Inventing Green | Alexis Madrigal

What about the C in RE < C?

By Alexis Madrigal ⋅ January 18, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

After a recent discussion with an agent, I’ve been thinking really hard about the narrative arc of Inventing Green. Connecting a bunch of different types of people, technologies, and eras takes time and effort, it turns out. Particularly if at the end of the story, I want to give you something beyond a few dozen [...]

Solar Towers and Their “Spatial Byproducts”

By Alexis Madrigal ⋅ January 13, 2009 ⋅ One comment

We read on infranetlab.org about the the solar updraft tower, “a combination of a solar chimney, greenhouse and wind turbine.” Yet another example of an old technology made new, this particular kind of solar machine was first dreamt up in 1903 “by Spanish Colonel Isidoro Cabanyes in the magazine La Energia Electrica.”
The solar tower exploits [...]

An Introduction to the Largest Interconnected Machine on Earth

By Alexis Madrigal ⋅ January 10, 2009 ⋅ One comment

The Department of Energy released a new, by-way-of-introduction report on The Grid, which as you can read below, can “appropriately” be called “an ecosystem.”
Our century-old power grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth, so massively complex and inextricably linked to human involvement and endeavor that it has alternately (and appropriately) been called an ecosystem. [...]

Solar Vs. Atomic – 1953

By Alexis Madrigal ⋅ January 9, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

A persistent lesson in green tech history is that, since the advent on the nuclear physics, solar and atomic power advocates have spent a lot of time and resources opposing each other. The atomic power industry clearly had some deeper pockets and won out most of the time. Case-in-point is this article from Popular Mechanics, [...]

The Naturmensch, America’s Maladapted Urbanite

By Alexis Madrigal ⋅ January 9, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

Every day, I walk through Buena Vista Gardens on my way to Wired. It’s a park, a public space, but most of the young people and almost all of the Americans use it as a cut-through road, to make the long block between 4th and 3rd a little shorter. As you wend through the park, [...]

Distributing Food on the Multiuse Roads of 1903 New York

By Alexis Madrigal ⋅ January 7, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzZF2PvQXlw]
Here’s a look at a food distribution system from 1903, as filmed by Thomas Edison. This market is thought to have been on New York’s lower east side, where more than 1,500 pushcart vendors plied their wares to a largely Jewish community.
“The precise location is difficult to ascertain, but it is certainly on the [...]

Chinese Power Generation Growth 2002-2008

By Alexis Madrigal ⋅ January 6, 2009 ⋅ One comment

The non-2008 growth rates are why people like Michael Shellenberger tell a certain tech magazine things like, “”If China burns all the coal that it is set to burn between now and 2050, we are super-deeply fucked.” The 2008 growth rate is why people like the environmental economist, Alan Randall, say things like, [...]

Our Plundered Planet and Ecoapocaltyptophilia

By Alexis Madrigal ⋅ January 6, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet is a scathing critique of humans relationship with Nature written in 1947. It strikes me as remarkably in-tune with early-21st century ecoapocalyptophilia.
Osborn beat the rest of us to talking about the world’s new human-centered geological era by a good four decades. The third chapter of his book is titled, “The [...]

Old Solar Architecture

By Alexis Madrigal ⋅ January 5, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

If you are one of the rare early adopters of green tech history, you owe it to yourself to check out George Mokray’s Old Solar series of posts at his blog at Daily Kos.
I particularly liked his post on Edward Sylvester Morse’s solar air heater, patented in 1881.
“A simple glazed box on the south wall [...]