World is Green

DD’s Eco Notes

# There are no effect-free solutions. We need to guesstimate the effects of all potential solutions, measure their real effects if we put them into practice, and compare alternatives to the best of our collective ability.
# We cannot afford to paint things black or white. We need to be able to differentiate a wide range of shades of green, and be willing to give new technologies some extra slack.

X Prize: $100 Million for Clean Fuels

In its richest and largest competition yet, the foundation will divvy up some $100 million for transformations in biofuels, clean aviation fuel, energy storage, the provision of basic utilities for developing nations, and other categories.
[...]
The X Prize Foundation has previously launched competitions for breakthroughs in private space travel, genome mapping, and high-mileage cars. In 2004 aerospace entrepreneur Burt Rutan won the Ansari X Prize by sending his rocket-powered SpaceShipOne to an altitude of more than 367,000 feet with a pilot and the weight equivalents of two passengers. More recently, Google ( GOOG) has backed an X Prize of $30 million for the first team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit video, images, and data back to Earth.

Google Lunar X Prize Team Announcement
[...]
He says one prize will be for innovation in providing water, broadband, and clean electricity to villages in the developing world. Other energy categories will be for innovation in energy transmission and the construction of energy-efficient houses and commercial facilities.

More details on their website (PDF). The incentives of X Prize has proved before to be powerful enough to solve issues never before solved like non-government space flights.

V.C.’s Clean Energy Investments - National Business News - Portfolio.com

“You start to see this rise in enormous appetite for energy, and someone’s got to feed that mouth,” says Erik Straser, general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, a V.C. firm that has invested more than $400 million in clean energy ventures.
[...]
“The primary difference between what is happening now and what has
happened in prior market cycles is it’s now economically feasible and
desirable to pursue these types of solutions,” says John Balbach,
managing partner at Cleantech Group, a network of clean technology
investors and companies. “If the outcome is less pollution or reduced
carbon or some impact on climate change, that can benefit in a positive
way, but the primary [concern] is return on investment.”

MIT Class Calculates Carbon Footprint of “The Man” | Wired Science from Wired.com

The MIT class, in a paper (pdf) to be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment, estimated that no American, even the homeless and itinerant Buddhist monks, could get their total “share” of energy usage below 130 gigajoules, which is more than twice the global average, and directly correlated with carbon footprint.

That’s because the basic infrastructure of the United States including police, roads, libraries, courts and the military were allocated equally to all citizens of the country. Thus, even if one’s personal consumption in terms of purchased products and lifestyle were minimal, he or she would still bear their share of the systemic carbon load, according to the methodology of this study. In common terms, each and every U.S. resident is carbon-heavier other countries’ citizens.

This is the real issue that needs to be addressed.