Comments on: Solar thermal as art

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:20:00 +0000

Rainwater harvesting as art; windmills as high design; on the streetcar meeting, speaking and connecting with someone you’ve never seen before. These are the kinds of attractive and inspirational feedback loops we need to tie in with the ecological and economic arguments to provide us a prevailing cultural feedback counterforce to the positive climate forcing feedback loops scientists are lining up against us in this race against time and non-linearity, and to prop against those beginning to spout the tact that all is now too late, and/or that adaptation/dealing with emergencies is our only hope.

It looks like a rockstar -what’s cooler than that? People will connect with the beauty of sustainability and its infectious inspiration. Nature itself the artist, holding humanity’s arm as the brush. Okay a little new-age, but look at those photo’s!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 11:43:00 +0000

When observing the inherent superiority of CSP, including on strictly economic grounds, one wonders about the extremely low profile of this technology.

One of the fundamental reasons I found is a rampant lack of interest in truth. Perhaps to quite an extent due to post modernism (where truth is always “truth” and even “truth”? hahaha!)

What helps is that in the business domain, ‘truth’ is a strategic phenomenon. Which is twisted, postponed, chopped up, reversed, deluted, etc in a quest for maximal revenues.

This is not to say that long term relationships in the business domain are not considered important. They are, but putting all one’s cards on the table for the sake of it, is considered contra productive and naive.

The political domain doesn’t fare much better.

Also the personal domain is littered with white lies and worse.

These domains cross fertilize (or cross pollute) and in the resulting culture of taking ‘truth’ lightly, with or without the best of intentions, telling one from the other is a tricky endeavour.

And worse: we don’t seem to care.

Add to this

- a rampant chiqueness of being a sceptic versus a perceived naivit

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 07:55:00 +0000

For those interested in the potential for clean electricity @ a lower price as clean coal (what policy makers see as the way to go, together with nuclear), results of a meeting this Friday of TREC in Germany.

The meeting was dedicated to the desalination aspects of CSP. Together with the esthetics of the CSP-tower, the idea that clean electricity implies clean water, makes one’s heart jump.

Interesting to note that the CSP industry in Germany is fully booked for the coming years. Where and when will other entrepreneurs jump in?

The docs are available for 7 days at Yousendit (from end October at http://www.trecers.net/)

Yousendit download7 (interview with Vinod Khosla on why he invests heaviliy in CSP)

Pace e Bene,

Emil M