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Segway creator aims for bottom of pyramid

Interesting:

Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don't have electricity. ...

To solve the problem, he's invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.

The energy machine creates power from "anything that burns" -- cow dung is envisioned as the primary input. It can also run on the sludge created by the water machine, which can allegedly purify any water put in it, no matter how dirty.

As intriguing as the devices themselves is the business model:

Steve Frillmann, community-garden guru, answers readers’ questions

As head of Green Guerillas, a community-gardening group, Steve Frillmann brings together neighbors who may not necessarily be environmentalists or garden advocates. No matter the color of their thumbs, they all work together to clean up urban areas, making them a little safer, a bit more humane. In answering reader questions, Frillmann chats about digging into the community-gardening scene, growing food on urban rooftops, and dealing with hose-related squabbles.

From Hilton to Honey

Plaster of Paris Paris Hilton got covered in white powder, and no, she wasn’t partying with Kate Moss. Instead, the famous-for-being-famous socialite was walking next to fashionista Julien Macdonald, whose fur-heavy designs aroused the ire of PETA. So they pelted him with flour, hoping he’d “rise to the occasion.” Dude, you got antique‘d. Elle in […]

An interview with Sir David King, Britain’s top scientist and climate crusader

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has earned a rep as a global leader in the fight against climate change, and, at least in part, he has Sir David King to thank for it. Sir David King. King, the U.K. government’s chief scientific adviser and an outspoken advocate of aggressive action to forestall global warming, has […]

Brave Newmont World

Newmont Mining to pay Indonesia $30 million to settle pollution suit Colorado-based Newmont Mining Corp. has agreed to pay $30 million to the government of Indonesia to settle a long-running pollution lawsuit, but the parties have agreed to disagree about the pesky question of whether, um, any illegal pollution occurred. Indonesia’s civil suit against Newmont, […]

Ice Knowing You

Enviros seek endangered status for Glacier National Park Greenland’s not the only place where the glaciers, they are a-melting. Montana’s Glacier National Park has lost over half its icy cover, and eco-activists have petitioned the United Nations to declare it endangered by global warming — hoping to force U.S. policy makers to act on reducing […]

Below the Melt

Greenland ice sheet melting speedily, making seas rise faster New research indicates that the Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than we thought, will be gone sooner than we thought, and may raise sea levels more than we thought. Whee! The new study, published in Science, says Greenland’s glaciers — among the earth’s largest freshwater […]

‘Total war’ in Nigeria

Wow:

A Nigerian militant commander in the oil-rich southern Niger Delta has told the BBC his group is declaring "total war" on all foreign oil interests.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has given oil companies and their employees until midnight on Friday night to leave the region.

A positive environmental program that can (almost) fit on an index card

Without further ado, here's the first draft of my index-card manifesto. It turned out to be two index-card manifestos, with five points each: one for stuff I consider immediately urgent, and a second for what I consider longer-term goals. Feedback is welcome -- nay, requested. (I'll discuss the whole project more in a subsequent post.)

WHAT A GREEN WANTS: IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES

Energy efficiency: Proven techniques can get the same amount of work with 50% of the oil.

Tax/subsidy shifts: Markets should tell the ecological truth. That means shifting subsidies from industries and practices that harm us to those that help us -- and doing the reverse with taxes.

Diverse clean energy: Our economy must move from reliance on a single concentrated source of energy (oil) to reliance on a distributed array of small-scale, renewable energy sources appropriate to local conditions. That means staying within our solar budget, using wind, solar, biothermal, and hydrodynamic energy.

Electric vehicles: Flex-fuel and plug-in hybrid automobiles are necessary transition technologies, but in the long-term we need vehicles that run purely on electricity, stored either in hydrogen fuel cells or advanced batteries.

Smart grid: The electric grid should be agnostic (accepting inputs from any source of any size), intelligent (able to apportion based on shifting demand and supply), transparent (providing data on price and supply to all consumers), and scaleable (capable of building out, or degrading, gracefully).

Jon Stewart interviews an oil analyst, who basically blows it

A couple days ago, Jon Stewart interviewed Peter Tertzakian, author of A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Break Point and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World. (You can watch the interview here.)

I haven't read the book, so I don't know what Tertzakian's general outlook is, but I can tell you that on television his outlook is boooring. It's highly unfortunate: The Daily Show reaches an extremely influential demographic, and the peak-oil issue desperately needs a higher profile on the cultural scene. A Daily Show interview is not the time for measured analysis; it's the time to be funny and flamboyant and, OK, a little alarmist. We need people to pay attention.

But Tertzakian was soporific, droning on about energy "break points" and how we've weathered the previous ones pretty well, and how even though there's no obvious alternative, we'll muddle through, blah blah zzzz ... I suspect he hasn't been on TV much.

My one substantive critique was that he referred several times to the lack of an alternative energy source that could scale to oil's breadth and depth. But what the public needs to understand is that we don't need a single, silver-bullet alternative. What can replace oil is a diversity of small-scale sources (wind, solar, biothermal, hydro, cogeneration) appropriate to local conditions. We need to replace a single, concentrated source of power -- both physical and political power -- with a decentralized multiplicity of sources. This will be a boon -- again, both physically and politically.

I wish everyone talking publicly about oil could at least get on the same page on that one talking point.