This house has been solar heated for nearly 28 years now, the glazed black box on the south wall pumps heat into the living room whenever the sun shines, consistently and reliably. It was built in the Riverside neighborhood of Cambridge, MA in 1980.
This solar collector is an air heater that takes air from the kitchen,
moves it past the black absorber plate with a fan,
and then exhausts the solar heated air back into the living room.
Sometimes on sunny winter days, the people who live there have to flip the damper and dump the collector's air outside to prevent overheating.
It has worked unfailingly all these years without any major maintenance, even for the fan and the thermostat that turns it on and off.
July 4th is a good day to read the Declaration of Independence aloud and hand out copies of the 4th Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This is what the latest FISA battle is about. Does the US government have the right to search and seize our papers, email, phone calls and persons without probable cause - AS THEY ARE CURRENTLY DOING - and provide retroactive immunity for the telecommunications and other corporations who have been helping them, without benefit of any legal cause, for the last few years.
Celebrate your independence on the 4th of July. Read the Declaration of Independence at the bus stop. Hand out 4th Amendment FISA flyers and copies of the full Bill of Rights then watch the fireworks.
On June 23 in New York City, John Todd, one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute, received the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award for his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World, a practical plan to remediate Appalachian coal lands with
An economy built on environmental restoration, carbon sequestration, renewable energy and ecological design
He wants to apply his decades of experiences with Eco Machines for water remediation to cleaning coal slurries and rebuilding healthy soils from the slag. He has outlined a process that goes from waste and water treatment to reforestation with a full renewable economy based on biomass and local wind power. With his experience building Agricultural Industrial Ecologies, as in Burlington, VT, he proposes a regional succession of industrial ecologies that can provide healthy lives and environments for larger populations over centuries if not millenia.
For nearly two decades, there was a nonviolent army, an army of satyagrahis, organized along military lines. It was made up of Pashtun people of the then Northwest Frontier of the British Empire, now Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same places where the Taliban remain active today. They were called Khudai Khidmatgars, Servants of God, or Red Shirts because of the color of their uniforms, and were established by Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Badshah Khan, an associate of Gandhi's.
Badshah Khan started building schools for his people, girls as well as boys, in 1910 and by 1930 there were enough graduates to make up the Khudai Khitmatgars. The organization lasted until 1947 when it was outlawed and disbanded by the Pakistani government.
Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains by Eknath Easwaran
Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1984/1999
ISBN 1-888314-01-x
I want
the Dalai Lama's
laugh,
that full throat rumble
straight from the Buddha belly
free
and smooth
as a strong stream
moving
big rocks
inexorably.
I want that laugh
and the wisdom
to let loose with it
often.
I've been hearing about an MIT (student) project to build low-cost solar concentrators using off the shelf materials since January when the project was part of the Independent Activities Period. (IAP happens in January and anyone from a professor emeritus to a student to a janitor can offer a non-credit course. It is a hold-over from the student demonstration days of the Sixties™ but less and less of interest is happening during IAP as the years go by.)
Yesterday, I went to see their prototype. Their breakthrough is not in technology but in materials. They use standard mirrors that sit in a frame so that they "sag" into a shallow parabolic shape and focus up to 1000 suns on a black coil which can then heat water to as high as 400º F. This is "low" temperature steam, capable of providing process heat but not enough to run a steam turbine. The machinery that moves the concentrator to track the sun is an off the shelf TV satellite dish motor. The model I saw does not yet have an automatic tracking system but, again, off the shelf components are available. It is an impressive machine.
I finally finished a short video (less than two minutes) on WWII posters for the Homefront. These posters exhorted all of us to become part of the war effort. It wasn't about "going shopping" then, it was about energy and resource conservation, rationing ourselves for the benefit of our armed forces, and making the Homefront an effective front for fighting the Axis powers.
I've been wearing an "impeach Bush" button since just after the 2004 election. Personally, I believe we need to impeach the whole Bush/Cheney Junta, turn them over to an international criminal court, and establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission between the peoples of Iraq and the United States of America. And that's only the beginning of what we have to do to redeem our national reputation and collective souls.
Lately, the comments I've been getting are that it's too late and it wouldn't matter so close to the end of their term. I respond by saying, "What makes you think they're ever going to leave?"
Today, reading Glenn Greenwald on David Broder, I realized that there may be another way. Broder and many others demanded that Bill Clinton resign over the Lewinsky affair. Why is there no demand that the Bush/Cheney Junta resign?
How do we make the Bush/Cheney Junta resign? Would a public hue and cry to that purpose be useful?
I think it would. How do we force the Bush/Cheney Junta to resign?
