David Both

I have not commented on the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico since it started, but I feel it is now time to do so. What a freakin’ mess!! BP — What were you thinking? What are you thinking?

One cannot call this a spill because an overturned glass is a spill; a wrecked railroad car with its contents leaking on the ground or into a stream is a spill, a tanker run aground is a spill. Each of these is inherently limited and thus contains within itself the limits of its potential damage.

The hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is an unchecked tap into a (according to BP) huge reservoir of oil and natural gas with the potential to poison a huge portion of the planet. This is the largest human-caused disaster in all of history.

As oil keeps gushing into the Gulf and the scope of this human and environmental disaster increases exponentially, I watch the people of the Gulf Coast attempting to cope with it and realize that there is no way that this is going to be stopped any time soon. Nor will a complete cleanup even be possible. The oil is not only present on the surface of the water, in fact the vast majority of it is hidden, unseen beneath the surface, like the iceberg that sank the Titanic.

We have run the ship of our oil dependency upon the iceberg of huge multinational corporations whose greed has run amok and caused them to “drill, baby, drill” without regard for safety, the ecology or the welfare of the inhabitants world’s coasts. Neither land-dwelling nor marine nor human nor plant nor animal is safe. All is at risk.

So-called “Experts” are saying that the effects of this disaster could spread as far as the Arctic. How can anyone believe that this is the limit? Is there any reason not to believe that there is no limit; that all of the world’s oceans and coastlines are at risk? If the oceans are poisoned and the food chain collapses, where will that leave us?

Please see my Facebook group, Boycott BP and join for updates and to participate in planning or taking non-violent, non-destructive, peaceful action.

http://www.facebook.com/david.both?v=info#!/group.php?gid=117870021588108

Unfortunately we will always require petroleum products, if not for fuel then for plastics, shampoo, lubricants, pharmaceuticals and many other products we use each day. Our civilization is built upon the foundation of fossil fuels. While we move our home to another foundation we must take drastic steps to ensure that events like the Gulf Disaster or the Exxon Valdeze can never, ever happen again.

Regulate the Oil Companies

We need to ensure that oil is located, drilled for and produced in a manner that is safe for the workers and the environment. In order to achieve this we need greater regulation of the oil industry and more inspectors who must be given the unalterable authority to shut down any operation on the spot and without any requirement to obtain permission from anyone. This person must be the ultimate authority on site or otherwise.

We also need to ensure that the pipelines and ships that carry oil from well to refinery to distribution centers and on to the gas stations and other outlets are also regulated and made safe.

No oil or chemical-related company or industry should be exempt.

Reducing Our Dependency on Oil

Clearly we must reduce our dependency on oil as we transition to renewable energy. There is no other way. There are many things each of us can do. Here are just a few with which we can start.

• Use CFLs.
• Purchase a fuel efficient vehicle. A REALLY efficient vehicle. To me that number starts at 35MPG and goes up. My Gen1 Prius gets 48MPG on average.
• Walk or ride a bike to the store when possible.
• Turn off lights that are not in use.
• Don’t waste water.
• Don’t leave vehicles running just to keep the air-conditioner of heater running.
• Keep tires properly inflated.
• Keep vehicles properly maintained.
• Replace old hot water heater with on-demand heaters.
• Replace old appliances with new, energy efficient ones.
• Get an energy audit from your energy company (electric or gas) and perform the actions they tell you can save energy.

There are many more but you can start with a few of these.

But remember, I am not laying all of the blame for this at the feet of the consumers. We must regulate the energy companies in order to make whatever energy source we use safe, dependable and clean.

Call your elected representatives and let them know we want clean dependable, and safe energy now and that regulation is the only way to get there. Don’t wait. Do it now! Would the BP Disaster have occurred if we had taken action after the Exxon Valdeze? We can prevent the next one.

My 2001 Prius, one of the original ones, hit 100,000 miles yesterday and is still going strong. I am very happy with it and my overall experiences have been excellent. Toyota has done much to keep me a satisfied customer, such as replace the main battery at no charge (pun intended) when it went out well after all warranties had expired.

I am trying to decide whether to try to get 250,000 or more miles on it. I really think I could do that and more. Plus it will eventually be a historical vehicle as the first viable production hybrid.

Here is a link that has thirteen very scary numbers about global warming. Read this and contact your Senators and Representatives to get them to pass appropriate legislation to help reduce the numbers.

