R&D Is Not Dispatchable

I’ve got a big feature up on Wired Science about the Aquatic Species Program, an R&D effort at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (née Solar Energy Research Institute) through the 80s and into the early 90s. It’s a case study on how uneven funding can destroy even promising programs. And with the end of the [...]

Fast Tracking for Green Tech Patents

While the Copenhagen deal may not be exciting to many people, the Obama administration has been doing a lot for green tech innovation aside from pricing carbon.
Obviously, the RD&D money in the stimulus package was helpful, particularly during the downturn. The loan guarantees are a tried-and-true mechanism for getting capital-intensive projects built, too. But here’s [...]

links for 2009-12-19

Nature: Geothermal quake risks must be faced
"It is now becoming clear to the public, local authorities, the geothermal industry and regulatory agencies that deep geothermal systems carry a small risk — as do most technologies in the energy sector. Dams can break, nuclear power plants may fail, carbon dioxide released from the oil and gas [...]

links for 2009-12-14

Yale Sociology » Wendell Bell
* “Wendell Bell and Oliver W. Markley: two futurists’ views of the preferable, the possible and the probable. Journal of Futures Studies” 13, No. 3 (2009): 161-178 (by Darrell Kicker).
* “The American invasion of Grenada: a note on false prophecy,” Foresight 10, No. 3 (2008): 27-42.
[...]

Serious Futurists

In working on a chapter about the visions that both professional forecasters and regular cultural observers held in the middle of the 20th century, I’ve stumbled into a whole field that seems underexposed these days: “future studies.”
While many people in places like San Francisco are familiar with some futurists like Paul Saffo, Jamais Cascio, [...]

Deregulation, Innovation, and Market Liberalization

Deregulation, Innovation and Market Liberalization by L. Lynne Kiesling
“Whereas the dominant regulatory paradigm has traditionally been centralized economic and physical control based on natural monopoly theory and power systems engineering, the ideas presented and synthesized by Kiesling compose a different paradigm – decentralized economic and physical coordination through contracts, transactions, price signals, and integrated intertemporal [...]

links for 2009-12-12

Biofuels, facts, fantasy, and feasibility
"It is frequently claimed that green algae are intrinsically more productive, often by orders of magnitude, than higher plants commonly grown as crops for food. There is no firm evidence for this belief. On the contrary, there is much experience which shows that algae are not more but less productive… Accordingly, [...]

The WSJ Leaps Aboard the Green Tech History Bandwagon

Now here’s what I like to see.

In Energy Innovation, Everything New Is Old Again – WSJ.com
“High-tech marvels, the solar dishes look like three-story-tall mirrored flowers atop steel stems. But at the heart of each dish is a very old-fashioned invention: a Stirling engine, patented by a Scotsman in 1816, decades before the diesel or internal [...]

“The Smoke Nuisance” and Copenhagen

“Viewed from the standpoint of the Smoke Inspector, the 1,600,000 people of Chicago are divided into two classes—First, those who create a smoke nuisance; Second, those who are compelled to tolerate a smoke nuisance. One class has radical champions who maintain that smoke is an irrepressible necessity; a concomitant of the commercial and manufacturing supremacy of Chicago; that smoke not only is not unhealthy, but that it is an actual disinfectant.”

links for 2009-12-08

OTHER CINEMA: Libido Versus Leisure
SUNDAY SPECIAL! After 5 years, OC welcomes back David Sherman, a veteran experimentalist and former curator of Total Mobile Home Microcinema, in collaboration with partner Rebecca Barten. He returns with a grand project indeed: Wasteland Utopias deals with the social and environmental consequences of the urbanization of Arizona’s Sonora Desert. His [...]