1. 05 January 2006

    974 days ago

    Americans, War Is the Answer

    I don

    via Kjell Olsen974 days ago

  2. 21 December 2005

    Mark Dayton and Norm Coleman, hear me out

    989 days ago

    A few hours after having written this: Looks like the drilling bit didn’t pass.

    I just wanted to let you know that I think it’s despicable that your fellow senator, Ted Stevens, has shown the disdain for congressional procedure and our troops fighting valiantly (in a pointless and unlawful war none the less) halfway across the world to hijack a defense appropriations bill with a provision to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The scumbags in congress today disgust me. Is it not completely inappropriate to force your personal agenda (as he has done) upon an entire nation while there are phenomenally more important issues at hand?

    First thing, ANWR will provide a windfall for the multinational oil corporations, but tear up a national treasure (the eighth wonder of the world?). I don’t care how small a percentage of the full reserve will be opened to actual surface penetration by drilling apparatus, the entire area will have forever lost it’s pure, unique air.

    Second, the actual volume of oil cached within ANWR is pitifully insufficient for it to be at all worth it. I’ll admit I’m on the environmental side of the issue, but at peak production (20 years from now), the subsidy provided to the american people by the surplus oil will be just 1 penny per gallon, and that’s the most it will ever do [1]. One penny per gallon. People will be saving 10 cents per tank, and who knows if they will even need or want it? You cannot tell me it’s worth such an enormous sacrifice (once it’s opened, cut through with highways to transport oil and pumps to extract it and all the necessary infrastructure, ANWR would hardly pass muster as a national park, and will never return to it’s former state) for such a trivial [2] benefit to America and it’s people.

    I’m a freshman in college at the University of Minnesota, Morris. My family was never rich, but well off. We had three cars at times during my life. That does not mean we struggled with gas costs. There are smarter and better ways to get around. For two years, fall/winter/spring, I biked the Midtown greenway to school every day. I attended 4 years at South High. 5 miles each way, I was fitter then ever and loved it. If it was too cold I could hop on the bryant avenue bus to lake street and be at school in no time, and I’ll admit to driving myself or catching rides occasionally. The metro transit system could use improvements, but it’s just as good as driving. Also cheaper, more social, and less stressful. Biking triply so.

    Please don’t cave into Bush and (Ted) Stevens hollow agenda to repay the multinational and ethically challenged corporations that financed their election campaigns. After the death of Paul Wellstone, who was the only elected official I’ve ever genuinely trusted and looked up to, I don’t see much good at all coming from any avenue of government. That isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

    Now with talks of Bush finally being held accountable for the crimes he’s committed since becoming president [3], I’m just starting to regain the naive confidence I held in government as a kid. Please don’t let me down: do what you know is right for your constituents (not big oil, but minnesotans) and shoot down this corrupt and anti-american drilling provision. If you’re not quite sure how to do it without holding up the Defense Appropriations bill (which, as much as I’m against the Iraq war, still must go through), see the third paragraph in the blog post at the bottom of my letter [4].

    Sincerely,
    Kjell Olsen

    1. http://www.alaskaaction.org/the-penny/
    2. http://www.answers.com/trivial
    3. his impeachment, his discredit, his dishonor and shame
    3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/flavia-colgan/arctic-refuge-in-the-bala_b_12673.html

  3. 07 October 2005

    1064 days ago

    AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Making a Mockery of Conservation

    The real target of the refinery bill is the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review (NSR). The NSR program requires owners of aging power plants and industrial facilities to modernize pollution controls whenever they expand their facilities and increase emissions. But the refinery bill doesn’t just exempt refineries from New Source Review requirements. It exempts ALL energy industry facilities—approximately 20,000 large industrial facilities and power plants across the country—not just on the Gulf Coast.

    And next up: drilling ANWR. Fuck.

    Kjell Olsen1064 days ago

  4. 12 September 2005

    1089 days ago

    Zoka Zola

    Net zero energy home.

    Our aim is to construct an urban single-family house that is ecological, socially regenerative and self-sustaining. We will only use energy generated on site. We would like this building to be an inspiration to other homeowners and developers in urban environments.

    via Kjell Olsen1089 days ago

  5. 26 May 2005

    1198 days ago

    Wired 13.06: The Mad Genius from the Bottom of the Sea

    A nice contrast to The Long Emergency, heres a guy bent on generating wackloads of power by pulling freezing deep ocean water from the depths of the ocean to the surface, and somehow capitalizing on the temperature difference.

    “The potential of OTEC is great,” says Joseph Huang, a senior scientist for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and an expert on the process. “The oceans are the biggest solar collector on Earth, and there’s enough energy in them to supply a thousand times the world’s needs. If you want to depend on nature, the oceans are the only energy source big enough to tap.” ??1??

    Ok, here’s how it works and some applications – basically just pump this cold water through any number of devices to get heat air-conditioning, irrigate farmland, or generate electricity:

    Once primed, the pipe acts like a giant siphon, requiring relatively little energy to keep an inexhaustible supply of cold at hand. Already, 39-degree-Fahrenheit water courses through the Natural Energy Lab’s newest pipe – a 55-inch-diameter, 9,000-foot-long polyethylene behemoth – at the rate of 27,000 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day.
    Running the frigid pipes through heat exchangers produces unlimited air-conditioning that costs almost nothing. Draining their sweat yields an endless supply of freshwater for drinking and irrigation. The cold water also creates a temperature difference between root and fruit that Craven believes speeds growth. And by turning the flow on and off, Craven has found he can further accelerate the plants’ growth cycle by forcing them in and out of dormancy – he can get three crops of grapes a year and pineapples in eight months instead of the usual 18. Feeding some of the water through a contraption Craven calls a hurricane tower generates clean electricity. “What the world doesn’t understand,” says Craven, still zigzagging through the parking lot, “is that what we don’t have enough of is cold, not heat.” ??1??

    What’s next on this guys list? Anti Aging treatments. He claims to have invented one in which cold is forced upon the human lymphatic (?) system, which kicks the bodies own regenerating abilities up a notch or two. He’s in his 80’s and claims to be running marathons.

    How all this would actually work

    via Kjell Olsen1198 days ago

  6. 07 April 2005

    1247 days ago

    RollingStone.com:The Long Emergency: Politics

    The United States passed its own oil peak—about 11 million barrels a day—in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

    Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
    It will change everything about how we live.

    No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

    We’re screwed, doomsday is coming, and this is an entirely plausible – if pessimistic – account.

    bq The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

    So with china and india exploding in both population and consumerism/consumption, how do we expect to ration the worlds quickly evaporating pool of oil?

    We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. [...] In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”

    Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

    The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

    The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. [...] These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

    The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the “level of service” (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

    We shouldn’t fuck the nat’l rail systems:

    Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

    Kjell Olsen1247 days ago

  7. Also somewhat recently

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