Jonathan Soli is a high school senior from Albert Lea, MN. For two years he has been working on a device that electrolyzes water and injects the separated hydrogen and oxygen gases into the air intake of an internal combustion engine. This results in a 27.7% increase in fuel efficiency and a 28.6% decrease in CO2. So far he's tested it only on lawnmower engines but he is also building a small vehicle which he estimates will get over 800 miles per gallon and hopes to experiment on an automobile engine if he can find one he can afford.
One high school student, Daniel Burd, figures out how to accelerate the decomposition of plastics and now another is making high efficiency internal combustion engines. Will high school science save us?
"If you want peace, understand war."
B. H. Liddell Hart
Once a Marine always a Marine and Scott Ritter trained as a Marine. Now he wants to apply that training to the peace movement. He is not content to write books and make speeches and then go home with a moral victory. He wants to win. He wants a real antiwar movement that can stop the Iraq War and prevent an Iran War from happening.
To do that, he believes the antiwar movement, the peace movement, the social justice movement must be organized, unified, and able to project political power from a core set of beliefs. Ritter believes those beliefs should be the Constitution which he took an oath to uphold. He would like to replace the flag lapel pin with a pocket copy of the Constitution and counter "Gods, Guns, and Gays" with "Freedom and Justice for All" plus the rest of the Bill of Rights. He wants the people who march on Washington to go far beyond a Sunday demo and Monday lobbying.
Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement by Scott Ritter
NY: Nation Books, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-1-56858-328-0
Freeman Dyson, an extremely accomplished scientist and fine writer, has a review of two books on global warming at the NY Review of Books:
A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies by William Nordhaus
Yale University Press, 234 pp., $28.00
Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto edited by Ernesto Zedillo
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization/Brookings Institution Press, 237 pp., $26.95 (paper)
As a preface to his review, he raises a very significant point:
...about 8 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year. This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.
I met Robert Lange at MIT at a lecture on international development. He's a Brandeis physics professor who has been working since November with Jongowe village on the island of Tumbatu about a mile from Unguja, one of the major islands of Zanzibar. There are no roads, electricity, cars, or bikes on Tumbatu but there are two villages. Jongowe is one of them and consists of 625 households with several thousand people.
Used a street performer's license to display my favorite WWII posters* in Harvard Square on Sunday and Monday for a couple of hours but didn't put out the begging bowl.
There are a couple of folkie guitar players and a team of a bullwhip artist and juggler working Brattle Square these days and, as usual, the Blue Puppet Theater.
BBC reports that this year, after nearly a decade of stability, methane in the atmosphere has increased. Both wind and isotope analyses indicate that the source is probably the Arctic wetlands, melting permafrost. "Some stations around the Arctic showed rises of more than double" the global average, 0.5%.
herds of cattle and other ungulates, rice production, and leaks of natural gas from pipelines, according to the IPCC. In addition, natural sources of methane include wetlands, termites, oceans, and gas hydrate nodules on the sea floor.
Methane contributes to tropospheric ozone, another greenhouse gas. Low atmosphere ozone is also a primary source of smog. Reducing methane in the atmosphere would thus have a double benefit.
Veronica Santos and Julia Parreiras from Belo Horizonte, Brazil make solar water purifiers using recycled plastic bottles and snack food bags turned inside out. The mylar bags are concentrators and the bottles are PET plastic, one side painted black to absorb more heat. They found that PET had more UV transmittance and stood up better to long term use.
Here's my own recycled solar cooker using snack food [popcorn] bags, a plastic cake box, and a dark saucepan.
Savannah College of Art and Design have been working on a homeless sleeping project, building three different models:
sleep shelter based upon a folding lawn chair
privacy screen for homeless shelter bunks
privacy tent for transitional housing bed
The 2008 winner of the $100,000 Buckminster Fuller Challenge is John Todd with his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World, a blueprint for a post coal era and carbon neutral economy in the coal land regions of Appalachia.
The plan includes
detoxifying the trillions of gallons of coal slurry with eco-machines designed to render the material harmless to the environment and local populations as well as to create beneficial products from the treated slurry solids
and
replacing Appalachian coal with renewable resources like Appalachian wind and woody biomass for power and products in a regional agro-forestry ecological land management system that includes all the various sectors of society.
The plan is replicable and scalable, designed to be carbon neutral if not carbon (and methane) clearing through the use of basic ecological design principles.
John Todd was one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute and has been building eco machines and living structures for forty years.
Vinay Gupta, developer of the Hexayurt Project, a $200 shelter that can be built in about two hours, has a new idea:
The Global Swadeshi Network is a group of people examining infrastructure and technology from a "right-livlihood" perspective, based on Gandhi's concept of swadeshi - "self-reliance, or standing on your own two feet."
He wants to combine Gandhi's Goals with Fuller's Methods as he explained in his vision of the future, "The Unplugged":
Gandhi's model of "self-sufficiency" is the goal: the freedom that comes from owning your own life support system outright is immense. It allows us to disconnect from the national economy as a way of solving the problems of our planet one human at a time.