Global Warming by the Numbers

Contact your congressional representatives

A friend of mine sent me a URL for an amazing photographic artist, Chris Jordan. His web site has four collections of his art. All of them have incredible visual and visceral impact, but the one that affected me the most is Running the Numbers; An American Self-Portrait.

The artist’s objective is to help us visualize many of the statistics we encounter each day. The photographs are huge, often-times multi-paneled images of everyday objects such as oil drums, Barbie dolls, toothpicks, even cigarette cartons — but with a statistical twist. For example, one huge panel of 60″x120″ is of two million (2,000,000) plastic beverage bottles — the number of which are used in only five minutes in the United States.

These statistical images range from the number of barrels of oil consumed in the U.S. every two minutes (28,000) to the number of breast augmentation surgeries performed in the US each month (32,000), each of which is represented by a Barbie doll. Individually each of these images has a tremendous capacity to change how we perceive many of the huge numbers we are presented with each day in the news. Taken together, and with his other collections, they form a visual indictment of American conspicuous consumption and its ecological and social impact.

The URL for the home page of Mr. Jordan’s site is below. All of the collections are amazing, but Running the Numbers; An American Self-Portrait is stunning. You will never view common items like your cell phone, Barbie dolls, plastic cups, or a light bulb in the same way again. Which is, of course the artists intent.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/

I would be interested in your reactions to this art. Please leave comments below.

Alice and I, along with Vickie, our Barack Obama Change Crew Seven Leader, and her three girls worked on cleaning up the greenway near our house today as a service project for Martin Luther King day. We collected four large bags of trash in about ninety minutes, and due to the fact that there were only a few of us and so much trash we barely scratched the surface.

If you walk the greenway it will look a bit better because we managed to get much, but not all, of the trash close to the pedestrian walkway. Further away from the walkway we did not have enough people to do so, and we were unable to wade in the water to get much of the trash that was in the stream beds.

The Worst

Most of the trash we collected was near Durant Road Middle School. That area was a mess. Clearly the students are dumping trash and “other stuff” there between classes and during sporting events on the fields behind the school. The greenway runs behind the school on the far side of the athletic fields.

We found clothing, plastic bottles and aluminum cans, glass beer bottles, beer cans, cans and bottles which had been used as spittoons for chewing tobacco, used condoms, a bright red snow sled (which we commandeered to haul the trash away), plastic and foil bags, complete home packed lunches — lunch boxes included, newspapers, magazines, and much other assorted trash.

Perhaps a discussion with school authorities is in order and some sort of regular cleanup day would help the students understand that they need to be ecologically responsible. My brother and I suggested this when we were going to elementary school and it became a yearly event.

More Disgusting Stuff

Many dog walkers try to clean up after their animals and, as we walk the greenway most days, many of the people we see are carrying plastic bags with the dog poop that they have cleaned up. However some owners don’t clean up or even worse, collect the poop in bags and then throw the bags into the brush and the streams. The latter is the worst possible thing you can do!

If you are one of the morons that does this, please stop now!!! The plastic bags hurt the environment all by themselves, and they prevent the poop from being broken down and reused by nature. At least if your dog poops and you leave it, the poop will degrade and return to nature in a short period of time.

Here is a link to an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the carbon footprints of six common products we all use. There are some very surprising results in here.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122304950601802565.html

At least this item is not totally political for a change.

My Toyota Prius is getting even better gas mileage than it has in the past. This is a bit of a story but I think it is very interesting.

About a month ago I had to have the main battery replaced. This was with about 91,000 miles on my car, which I would think would make it officially beyond the 8 year/80,000 mile hybrid power train warranty. I have had the car for a little over seven years. My dealership, Leith Toyota in Raleigh, North Carolina, replaced the battery under warranty and provided me a rental car at no charge while we waited for the new battery to come in.

I have to say that this is incredible service and far beyond what I would expect. Needless to say I will be going back there for my next Prius or whatever might be even better when the time comes.

Getting 55.4 MPG for the first 67 miles after my last fill-up.

However I have noticed that with the new battery I am now getting in the low 50′s for gas mileage instead of the high 40′s. How great is that! I can only surmise that the new battery, while the same basic technology as before, must have been tweaked a bit. I have noticed that my Prius now is more aggressive about turning off the gasoline engine when the vehicle is coasting to a stop or stopped. That will make a great difference right there.

