New Energy Solutions

Solutions

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FOCUS ON THE SOLUTIONS 
To move beyond denial & a sense of powerlessness about the climate-energy emergency, we need to understand, integrate  and advocate for the solutions. Such a healthy response reflects the understanding "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". In this section we offer some video presentations of coherent solutions & strategies,  presented by scientific leaders in the fields of sustainable energy, agriculture & ecology. Below you can find short descriptions of the material.

1: Lester Brown: Take Action Now as a Planetary Citizen 
Today we face such dangers as a potentially social fracturing along generational lines if, for example, climate breakdown in the Arctic is determined to be irreversible - with all that implies for 7 metres of sea-level rise. The founder of the Worldwatch & Earth Policy Institutes  discusses our responsibility to act now to save civilization.

2. Amory Lovins: Climate change, Peak Oil & Energy Autonomy
The co-founder & chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute discusses the interrelationship of climate & energy paths. Whether we care about prosperity, energy or environment, we should be doing exactly the same things about peak oil and about energy. What are they?

3. Lester Brown: Plan B 
Brown outlines his celebrated Plan B, a groundbreaking & comprehensively researched plan to stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty & restore the Earth's damaged ecosystems. It no longer seems inevitable that we will add another 3 billion to world population by 2050, whether through an accelerated  move to smaller families, or through rising mortality rates...

4. Amory Lovins: Natural Capitalism - the Next Industrial Revolution
In this substantive 90 minute lecture at UC Berkeley, Lovins describes the necessity, features & implications of a new form of capitalism that values not only money and goods, but 2 other crucial factors from the real world. This "natural capitalism" would be a new way of doing business as if nature and people were properly valued.

5. Lester Brown: The Market Must Tell the Environmental Truth
When the British government asked Sir Nicholas Stern to investigate the future costs of climate change, he described it as "the greatest market failure in history". Unacknowledged costs of fossil fuels have created the truly enormous cost of climate change for ourselves, the planet and future generations. The market must be made to tell the truth.   

6. Amory Lovins: We Must Win the Oil Endgame
The old story about climate protection is that it's costly or it would have already been done & government must make us do something painful to fix it. The new story is that it's not costly but profitable because it's cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel. Meanwhile the endgame called Peak Oil approaches... 

7. "Reinventing Fire": Nuclear Power - Fix or Folly?
In this 2009 panel discussion, Amory Lovins, Robert Rosner & Peter Darbee discuss the relevance, cost and effectiveness of nuclear power versus Renewables like Wind or Solar-PV (where it can still lay claim to superior "baseload" capacity), or Energy Efficiency & Micropower (where it is  clearly economically uncompetetive).

8. Ray Anderson: A New Industrial Revolution
Anderson is an unlikely-looking radical, yet probably the most visionary figure in American business. As chairman of carpet manufacturer Interface, he transformed the company he founded into the world's first industrial firm devoted to sustainability in the strictest sense: "taking nothing from the Earth that is not rapidly and naturally renewable, and doing no harm to the biosphere."

9. Daniel Goleman: Ecological Intelligence in Practice
Speaking to the Google campus, Goleman, a Buddhist meditator, psychologist and the best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence (1995), discusses the possibility & necessity of developing intelligence about  our ecological impacts through information systems. Such systems, now well developed likeGoodGuide.com, could save us from ourselves.

10. David Korten: From Plutocracy to Deep Democracy
The US constitution institutionalized the power of white men of property. Just after WWII, an egalitarian social contract existed. In the 1970s, the corporate elite re-asserted itself against that emergent middle class democracy. Bush II embodied this plutocratic, rather than a democratic, nature of the country. So what would "deep democracy" actually look like?

11. Wind Power Leading New European Electricity Generation
Europe installed 10,000MW in 2009 (peak output equivalent to 7 or more new nuclear plants). This was the 2nd year in a row that Wind topped the ranking of all new power plant installations in the EC. The European Wind Power market grew 20% last year despite the global economic crisis, and accounted for 40% of all new electricity generation.

12. The Next Level of Highly Efficient Thin-Film Solar PV
The trillion-dollar electricity industry is a powerful incentive for newsolar PV technology. Nanosolar's amazing process prints thin-film solar PV cells onto metal foil rolls (50,000 PV cells per roll, continuous-flow). A robotic production line works 24 hours a day, producing solar PV cells with equivalent generating capacity to a nuclear power plant every year.

13. High Voltage Direct Current: Bringing Renewable Energy to Cities
HVDC transmission can carry 500MW of electricity in 1 undersea or underground cable, as in a grid linking large-scale offshore windfarms into the grids of partner countries round the North Sea & Baltic. On land, HVDC can be buried underground along existing rights-of-way like motorways, avoiding ugly AC transmission towers as well.

14. European Utilities & Offshore Wind Power: A Mature Relationship
Interview with the scientific directors of a couple of large German utilities about deployment, installation and integration of large-scale offshore wind farms into their portfolio of electricity generation technologies. This is an example of "where the rubber meets the road" for the future of urban civilization. 

15. Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles 
Displacement of petroleum with electricity is a complement to any serious effort to conserve, by improving vehicle efficiency. As a strategy for energy autonmy & climate protection, plug-in electric and plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEVs) offer a "holy grail"- renewable energy rather than fossil fuel can become the major power source for road transport. The batteries of a national fleet of PHEVs could act as a storage device for intermittent wind-power; the vehicle-to grid or V2G concept.

16. Bhutan: On The Wings of Light
The Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan is famous for its conservation policies and articulation of the principle of Gross National Happiness instead of conventional growth economy formulations like GDP. These 2 videos record the context and progress of a project to install solar PV lighting in one of the country's beautiful central valleys.