Articles by Biodiversivist
My real name is Russ Finley. I also have my own blog called Biodiversivist, which contains articles in addition to those submitted to Grist. I live in Seattle, married with children. Suffice it to say that although I am trained and educated as an engineer, my passion is nature. I very much want my grandchildren to live on a planet where lions, tigers, and bears have not joined the long and growing list of creatures that used to be.
All Articles
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Food prices going up, along with everything else
From an article in the Telegraph by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (Hat tip to Gristmill reader KO):
What has abruptly changed is the twin revolution of biofuel politics and Asia's switch to an animal-protein diet. Together, they have shattered the fragile equilibrium.
Investors who want to take advantage of agflation must tread with care, both for moral reasons and questions of timing.Riiiight ... moral reasons.
The way I see it, you can go the PETA route and call the closest thing the environmental movement has to a hero (Nobel Laureate Al Gore) a hypocrite for eating meat, replete with a bulbous-nosed, pot-bellied caricature, or you can admonish your politicians to stop supporting biofuels. I suppose you could do both. I'm concentrating my firepower on the biofuel side of the equation.
Industrial agrofuels are still in their infancy. They have to be stopped now, before it's too late. As consumers, voters, and peaceful protesters, we have a measure of power. Let's start using it. Find an effective way to convince humanity to eat fewer animal products and I'll support that effort also.
More quotes from the article under the fold:
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Innovative idea may reduce renewable energy costs
A study done at Stanford and published in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology is described by its lead author, Cristina Archer, this way:... each in a separate cage with a treadmill. At any given time, some hamsters will be sleeping or eating and some will be running on their treadmill. If you have only one hamster, the treadmill is either turning or it isn't, so the power's either on or off. With two hamsters, the odds are better that one will be on a treadmill at any given point in time and your chances of running, say, your blender, go up. Get enough hamsters together and the odds are pretty good that at least a few will always be on the treadmill, cranking out the kilowatts.
The combined output of all the hamsters will vary, depending on how many are on treadmills at any one time, but there will be a certain level of power that is always being generated, even as different hamsters hop on or off their individual treadmills. That's the reliable baseload power.Read the whole story here at Mongabay.
Oh, wait a minute. My bad ...
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The debate on plug-ins begins
Alan Durning's article makes a lot of good points about the need to do more than just improve the efficiency of our personal transport. It's a great article, but it also contains a few inaccuracies that I feel obligated to clear up before the global warming deniers (among others) try to use them.
I can tell from the comments on Alan's post that some readers are under the mistaken impression that his conclusions are a reflection of the EPRI/NRDC (PDF) report cited, but many are actually counter to that report. For example:
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Electric motorcycle delivers man to side of van
"I'm the owner, not the driver, so this is going to be interesting to say the least."
Indeed:
