Power, Nuclear Power, and White Males

Earlier today, I posted a link on Twitter to a poll showing that 66% of white men and only 35% of everyone else support “increased reliance on nuclear fuel.” People immediately started trying to draw conclusions from that data.
“So what does that mean?” asked @lostkiwi. “White males are the only ones rational enough to know [...]

Industrial Food Processes

Here’s the link backstory to my article on Wired Science about the industrial processes used to manufacture traditional Thanksgiving foods. Aside from Jon Snyder’s tremendous photo (seen above), the best part about the story was digging through old food process patents to see how food makers think about their goals.
Energy efficiency and technical rationality are [...]

links for 2009-11-24

Making buildings more efficient: looking beyond price
"How do we remove the barriers? It turns out we know a decent amount about them but comparatively little about how to overcome them. A great primer on this is “Energy Efficiency Economics and Policy” from Resources for the Future. It’s a survey of research on efficiency economics, [...]

Narrow Technological Narratives and the One-Wheeled Replacement for the Car

The Dynosphere was a one-wheeled contraption that graced the cover of Popular Science in 1932, but that never made a commercial impact. A 2.5 horsepower engine could propel it at up to 30 miles per hour, though that figure might be bunk.
It’s interesting because we tend to think of the diffusion of inventions like this:

But [...]

This American Life on Health Care: The Power of Historical Contingency

The This American Life episode dealing with the rise of the insurance business features one of the best uses of historical knowledge that I’ve observed from a major media outlet.
Unlike many articles about green technology, which are of the history either will or will not repeat itself variety, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson’s account of [...]

Imagining Coal-Scale Solar

Spotted a really nice post over at the Green Mountain Engineering blog looking at metrics for solar scalability. There’s a lot to the post, and the links it sits on top of are first rate, including studies on solar’s historical growth curve, cost learning curve, energy payback time, and material availabilities.
Tyler Williams does a great [...]

Prodigal Sun

Back in 2000, Mother Jones delivered a really solid article on solar history and policy from the oil crises through the 1990s. Particularly noteworthy were the references to the book The Sun Betrayed and Who Owns the Sun?. The two books both argue that the vision for solar power originally proposed by decentralization and appropriate [...]

The Solar Space Race That Never Was

Congressional treatment of solar energy hasn’t exactly been charitable, but it has been funny sometimes.
In 1963, Polykarp Kusch, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, went before a Senate subcommittee on space and aeronautics. He was testifying against the form and scale of the American space program. The scientific objectives, he told them, were “limited” — and [...]

links for 2009-11-21

Solar 101 – History of Solar Energy in California
The California Energy Commission on the state’s solar history is lacking some pretty key elements of the story.
(tags: solar california energy photovoltaics PV)

Jacob’s Ladder

An explanation would kind of ruin it. (If you really need more, it’s called Jacob’s Ladder)
Just stare at that video and note that it caught the attention of Guy Kawasaki and the twitterverse. There is a reason that electricity scared and titillated the masses for decades. We know how this all works and it’s still [...]