It seems to me that there is a big battle on ‘global warming’ and a lot of energy and time can go into commenting and explaining. I am not best placed to do that, but I should put my money where my mouth is. There is no argument for me on this issue for a long time yet I have not done as much as I could personally. How can I expect people who are sceptical or little informed to make changes? I intend to research insulation and heating solutions for my own house and invest in those solutions that I can cope with. I hope to help by example. The investigations and any implementation details and problems will appear on pages here over the next year. First I am looking into solid-wall insulation and loft insulation.

My view is that solar electric power is the most important item to develop. Although there is a good argument for diversity in the base energy source, solar really is the source of it all. Nuclear and geothermal are not immediate products of solar energy, but were in the distant past. I thought this article useful for showing us the possible and the cost:

New Jersey Utility Approved to Install 80MW of Solar for $515M

This scheme is using many photovoltaic panels atop power supply poles as well as in some places on he ground. As can be seen the installation cost is $6.5 per Watt. That Watt is supplied every second the sun is shining so that upfront cost of $6.5 will provide maybe 5,000 kWh over a year; this is not any new technology it tacks onto existing infrastructure.

In Scientific American, November 2009, I found more creative thinking about our environmental problems. The article is The Rise of Vertical Farms. The author, Dickerson Despommier (a professor at Columbia University), has a web site detailing the plan, The Vertical Farm Project – Agriculture for the 21st Century and Beyond

The plan as suggested is to grow food within cities on brown field sites. These could be 30 stories high. City waste water would provide the water, the energy would come from whatever renewable was most locally suitable, supply of the produce would be local, the growing season would be all year long, the plants would be protected from many diseases and weather conditions just by being shielded from the outer environment. A lot of conventional agricultural land could be left to recover and regenerate; absorbing some of the CO2 we need less of in the atmosphere.

Desert and other arid regions could also become food producing areas. I found this a very attractive vision. As the author says, there are many matters to work out, and as I think repeatedly, let’s start small experiments now. The problem that I foresee that I did not notice mentioned is the evolution of plant diseases within these environments. As the world human population is expected to rise to 9.5 billion something new has to be done.

This is an inspiring possibility: Ammonia is the smarter hydrogen. This is a short article that points to lots of research and development that I have not had time to scan through yet. The main message to me is that there is a lot going on in non-CO2 energy development that would not have come to my mind. There are lots of clever people working on the energy problem and that gives up hope.