hope and the silver bullet

Yesterday I realized most people have no idea about Peak Oil. For those of you who answer that description, I recommend googling the term. If you don't have the time, I'll give you the shortest version: It means, the end of oil.

That's right. No more oil. And this doesn't mean just the oily gluck for your car, it also means no more easy to get fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, plastics, etc.

If you don't care about the end of Oil, and you think more Coal and Tar Sands will do it, I say - not at the rate we're going. And not if you care about your water supply getting contaminated or butchering the land, fouling the skies, and killing more species.

And if you don't care about the rise of temperature and sea levels wiping out huge areas of the world and a permanent drought in the US that has now over taken 40-50% of this great nation - then I'll just assume you really do not like humans, do not care about your childrens' future or your own.

As much as I love solar and wind and bio-gas....at the rate our gluttonous masses consume - those techs just aren't going to cut it.

Of course, we could also add in there, the values of energy efficiency technologies which are HUGE and lower the numbers of need and use ratios. We could put in a dose of Energy Literacy so people could understand that CONSUMING has REPURCUSSIONS.

But for those of us who can't seem to get off the couch and turn off Big Brother's hypnosis machine, I mean, television - for those of us who need a few more Katrina's to wake us up to Mother Nature not being to pleased with the shit we're burning day and night - for those of us who still don't see the connections between using arcane ancient technology of fossil fuel burning and a very small sliver of the population maintaining its riches and keeping us from getting cleaner technology .... then we will need a silver bullet.

Most people in the energy world will usually flare their eyes and tell you very loudly, "THERE ARE NO SILVER BULLETS!!"

But, I've seen an almost complete prototype that is the size of a silver dollar can power your house and your car. Forget the combustion engine! The only downside of this baby is it might stop working in a couple hundred years.

And so I'm going to have to separate myself from the crowd here and say, maybe, "THERE IS INDEED A SILVER BULLET!"

As Envirobabe, I see all the new tech stuff. But there is one in particular that has really astounded me and given me hope for the future of humans having a decent life on this planet.

Go to www.potomacenergyprojects.com

The inventor spent 17 years developing this. He worked tirelessly for the government as the widget, fixit guy, tirelessly for a certain corporation only to have them steal a patent that has currently netted them 135 million dollars, stolen right out from under him. He served his country in Vietnam. He's not a Ph.D. He doesn't have a degree. And this is probably the reason he's been able to create this thing - See, he's not tainted by established science. His only agenda is serving Earth and its people.

The PEP prototype - proven on paper but has never been possible to build until now, with the use of superconductors. It runs on principles of magnetic flux. IT's scaleable. It is the coolest. And Eddie Sines, the inventor, needs help right now to finish this baby.

You want to be energy independent? You want to be free?

Go to www.potomacenergyprojects.com and invest in a future.

Solution building

Deforestation. Hmm, not only does it kill millions of species, it screws up our water supplies. Much of tree killing is for cooking needs.

Solution: solar stoves, solar powered radios, computers, lanterns....

Want to help poor people in the developing world? Want to tell Bono how he can contribute to communities desperate for electricity - instead of giving hand outs that entrench bad ideas, oil and gas kick backs and corrupt leaders?

Minimal power can have a tremendous impact: basic lighting, communications/computing, refrigeration for health clinics.

You can help make this happen. You don't have to wait for other people to do it, or waste your money giving it to a rock star who is only listening to people with their own agendas or wanting to feel good about themselves by just dealing with end results (it's called a band aid) and not thinking about systems and how they work.

Go direct. Go to www.self.org.

For a gift of $50 you can buy a solar powered radio - giving people access to critical weather and health information. $100 buys a high quality solar powered lantern for portable light. $250 buys a 60-watt solar panel - enough to power a village home for 25 years. $1000 buys a direct current computer and the solar panel to power it - giving rural stutdents a chance to achieve their dreams. For a gift of $500 you can buy a complete Solar Home System for one family, including solar module, battery, light fixture, controller switch, wiring, etc. And if you're feeling generous, a gift of $3,000 buys a complete solar system for a village health clinic - including a solar vaccine refrigerator.

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Once people have the basics, then the idea is how to create sustainable development.

Renewable energy has a lot of potential for local manufacturing - wind mills, basic turbines, solar hot water, stirling engine solar systems...

And like some of my friends in the military have written:

"Would an alternative approach:
-Ruduce vulnerability to insurgency?
-Increase societal stability and sense of progress?
-Increase sustainability absent/ post international presence?"

"Should resources move from 'traditional' power to renewable/sustainable power systems?

I vote YES.

A hero is born

Every now and then a hero is born.

Today that hero is Major General Richard Zilmer, on the ground in Iraq, making demands for wind and solar units to be used for electrical generating needs.

As many of you may know, fuel convoys are targets, easy kills for insurgents to nail Americans. The more energy demands on the bases, the more convoys you need to bring the drugs in, I mean the oil.

Like I've said before, lot of SUN IN IRAQ!!!

Department of Defense is starting to ponder some interesting smart questions like -
"Could 'sustainable' energy approaches contribute to operational effectiveness?"
"Could approaching energy differently enable a more sustainable societal outcome?"

So in Iraq and Afghanistan, they're starting to drop and plop some super nifty easy to put together power stations that use wind and solar - The Mobile Power Station/The Clean Green Power Machine made by SKYBUILT POWER.

Major General Zilmer, you give me hope again in America and I salute you.

Democracy ended with the Diebold voting machines

These are sad days for American democracy. When our own President says that voting for the opposition party is tantamount to voting for terrorists, you know something is dangerously wrong. The Republican party has become so shamelessly corrupt that it is increasingly difficult for me to grit my teeth and hold hands with them for our bipartisan efforts. I know, I know, there are good ones among the rotten eggs, and these Republicans currently in power bear little resemblance to the tenants of what the party used to look like, so much that they have made Nixon look like a saint in comparison....but the Repubican party's outrageously offensive advertising, outrageous kick-backs, corruption and gnawing off the bones of the American people is so beyond the limits, that it almost overpowers the fact that since the 2000 Presidential coup-d'etat they have pretty much stolen most of the elections - from the 80-90,000 African Americans and Hispanics who were physically kept from voting with fraudulent felon records that came from the state of Texas to be used in the state of Florida, to Ohio, to the recent governor race in Georgia - with no paper trail and Diebold voting machines owned by Republican big donors. I called for UN peacekeepers for the 2004 Elections but who heard me then? How many elections is it going to take before the American people wake up to what is happening? For that matter, how long is it going to take for the Democratic party to figure out there are literal malicious bugs in these voting machines?? Ask any computer head and you'll get the same answer. Check this out. It's all real and you can show it to those who still believe Big Brother actually wants things to be fair: If you are a voter, or a care about clean elections, you must watch this:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3074338748583195498&hl=en

As my friend Bob Cohen says: "It's not how people vote that counts. It's whoever knows the voting machine's
code that does the counting."