Changing Light bulbs at the White House

Last Friday the House passed the Waxman Markey bill on energy and climate change, establishing, among other things a cap and trade system fo...

Power from Space

Just recently the California utility company PG&E announced a program to beam energy from space, where it would be collected and beamed ...

If you claim to be scientific, then be so

When I was taught basic science and engineering it was understood that if you proposed a hypothesis, or theory, and ran an experiment where ...

Geothermal Energy and Earthquakes

Geothermal Energy is one of those sources that is, within normal scales, sustainable, and it is currently being drawn upon, so that relative...

The Natural Gas Report for the week

Yesterday I was not all that cheerful about the omens foretelling the future of gasoline and crude in the near term. So today it is time to...

Driving is picking up, but is that good?

Having effectively been away for a couple of weeks, as good a place to start as any, to catch back up with the current state of things, is ...

Thoughts on the trip to China

The trip to China is now over, and I am left looking back to see what impressions remain the most profound. I will forgo the cultural and g...

Powering a rural economy

Solar heating of a kettle (30 min to boiling) One of the concerns of the Qinghai Administration deals with the large number of herders that ...

Heating houses and tents

Room in a Tu community The Tu have a significant minority status in China, and in Xining City there is a community, which has at least three...

A road trip through incredible geology

Dry mountains tower over trees in the Yellow River valley. Up on the hills overlooking the site where China did much of its early developmen...

Yak herd grazing on the hills We drove to the banks of the Yellow River (stopping for a Tibetan Welcome at the river) and had to cross a ran...

A trip to Ta'er

Walking around the great Stupa at the entry to Ta’er Lamasery. Xining city is growing rapidly, with many changes and it looks prosperous, wi...

Xining City

8 am Xining City, China (view from the door of my hotel) Here in Xining City in Qinghai Province on the Western edge of China we are up on t...

On foot and tricycle in Beijing

Cable powered bus in Beijing If you look closely along the side of the bus, you will see the rope that the driver has just pulled to reconne...

Morning in Beijing

7 am Just off Tiananmen Square, Beijing By 6 am the buses are running in the streets, but the bicycle traffic does not pick up until about ...

Welcome to Shanghai

6 pm local time Shanghai Airport And this is where the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aglee. The airport, while allowing me e-mail ...

Leaving on a Jet Plane

11:30 am Los Angeles Airport Well this was interesting. I had planned on adding three additional pictures to the post for today. The first...

Parking Lots at 6:30 am

Well we made it as far as St Louis last night. Looking out over the parking lots this morning, they are perhaps just a little over half ful...

Views from the road

I am setting out on another trip, that will last some ten days, but am taking my laptop and so should be able to continue some sort of comme...

The hydrofracing bill, ANWR and offshore drilling

A couple more quick notes for the evening: the bill to move hydrofracing under the Clean Water Act and about which I summarized the hearing ...

The Tata Nano and Jevons Paradox

A small snippet of news to underline the comments that I have made about the Tata Nano. In a normal year automobile sales in India run abou...

Beyond the Storm there will be no calm

Predicting that the next energy crisis is closer than most folk realize is, unfortunately, in some ways the easier part of a look into our...