CO2 scrubbing silos?

i love that their solution is to literally bury the problem: extract C02 from the atmosphere and pack it in the earth, under the oceans, or wherever.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/23/scrubbing-the-atmosp.html

whatever works, i suppose, but man what a mess.

Paul Kingsnorth on Renewables in Apr. '08 Ecologist

thought a few might be interested in this (maybe CEO Hoicka most):

in the April 2008 issue of Ecologist, Paul Kingsnorth writes about the storm brewing in Lewis about a massive, 181 turbine wind farm. here are some highlights from the article.

The battle of Lewis [a contested site of a 181 turbine wind farm] is not the easily-told story of greens versus anti-green reactionaries. It is more complex, and more interesting, than that.
The question that hovers above it all is currently echoing around the world, and will only grow louder: in the fight against climate change, will the environment have to be destroyed to save the environment? Can the ends justify the means?
(26)

The amount of maize needed to fill the tank of a Range Rover with ethanol fuel would feed a person for a whole year. Fill your tank every two weeks for a year and you have taken enough food out of circulation to feed a hungry village.
(27)

Ironically, it now seems that biofuels don't even do what they were intended to: new research has revealed that, once the 'carbon cost' of clearing land for biofuels is taken into account, virtually every biofuel crop actually produces more emissions than the fuel it replaces.
(27)

The lesson to be learned from all this is a sobering one. Renewable energy technologies as we currently know them are incapable of providing anything like the amount of power we have come to expect from fossil fuels. Even if technologies improve, which they will undoubtedly do, they will not do so fast or cheaply enough to prevent the growing conflicts over land that the spread of large-scale renewables is already provoking.
...
[G]reen technologies can have a distinctly un-green downside. And green technologies – any technologies – on this sort of ['mega project'] scale are going to be undemocratic, top-down, unaccountable and, potentially, very destructive indeed.
Scale, in the end, is all.
(28)

interesting and highly relevant stuff, even if he may be a little more polemics than research.

the craft of academia: final round, the phd

thanks for stimulating conversation last night, dudes. i hope i didn't come off too didactic or preachy—the catholicism in my family history sometimes makes me fervent about certain things. i think last night i was going off on the craft of academia, and how i believe what we do as phds is training and rehearsal for that craft. (craft's a big term, but in brief: not suggesting that it's only learning the ropes of academia that's involved in acquiring the phd-craft; but there's also a matter of pushing the boundaries to shift what it means to be academics, struggling to change what needs changing in the structure/institution/industry, etc.—in short, craft knowledge as both a matter of professionalization and a matter of radicalization and change)

so what follows is all my belief—clearly to be taken with a grain of salt, but worded with conviction as it is firm belief for me... take from it what you will.

1) writing needs to be a daily act—time of day, duration of writing activities, nature of immediate environment: i think these all need to be both reflected upon very carefully and varied to determine best fit for our needs. i wonder if we need to get out of strict and rigid habits, or whether we need to form them...

2) everything goes into the phd—which is to not to mean we spend every waking hour and every sleeping one dreaming about our dissertation; but i think we need to reflect on how our interests and passions about everything from Barney to Foucault (no comparison intended!) need to be deeply considered. i guess it's about finding a balance, perhaps between carving out discrete chunks of time to spend with family and friends away from work/research, and about allowing oneself to think about research/work during these times without rushing to a keyboard.

3) befriend technology, yet remain a luddite—i was talking about RSS feeds from journal providers, joining email listservs for areas in our field (even peripherally), organizing our interests in refworks, and probably setting up a wiki or blog to order thoughts and gain some writing and web development experience... yet part of me wants to build tables, paint watercolours, and forget all about the hi-tech stuff. i guess the point is to recognize where tech can kill creativity and innovation, and to be skeptical of it for that reason, and for the other ways we let it dehumanize us (is this thought overly dark?)

anyway here's a hit list of some programs i find useful (i'll only mention the free stuff).
+ Firefox is the web browser of choice for doing research: it allows you to "add on" different features, like Zotero, which is a bibliographic research tool.
+ Thunderbird is a great email program that lets you organize and archive your email better than doing stuff only online. it's a bit of a pain to set up, but once you do, you should be sailing. it also allows you to bring in RSS feeds so you can bring all your research into here, a kind of one-stop place for daily mail and news...
+ GMail is the only online mail service that i use, mostly because it's a great interface, but also because, once you create a Google account, you have access to all the other free stuff Google has created (like Blogger, Calendar, Scholar, Documents, and so on)—this is all great stuff for if you're not working from home, but are mobile (esp. during classes in first year). Useful too, because Google Documents are totally compatible with the Microsoft Word format
+ Foxit reader is an alternative to Adobe PDF Reader, and really nice because it lets you annotate PDF files: specifically, make highlights and add comments—Adobe doesn't let you do that!

...here's some of the writing/editing resources i mentioned, too
+ Howard Becker's kind of the guru for social science writing, in my opinion. very clear and direct writing, and a narrative style that directs his readers away from snap judgements toward more analytical, multi-faceted, and responsible thinking on a topic. (I would recommend hitting a library or a used-book store to peruse them first: you might find one to be better than another [or you might find one for cheaper than what Amazon or Chapters sells it for...])

Writing for Social Scientists | Telling About Society | Tricks of the Trade

(i'd also recommend his book on Art Worlds which, even though it's about the social construction of systems of artistic practice, i think there's a great deal of what's said that informs how systems of scientific practice operate...)

anyway, that's the list for now—any more to add? thanks for listening & i'm sure the conversation will continue...