Toward the end of your lecture you took a question about green energy or something like that. Your response said something about the need for new technology, and that would probably come from China.
Below is a link to Doug's show Saturday Dec 19, with Gar Lipow who it turns out is an environmental economist who studies this topic. The short form is, there is no need for new technology. We have all we need. What's needed is to scale it up. It requires a switch to electricity, and also switch to a system of wind and solar, and then generate the electricity through switching to essentially steam turbines which I assume drive the electric generators. Lipow says its easier (more efficient?) to store energy as heat, so there are models that use mirrors to heat water, which in turn run the turbines. These kinds of plants are cheaper to build, than nuclear energy plants. I can believe that, since this idea is very low tech stuff, re-tooled from 19thC steam power.
There is the question on how to extend public transport into the outland. The solution was electric buses. God I remember those in LA when I was a kid. They don't need tracks. These are still used in areas of SF. They would be a great way to extend the whole BART system. If the high speed rail was run on electricity, you could really cut into gas powered cars and planes.
Doug's program is also here, for those like me who seem to have the wrong `codex' to use. This works with just a browser and audio card:
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/57092
It was very positive and interesting. I was humming along. Sure. I was thinking about a way to get rid of batteries. I was thinking about short use of batteries to some main highway system with some kind of electro-magnetic grid. The car gets onto the grid, switches off its battery (and recharging itself through the generator effect) and forms a connection to the embedded magnetic field, which the car armature uses to turn against with no mechanical link. The field strength is used to turn the electric motor in the car...which also runs a recharge system. Since the battery is for short term use relative to the much longer time on the magnetic highway, you escape the problem of the impossibility of a perfect engine, because most of the time the batteries are being recharged through the magnetic grid. The trick is to figure out how to magnify the field to sufficient strength. Since EM fields are of the inverse square type, it means the tolerances have to be very close to capture their energy. The most efficient interface is air with no physical contact, because it has the least friction.
Then with my morning coffee, I went to catch up with Copenhagen. My mood went to hell.
Gar calls offsets, a literary prize. I think it's even worse than a meaningless little ribbon. There was a woman from a Brazilian activist group who explained what was in the UN-REDD proposal and how it could be manipulated (possibly intended) that would increase deforestation. The way the offsets work are between private companies trading. But most of the land with forests are not owned in private.
She was speaking on Democracy Now on Friday's program. You have to wait through most of the program, because it appears toward the end....
CG