Solar Tubes Make Great Lighting Alternative

Solar Tubes are a great way to harvest sunlight for indoor lighting.

They produce more light than a simple skylight does. By collecting and then magnifying sunlight using a mirrored tube, the system then uses a multi-faceted lens to diffuse the light through out the room. The system uses zero electricity and provides an amazing amount of light, even on a cloudy day.

A local business, Caldwell Toyota, which recently built a LEED certified retail store uses solar tubes manufactured by Solatube through out the building to reduce it's lighting costs and energy usage.

If you are building a new house or business, or simply remodeling to increase your homes efficiency, you would be well rewarded by this simple, sustainable technology.

New Technology Tuesday

Technology, particularly the accelerating rate of technological change and the vectors it follows, offer both the promise of hope for our future as a species and a planet, and in the opinions of many carry it's doom. It is industrial technology which has percipitated the climate crisis we face today, and it will be technology which will provides alternatives, along with changed human attitudes and behaviors, to help us steer away from it...hopefully.

I'm not sure if it's fair to say that it's technology (or misapplied technology and science, like say the application of behavioral psychology in marketing and media to promote consumerism for an example) or human behavior which is the culprit in our out of control ride to potential extinction.

I still hold the optimism of better living through science which I acquired as a youth, but I very much understand the menace of unintended consequences, particularly as it has applied to industrial pollution. Many of the wonders of the last century, turned out to be the bane of those who came into contact with them, whether we are discussing the wonderful insulating properties and applications of asbestos, or the insidious lung disease it caused in so many people, just to name one example.

Here are a few of the new developments in technology which I find hopeful. I'd be interested to hear your opinions on any of the items highlighted, or the general role of technology in our future.

* Better control of fusion power offers a lot of promise for escaping our addiction to fossil fuel. Researchers at MIT have developed a method for managing the hydrogen plasma in a fusion reactor. h/t Kurzweilai.com.

MIT's doughnut-shaped fusion reactor, the Alcator C-Mod, uses magnets to confine hydrogen in a turbulent, electrically charged state of matter called a plasma. By infusing large amounts of energy into the plasma, physicists can kick off fusion reactions that, in turn, release large amounts of energy. The MIT reactor is too small to generate practical fusion reactions that generate enough energy to keep themselves going--what's called a burning plasma. But the researchers have been working on ways to achieve this state in larger reactors, such as the planned International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

* Australia plans to use market trading to help predict eco-disasters and in the future to help guide government environmental policy.

The Australian Knowledge Exchange works by giving traders A$100,000 (US$65,000) play money and 1000 stocks in each of five reservoirs in New South Wales. The stocks pay out each month according to the level of the dam. If the dam is full, they are worth $100. Traders can profit by buying stocks for less than their final value, or by selling them for more.

..."This approach has huge potential in the environmental sector where there is a lot of uncertainty," says Josh Donlan of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Advanced Conservation Strategies, a Utah-based NGO.

The incentives are clearly not monetary - the trader who does best wins a paltry A$50 - but Whitten hopes people will be drawn to take part in what is a "public good" enterprise, much like Wikipedia. Although anyone can become a trader, the team's ideal players would be farmers, weather forecasters, people who live close to reservoirs, and computer modellers. The market currently has about 50 traders, and the team hope at least 50 more will join.

Donlan says the market's real value will come from the wide-ranging knowledge of investors. For example, when it comes to biodiversity, rather than rely solely on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which may not account for all regional variations, markets that capture local knowledge could give a more accurate prediction of the size of bird populations, say.

* The Auto Industry is developing strategies for successful transition to electric plug in vehicles. The industry is considering implementing community out-reach strategies for plug-in electric vehicles first to make sure that they receive adequate support for success.

Car companies intend to target places where governments are willing to provide incentives to purchase plug-in electric cars and install charging stations. Utilities, too, need to be involved so that the grid doesn't become stressed by a rush of cars.

...Nissan will stage (their plug-in) car's initial introduction in the fall of 2010 in region's that have the right infrastructure in place, said Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan Americas. That will help it prepare for "mass market" availability in 2012, he said.

