Hail and Welcome!
Happy Harvest Moon, it’s time for a great and beautiful Esbat. The gorgeous Lady gazing down as we work our magick. Mabon is just around the corner. Look around your neighborhood and see how many scarecrows you can count. Leaves have already begun to fall, holly berries are turning red and early harvests have begun!
Walk out into the late summer, early harvest, evening and let your gaze move to the full moon of our Lady. Now visualized a red string from the moon to the tip of your finger. Focus and feel the energy flow as it enters your core. You are drawing down the Moon to perform your magick in the midst of the harvest beauty. It just doesn’t get better!
As for today’s news and my editorial rant:
Ford is shuttering plants while the rest of Detroit is cutting back. No surprises, as I have been prophesizing the fall of Detroit for years. It’s gas mileage, pure and simple. The fat cat old men running Detroit really believed that cheap oil would last forever and alternative energy was bogus. Surprise, you’re wrong! By the way, great business plan there, guys!
So where are we, on energy? The truth is we simply must move on and away from conventional thinking. Anyone who says that s/he has the answer to all of the energy needs has probably got a pair of rose-colored glasses somewhere. There is no single answer and no single energy source.
First, let’s talk cars. Modern people must have private transportation, end of subject. Modern people need energy. Do we need to destroy the planet to enjoy our lifestyle? Absolutely not! If we don’t change our thinking, and approach, will we destroy our civilization, and perhaps the very planet? Absolutely yes to the former, and probably yes to the later.
We need to break the topic of energy issues related to cars into categories: Clean fuels and miles per gallon.
What is a “clean fuel”? You must start at the source and work your way up to have a clear understanding of what this means. Where does the fuel come from? Did we have to cut the top off a mountain and dump it into a watershed to access the fuel? Did we have to pollute the air, stream, ocean, or natural preserve for the fuel? If we must bankroll terrorists for this fuel, can you call it clean? The fuel must also not emit anything other than water vapor and carbon dioxide when burned. We have just ruled out Coal, Oil Shale, Middle East Oil and a lot of American resources! So what in the world is left? I do not want to talk theory or “what ifs” so hydrogen is out. I only want to talk about what works today and is already available. Neat approach, I say.
Small electric cars for around town are great in limited applications and should be encouraged. The compressed air powered MIDI is awesome and available and Detroit could take many pointers from this car. Another great car available is the Carver, three-wheel fun at over forty mpg! How about the TWIKE? It may be a silly name, but it is a serious solution. The TWIKE runs on batteries and human powered pedaling. That’s right, a human electric hybrid with no pollution and you can even get a workout if you like! Any diesel or gasoline car that gets greater than 30 mpg should be encouraged and those with less mileage should be subject to a carbon tax! Cars rated at 40 or more mpg, renewable fueled, electric or compressed air cars and the like should be subject to federal and state tax incentives. They are here now and each can play a role in breaking the chain of Middle East terror, war, oil shortages and global warming. But where is the Government? Why are there no politicians taking up the banner?
As for fuels, let’s look at a country about to claim energy independence, Brazil! Brazil grows sugar cane and turns it into alcohol, which is then blended with Brazilian gasoline to stop imports of foreign oil. Guess what, it works! So, lets see how that might work outside of Brazil.
In the USA or Canada sugar from sorghum molasses or sugar beets would be converted, not into alcohol, but butanol. What is butanol? Butanol is a complex alcohol like liquid, which burns clean, like alcohol, but is not corrosive and can go straight into the tank with no conversion. Butanol delivers much better miles per gallon than alcohol. In fact most drivers would not even notice the difference gasoline and bio-butanol.. Bio-alcohol is usually fermented near farms with yeast by farmer-based coops. Bio-butanol is made by the same farmers and fermented using bacteria instead of yeast. We could be making farmers wealthy instead of paying for unholy wars! These are not laboratory hopes or theories, all of the technology is already here and available.
In 2007 British Petroleum (BP) and Dupont will begin building Bio-butanol fermentation refineries in Great Britain. The source will be British farmed sugar Beets. This will start the nation of Britain down the road to prosperous farmers, clean air, Kyoto Protocol compliance and Energy Independence like Brazil.
