Smart Energy

Gain by Richard Powers

Gain, Richard Power’s amazing sixth novel (originally published in 1998), takes one of the most difficult issues of our time and humanizes it. The issue is corporate culpability. We all know that “better living through chemistry” has its price and its consequences, but who is to pay?

Not Clare, the transnational corporation whose history is charted across three generations in this saga of a novel. The company makes soap — a cleaning product that offers the homemaker so much to gain. And the company, of course, has gained, prodigiously, over the years: it has profited immensely.

Clare manufacturers its products in Lacewood, Illinois, where Laura Bodey is an estate agent. Laura has ovarian cancer. Her story – of her illness and how, as she disintegrates, her family reunites around her – is intertwined with the story of Clare International.

Long before the novel makes the facts plain, we’ve already drawn connections: our chemistry is killing us. The brilliant Powers draws parallels and cycles in abundance but, to his credit, he never once hits over the head with any moralizing message.

Perennial plants flower and die, and so do people and industries, he implies. It’s the way of the world. We can change things, perhaps and, after reading Gain, we may well join one crusade or another, seeking justice for victims of industries focused on nothing but gain or, contrarily, seeking to eliminate the tort system that is, at this point, the victim’s only source of recompense and punishment for the polluters who make us sick. Either way, or no way, that’ll be what you got out of the novel, not what’s there. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, the normally conservative Forbes has a full on endorsement of green building as a way to mitigate the effects of human-caused climate change:

Increasing storms, violent floods, fluctuating global temperatures, unstable energy costs and global water shortages. All of these threaten to derail, destroy or bankrupt businesses around the world. Businesses that can't afford to rebuild if they are destroyed, or stay profitable as energy prices rise while the global economy sinks. In today's environment businesses can no longer wait for governments to help shape solutions to deal with climate change.

via Seven Keys To Green Building – Forbes.com.

The piece includes a video about the “seven keys” which are:

1. Consolidate office space
2. Set green building performance goals
3. Reduce equipment and load requirements
4. Conserve energy
5. Design comfortable work environments
6. Consider renewable energy
7. Additional strategies

We may take exception with the order of some of these (doesn’t conserving energy entail reducing equipment and load requirements, for instance?) but the mere fact that a magazine that toes the bottom line of the Profit Generation is talking about this is significant.

Farmers, ranchers and chefs will have the unique opportunity to discuss ways to source fresh, local agriculture to local foodservice venues at the 2010 North Idaho Farmer-Chef Collaborative.  Held in Moscow on March 1, this interactive event, fashioned after the popular “speed dating” phenomenon, pairs buyers and sellers to facilitate one-on-one discussions to match buyer needs with available local products.

The Moscow-Pullman area has great opportunities for growers to connect with restaurants from a wide variety of dining facilities, ranging from high-end establishments to family-style diners with great quality, service, and appeal.

“Local restaurants are eager to capitalize on the growing ‘buy local’ trend by offering unique, seasonal menus featuring only the freshest items available,” said Kim Peterson of the Idaho State Department Agriculture. “The local food movement has succeeded in driving demand and opportunity for local farmers and the local economy. The Farmer-Chef Collaborative aims to build connections within the community while supporting such movements.”

The North Idaho Farmer-Chef Collaborative is sponsored cooperatively by the Idaho State Department of Agriculture, Rural Roots, University of Idaho Extension, and the University of Idaho Sustainability Center.

The event will be held at the University Inn from 9:00 am to 11:30 a.m. and costs $15.00 per agribusiness to attend. Pre-registration is required. For more information, or to register, please contact Kim Peterson at the Idaho State Department of Agriculture at (208) 332-8532 or kim.peterson@agri.idaho.gov.

Here’s a very cool house built out of reclaimed and recycled materials. Alas, I have no idea where it is or who the builders are; I found the little bit of info I have on ScienceHax, where you’ll find more photos.

A one-take music video par excellence by OK Go, directed by Brian L. Perkins. Booooooom asks,

Can we crown them kings of the one-take music video yet?

Hell yes.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of southeast Asia.

via Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies | World news | guardian.co.uk.

A smart electrical power grid could decrease annual electric energy use and utility sector carbon emissions at least 12 percent by 2030, according to a new report from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The report, The Smart Grid: An Estimation of the Energy and CO2 Benefits, shows a direct link between the smart grid and carbon emissions. It evaluates how different functions of the smart grid could provide substantial reduction in energy use and carbon emissions – both directly by using new technology and indirectly by making renewable energy and efficiency programs more affordable and potentially larger.

via News – Clean Edge – The Clean-Tech Market Authority.

See also: Pullman to become Smart Grid Community

I produced and edited this project for work. It took about three months to get to this 3-minute video, in part because I needed to travel to various locations in the state to conduct the interviews and then cull through some 20 hours of raw footage to find just the right sound bites. In any case, I’m fairly happy with it, though some of the shots and some of the sound are less than perfect. I do think the editing is fine and it tells a great story: the importance of science to a premium wine industry and, correspondingly, the key to the science is an outstanding education.

Voyager Capital hasn’t made many bets in the clean technology arena. But that’s changing today with the Seattle venture capital firm leading an investment in Coulomb Technologies, a Campbell, Calif.-based company that is developing a worldwide network of electric vehicle charging stations.

Voyager, along with Rho Ventures, is leading a $14 million investment in the company. Other investors include Siemens Venture Capital and Hartford Ventures.

Coulomb opened its first charging station — operating under the ChargePoint name — in 2008 in San Jose, California. It most recently opened other facilities Detroit, Lincoln City, Oregon and Honolulu, with the company saying that it plans to have more than 1,000 stations up and running this year.

via Voyager invests in charging stations for electric cars.