It is establishing "public-private partnerships" with governments and utilities in an effort to ensure things like favorable permitting and available inspectors for charging stations, Perry said. So far, it has agreements with Tennessee, Oregon, and Sonoma County, Calif., to set up a network of charging stations in public places.

"As we think about the individual consumer, you don't want it to be an open question--Ok, I want an electric vehicle, what do I do? We want to have those answers," said Perry. "It's not a technical hurdle. It's more a coordination and logistics hurdle."

I really look forward to plug in cars hitting the market. It doesn't address the fundamental problems of sustainability, but it does offer a solution to the contribution of vehicle emissions in climate change. The picture at the top of the post is the chinese battery manufacturer BYD's dual electric/gasoline car, the e6 (h/t treehugger.com)

Tax and Distribute Our Way To A Healthier Planet

The New Scientist Science and Society writer Michael Le Page has an interesting commentary and suggestion to incoming President Barack Obama. In a plea to Obama to take leadership on Climate Change, Le Page suggests updating Kyoto by creating a direct system of incentives and disincentives for both large economic players and individuals around the world to promote positive changes in our technologies and practices.

Le Page criticizes Kyoto as a joke, rightly pointing out it's fatal flaw, i.e. it's lack of enforcement, and a target setting process which is open to manipulation.

Cap-and-trade schemes might look good on paper but they are doomed to fail when it comes to weaning the world off its addiction to fossil fuels. For starters, without a strong enforcement regime, any cap is meaningless. Under the Kyoto protocol, for instance, countries that do not meet their targets just increase them next time around.

The solution offered represents thinking far outside the box, in my book, and reflects an approach which I believe conservative economists like Milton Friedman would agree with, i.e. the use of taxes as a method for creating disincentive and incentive, as opposed to the creation of a body of legislative regulations and the accompanying bureaucracy to oversee and administer it. It leaves companies and people free to choose solutions and courses of action which best fit their individual situations and interests.

So what's the alternative? In the US, there is growing support for a carbon tax on fossil fuels. Such a tax can be adjusted to reflect the harm done by different fuels: coal would be taxed far more heavily than natural gas, for instance, unless burned in a power station that sequesters the carbon. The tax should be raised each year to make fossil fuels ever more expensive and renewables relatively cheaper.

There are many arguments in favour of this approach, but perhaps the strongest is that a carbon tax will be hard to dodge. It's more difficult to smuggle oil or coal than cigarettes and cocaine. Those who use fossil fuels will immediately pay a higher price.

Your advisers will tell you this is political suicide: the last thing we need in a global financial crisis is higher fuel prices. Well, here's the clever bit that should make this tax popular with most voters: every penny raised from the carbon tax should be divided equally among a country's citizens. This is called the "tax and 100-per-cent dividend" approach, and it is advocated by leading climate scientist James Hansen of NASA.

...People who live in a huge house, drive gas-guzzling cars and fly lots will lose out under this regime. The dividend they receive will be outweighed by what they pay for fuel, flights and heating. Most people, however, will be richer. Families and retired people struggling to make ends meet would gain far more from the dividend than they lose in higher bills.

Did you get that? Tax carbon, and give the money back directly to individual citizens, just as Alaska provides direct disbursements from it's Permanent Fund to residents of that state. Those who act in ways which use less carbon, get taxed at a lower rate, and keep a larger portion of the direct carbon tax distribution.

The tax-and-dividend approach is easier to implement, harder to cheat and provides a stronger, more immediate incentive to change. It applies to everyone, not just big companies, and rewards those who genuinely emit less CO2, rather than lawyers and accountants. It's bold, simple and our best hope of averting catastrophe.

Now maybe, for the sake of argument, we can also consider a scheme by which a portion of the carbon tax receipts go to basic research in alternative energy creation and storage, say 10-25%, and rest directly back to individuals...but regardless, I like the idea, and think it would produce the change we need, as well as a direct benefit to individuals and to the economy as a whole.