Obama on Climate Change

Here is my thought for the day (that's right, I only have one per day).  Barack Obama has a certain level of expertise in community organizing, which despite what the left had to say during the campaign, is not a bad thing.  He has also amassed a rather large army of followers on the internet in addition to his small army of dedicated, enthusiastic, young volunteers.  The more I think about it, the more I think that these facets of his campaign should be built up into something more official, and put to work specifically for dealing with cliamate change issues. More specifically, they should deal with energy efficiency in the home issues.  I have no idea how he organizes this community, but I presume that the surrogates recieve some training.  They should be versed in energy efficiency policies and programs which will enable deeper deployment of related technologies on an individual level.  That is, they should be communing with the american public providing insights on how to save energy, and offering advice on what programs are available to help the public increase their homes efficiency. 

I believe that one of the biggest problems with addressing climate change is very similar to one of the biggest problems with American elections: getting people to care about the issue enough that they do something about it.  Clearly Obama can get people out to vote.   Perhaps he can cause the base level momentum shift that is necessary to make people behave more efficiently (with respect to energy) by using the same channels that he used to get out the vote.

Then again, he had that relatively unseen force in George W. Bush driving the enthusiasm of many democrats.  Maybe the climate change issue needs such a monstrous character lurking in the background.... I nominate Massey Energy and its CEO Don Blankenship.  They might not be the biggest producers of coal, but the mountain top mining they do is just plain horrific.  Not mention Blankenship is an arrogant douche.

Politics like School yard Maul Ball

When you get the ball, you run with it the direction you think it should go, only to discover that you can only take it so far.  Once you get there, you have no where to go but back where you came from.  I suppose this makes the system quite one dimentional and finite.   Not to mention that if you get all the way to one end and try to turn around, there's going to be quite the scrum while everyone fights for the ball before running off in the direction of their choice.  I guess Obama got the ball in the end, and now he has to figure out where to run with it. And who's most likely to tackle him.

Spending Freeze

This is getting ridiculous.  I desperately need to curb my spending habits and generally stop wasting money on useless junk.  As a child of the internet, I naturally turned to Google for help finding tips on saving money.  First up, of course, was drafting a budget.  There are many sites that help, and all together, this was fairly straight forward for me, as I do enjoy playing with numbers.  Budget: check.  Next, I started looking at ways to reduce spending to stay within this shiny new budget.   Here's where things got a little off track.  

There are a ton of coupon type sites that offer a list of all sorts of great deals.  Not the least of these was the online portals for the credit cards I already use.  They link directly to many retail chains offering sizable discounts if you use the card you already have (no signing up for new things to get an extra 15% off at the Gap or where ever).  Then the are the redemption codes that are made out to be just as exclusive as so many others. 

All this adds up to tremendous pressure to take "advantage" of the amazing savings!  The whole point of searching for tips in the first place was to reduce my purchases to necessities, and find discounts therein. Instead, I find a mini-fridge that holds 11 bottles of wine in a stainless steal wine rack all at 60% off. What a deal! I should buy that, right now.  I do like wine after all.  And with these other coupons, I can potentially buy 11 bottles at a great price.  Look at all the money I'm saving on stuff I never would have bought had I not been trying to save money!

Why is self-discipline so difficult? Oh well, so who wants to come to my house for a wine tasting party?

Energy Transmission Infrastructure

Ok so here's the theory... There's quite a bit of talk about the transmission problems when it comes to energy. That makes perfect sense considering the current age of the infrastructure and the that sending electricity over a long distance is, generally speaking, a pretty big waste of electricity. Often, renewable energy like solar and wind power can best be generated well away from the civilization that plans to use it, making transmission inefficiencies a huge problem. The analogy that keeps coming to my mind is the counter-intuitive notion that transferring a petabyte of data from New York to Los Angeles would be substantially faster on tapes driven across the country than it would be to send it over even the best fiber-optic connections. Perhaps energy transfer could be done well if generated at a site, but stored in some type of battery, then driven (by truck, by train, whatever) to a kind of collecting station, where the energy would be plugged into the grid and distributed. I assume that battery technology would be and enormous barrier, but I think this is a slightly different problem than the battery problems we are currently focusing on.

As of right now, batteries are apparently not good enough for electric cars to be viable, but there are supposed to be many great strides towards creating a battery which will suffice. Those batteries would be designed for a slightly different function than I envision, so perhaps the storage device needed already exists. Electric car batteries (or fuels cells) are meant to be able to deliver enough power for a car to drive quickly and far, and still be rechargeable/refillable in a short amount of time, as well as working over a long life. Batteries as part of transmission infrastructure would only have to be rechargeable, and hold a substantial charge at full capacity. The time to charge and power delivery would not have to be as quick or as complicated as those in a car.

Another major difference is that there is one or at most several batteries in a car, whereas in this vision of infrastructure, there would be hundreds or even thousands. Each storage device would not have the same size limitations that a car battery would. Obviously there would be some size limitations in the same respect that if a device the size of a suitcase was required to carry 1 GB, the petabyte transfer via physical transportation would not be possible. I'll have to do some research and back-of-the-envelope calculations to figure out just how much energy would have to be stored in a certain space, but my instinct says that the difference in intended function of a battery as part of this infrastructure versus a battery powering a car would be great enough that the technology may already exist.