not passed to us exactly when the boat was invented, or who did the inventing. And, we don’t know how it changed that culture. But, we do know what it enabled, and that’s where my analogy gets started Continue Reading »

For those of us willing to look around objectively, the prospects of a green future look better than they have in decades. That’s despite the major threat this world faces from global warming, continued air pollution, and mass extinctions. The reason things are looking more green is that Green is becoming a political force. It already is outside of this country, and even here in the US there are signs of shifting winds.

There are, however, fundamental differences between the US and those nations with an already-strong Green movement/party. For one, the US never adopted fully the socialist-populist political ideology. Sure, we may eventually provide health care to everyone, but that’s because the other way is totally screwed up more than out of a genuine widespread belief in the social equality of it. I’d venture to say that social equality is not high on the list of priorities for many Americans, and to be a traditional (I call it a conservationalist) Green, you have to believe deeply in the social equality tenet. That’s because to be a traditional Green, you have to abstain from doing things that are good for you but affect others negatively in a not terribly visible way.

Some might call it individualism, others maybe arrogance, but whatever the name Americans are not ready to modify their actions en masse based on the simple principle that they are hurting others even though they can’t see it. This is the crux of the problem for conservationalist greens in this country: in order to save the Earth for future generations, the behaviors of today’s generations have to be greatly modified. Continue Reading »

I’ve talked in these pages about Tom Friedman’s Geo-Green ideas before (here, and here), but I’ll summarize it again quickly: geo-green means being green for the sake of national and economic security as much as for traditional environmentalist reasons. For the feature article in Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine, and his longest writing yet on the topic, he stakes out the geo-green position, and calls for serious change at every level of American society.

Of particular interest for those, like me, who think that being green, capitalist, and expansionist is not an oxymoron:

Equally important, presidential candidates need to help Americans understand that green is not about cutting back. It’s about creating a new cornucopia of abundance for the next generation by inventing a whole new industry. It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet. It’s about making America safer by breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply hostile to our values

You’re forgiven if you have missed it, but there’s a rhetorical war being waged on blogs and in the tradition media for the soul of the modern environmental movement. I’ve written of this concept before, and as I see it there are two primary groups involved: the conservationists and what the Pragmatists. Conservationists are typified by the old-gaurd environmental organizations the Sierra Club and Greenpeace being the most prominent. Pragmatists are right now championed by one of my favorite organizations TerraPass; some great pragmatic green writing is going on over at their TerraBlog.

I just finished reading a thought-provoking book written by a staunch conservationist, “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage” by Heather Rogers. In it, Rogers lays out the fundamental argument of the Conservationist ethic: waste is immoral. This is certainly a logical argument that follows the simple syllogism that waste causes tremendous environmental degradation, our environment supports our very existence, therefore wanton waste will lead to our destruction. Like I said, simple. Or, maybe not.
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It has been quite some time since I last wrote here. I assure you I have no intention of abandoning this blog, it’s just that my wife is seven and a half months pregnant, and much of the duties of housework and cooking have fallen on me. I just wanted to make a quick entry on something that there has been a lot of misinformation out and about as of late: carbon offsets.

You can find out as much as you’d want to about carbon offsets at Wikipedia or some other handy reference, but here’s my basic distillation. Carbon offsets are simply a contract that you purchase guaranteeing that some amount of carbon you emit is not emitted elsewhere. Thus, the net effect of purchasing offsets is the same carbon-wise, as if you had installed solar panels on your roof, bike to work, and completely avoided flying. But instead, you can purchase carbon offsets and continue to live your regular life with a much-reduced carbon footprint. Win-win!
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Perhaps you may have seen this story floating about: RAND (a non-partisan research institute, or think tank) released a study today concluding that the most likely scenario is that renewable energies will cost no more than nonrenewables in 2025. To be a little more explicit, if the nation gets 25% of its transportation and electricity (and thus 18% of total energy) from renewables, up from just 8% today, this will likely have no impact on energy expenditures.

I’ll go even further than that. Combining this study with studies investigating the health impacts of fossil fuel burning, along with somewhat speculative estimates of global warming economic effects we arrive at this very important conclusion: significantly expanding our renewable energy usage over the next two decades will reduce the amount of money we spend on energy.

It’s time to shift the debate. It’s not about cost anymore, and no one can really even make that claim honestly. The oil, coal, and natural gas industries are sustaining their apparent price advantage only through discounting environmental and health effects. The debate is now between entrenched economic interests and the greater common good. We need to move beyond that to the point where we are answering this question: on a regional basis, what is the mix of energy supplies that will a) produce the greatest health benefit, b) move us toward energy independence, and c) reduce our CO₂ by the greatest amount?
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Back in April I sent an unsolicited application offering my part-time consulting services to 4Frontiers, a company formed just a few months earlier. A month or so later I received an interested reply from one of the heads of the company, but I got too busy to work up a CV and a few other materials he wanted of me. By July I’d nearly forgotten about it, and when I remembered it just assumed it was an opportunity lost at the time.
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If you happen to have been reading this blog for the last year or so, you may have noticed that I sometimes find myself at odds with Jeffrey Bell, the occasional opinion writer at Space Daily.com. Here’s a link to his latest column, but let me summarize it for you:

“Back in my day, we solved all these darned ‘Centennial Challenges’ but you young’uns are too thick to pay attention.”

Seriously, that’s a pretty accurate representation of what he’s saying. For those not familiar with Jeffrey Bell, his tagline is

Jeffrey F. Bell is a former space scientist and recovering pro-space activist.

That just about sums it all up right there. Nearly every single column he writes attacks the current new space movement from the tired perspective of “been there, done that”. But let me tell you something Mr. Bell, your generation of space activists and engineers did not actually succeed in getting us all into space!
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