Another clean fuel is bio-diesel. Again, made by farmers in farmer owned coops. This fuel has no sulfur or nitrogen compounds to pollute! Another good candidate fuel! Vokswagen New Beetles commonly achieve forty plus mpg on bio-diesel, darn nice cars too! Honda sells wonderful diesel cars around the world with high mpg, no smell, no smoke and no rattle! Honda can’t sell them in America because our fossil fuel diesel has so much sulfur and nitrogen compounds that pollute and supplies of bio-diesel are not yet adequate! Good job American oil companies! Hey, but don’t you guys also sell the clean diesel in Europe? What’s up with that? Why is BP the only major oil company working with farmers? What’s up with that?
So what is the down side of bio-fuels? We as a nation have been the world’s, breadbasket for a very long time. But we now need to choose between the role of feeder of the world, while our farmers go broke, or energy independence with robust farms, prosperous farmers and a clean environment.
A serious side effect of the use of bio-fuels is that the carbon locked in the fossil fuel would remain stored underground for as long as we remain intelligent enough to leave it alone. Additionally, the carbon we burn will have been taken from the air and stored in a massive system we call commerce. During this time of storage it will have been out of the global warming process. We burn the carbon (fuel) and then reclaim it for re-use, nice!
So we have addressed cars and their fuels, so let’s go to electricity. Like auto fuel there is no single source but many. I will eliminate from this discussion those sources like coal and petroleum, which destroy nations and the environment and only speak to “clean fuels”.
For a lot of the USA there are places appropriate for wind farms and that should be a national mandate. Nonpolluting, beautiful and renewable! I have seen Native Americans with growing, profitable wind farms on Tribal lands, outstanding! Every wind farm I have ever visited is a beautiful study of kinetic motion, gently pumping out the energy we must all have with no harm and no fowl.
Then there is nuclear. Yes, I know, I said nuclear and clean at the same time. Please don’t throw anything at the computer! The Canadian designed reactors called CANDU cannot melt down! Further, CANDU reactors run at such low levels of radioactivity that they can actually run on American “spent” fuel rods. CANDU reactors use a much cheaper fuel, as enrichment is not needed. The CANDU reactor is cheaper to build, easier to build, cheaper to run, cheaper to maintain and so very much safer. I simply can’t understand why CANDU is not the world standard for nuclear power generation! But then there are those who need an excuse for nuclear enrichment technology and there you go!
Solar energy is back with a vengeance! Technological advances have resulted in cheaper and better solar cells. Printed paste nano dot solar cells on plastic substrates and metallic alloy plated onto sheet metal with uses in roofing and siding are two examples of cheap and available solar cells which are three times more efficient as those made of silicon. A ten-foot by thirty-foot panel of either noted example will power your entire home! Finance a second panel and sell the excess to your utility! How’s that for smart, every home generating enough power for another home. Perhaps we could have enough left over for those electric cars!
Unfortunately, we have reached a bottleneck with hydroelectric power as there are only so many locations suitable for this power type and I don’t think we, as a people, really want to make salmon extinct so that we can light our homes, though some might consider it just collateral damage.
Natural gas, methane, now here is a fossil fuel, which already burns clean, but it’s carbon comes from fossil fuel and should be left underground! We have sources like garbage dumps and sewers where we can collect our own natural gas. But we also have, since at least 1900, another source of natural gas. Bioreactors where we ferment sugar beets, waste from breweries and every other type of organic waste, to natural gas! Yes, it’s true, we already have all of the proven and off the shelf technology to begin replacing Middle East fossil fuel natural gas with our own, made at home, natural gas with no destruction of our environment and all of the money stays here!
I am not just talking about a single piece of the power palate, I am talking about the entire energy spectrum for any country, our country or yours! Think of the impact to a nation’s economy if all of the money spent on energy were to stay at home. Meanwhile the terrorists would have to beg for money to buy weapons and no one would ever consider war for oil. Change to bio-fuels and other clean fuels across the board and you will gain prosperous economies, smaller armies, lower taxes, cleaner air, fewer natural catastrophes, and fewer droughts. It sounds like paradise, but isn’t that what we started out with?
The choice is now up to the people, you and me. We simply must demand that our companies and governments give us what is available today and not talk of promised breakthroughs decades from now. Let’s break the chain of fossil fueled terror, war and environmental destruction and rebuild our countries now! When clean hydrogen is finally available it will become a part of an already robust clean energy scheme where everyone including GAIA wins.
Until next time ~
Blessed be,
Stormy
Readers,Please email me, stormy@autumnwynd.com, with your comments, rants, ideas, thoughts or articles for post.
Thank you!