After my last fill-up I actually was getting 55.4 MPG. It is currently at 53.6 MPG. I cannot complain about that a bit. Although I suppose if it ever does drop back down below 50MPG I will be somewhat disappointed.

Concerned about global warming? Check out a new web site, 350.org. The name refers to the fact that 350 parts per million (ppm) of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is the maximum concentration for a sustainable climate. We are currently at 387 ppm and rising.

A really cool site called engadget has a post about Mercedes-Benz’ attempt to stop producing petroleum fuelled cars by the year 2015. This would be really fantastic. I would buy an all-electric Smart car for tooling around town and commuting to work.

Read the article here.

NanoSolar has announced a new process for printing Photo-Voltaic Cells on sheets of material. The process is… Well here is their own press release.

Dear Nanosolar friend:

We wanted to let you know of a major milestone in solar energy technology we have now achieved:  The solar industry’s first 1GW production tool.

Yes, that’s 1GW of capacity from a single production tool!

You can see it yourself in action in a video we have decided to release and share with you.

Most production tools in the solar industry tend to have 10-30MW in annual production capacity.  So how is it possible to have a single tool with Gigawatt throughput?

This feat is fundamentally enabled through the proprietary nanoparticle ink we have invested so many years developing.  It allows us to deliver efficient solar cells (presently up to more than 14%) that are simply printed.

Printing is a simple, fast, and robust coating process that in particular eliminates the need for expensive high-vacuum chambers as traditionally used to deposit thin films.

Our 1GW CIGS coater cost $1.65 million. At the 100 feet-per-minute speed shown in the video, that’s an astonishing two orders of magnitude more capital efficient than a high-vacuum process: a twenty times slower high-vacuum tool would have cost about ten times as much per tool.

There’s still a lot of hard work to be done for us to bring solar power everywhere.  But at this time we wanted to share with you our excitement about transformational progress happening.

Thank you for your continued support of Nanosolar.  While deployment of our product will focus over the next 12 months on installations with our wholesale customers (which includes the world’s largest utility), we are looking forward to making our products more broadly available! to ever yone in 2009.

Martin Roscheisen
CEO, Nanosolar Inc.

Can it be? Can a car really run on water? I cannot tell you how this might be possible, but here is some video allegedly of a car invented by Genepax in Osaka, Japan, showing its eco-friendly car that runs on nothing but water.

The company hopes to go into mass production with a Japanese manufacturer.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid203719194/bclid86272812/bctid1600171070

I would like to believe this, but the chemistry of water is well known. Unless you put energy in the form of electricity into it to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen and then use a fuel cell to recombine them to produce electricity, there is nothing that I am aware of in pure water from which to extract energy.

Here is a web site for Zero Pollution Motors which hopes to have a car that runs on compressed air available for sale in 2010. These cars will run on compressed air and will seat six. They are supposed to have a design range of over 800 miles on a single tank of compressed air and a top speed of about 90MPH. Pretty impressive.

Air fill-ups? An on board air pump. Just plug it in to a 110 or 220 Volt outlet to fill up. Pretty cool. It should work with the same infrastructure as any you could put together for plug-in hybrids or all-electric vehicles.

High-tech hybrid cars are now competing directly with 100% gasoline powered cars in 24-hour endurance races. The latest is the Gumpert Apollo Supercar which will race the 24-hour Nurburgring this year from 22 to 25 May.

Wired has a great story at http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/800-horsepower.html

A hybrid Toyota Supra won the Tokachi 24-hour race last year by 19 laps, well ahead of any other cars in the field. The Tokachi race is less well known than the Nurburgring so this race may change the face of the auto industry.

I remember the year that the Chrysler turbine car nearly won the Indy 500, but broke down two or three laps from the finish line due to a broken bearing in the gear shift box. But it was one of a kind from a third rate auto company and hybrids are already here to stay. What this could do is convince the bozos in Detroit that any and all vehicles can and should be hybrids. And it could convince the American auto buying public that hybrids can save fuel and provide performance at the same time.

The TRIAC electric car is finally supposed to be here in July. It has a 100 mile range  and can go 80MPH. And it is cute.

Link to Triac Electric Car.

Save the environment.

Save the Earth.

Save ourselves.