Brad Templeton looks at the per-passenger cost of taking public transportation vs. other types of transportation (such as cars and bikes) and finds that the greenness of public transportation has been much exaggerated (see chart above).

A full bus or trainload of people is more efficient than private cars, sometimes quite a bit more so. But transit systems never consist of nothing but full vehicles. They run most of their day with light loads. The above calculations came from figures citing the average city bus holding 9 passengers, and the average train (light or heavy) holds 22. If that seems low, remember that every packed train at rush hour tends to mean a near empty train returning down the track.

Transit vehicles also tend to stop and start a lot, which eats a lot of energy, even with regenerative braking. And most transit vehicles are just plain heavy, and not very aerodynamic. Indeed, you’ll see tables in the DoE reports that show that over the past 30 years, private cars have gotten 30% more efficient, while buses have gotten 60% less efficient and trains about 25% worse. The market and government regulations have driven efforts to make cars more efficient, while transit vehicles have actually worsened.

My figures suggest the city bus moves 3,000lbs of bus for every passenger on average, and still 500lbs per passenger when fully packed at rush hour — starting and stopping all the time.

In order to get people to ride transit, you must offer frequent service, all day long. They want to know they have the freedom to leave at different times. But that means emptier vehicles outside of rush hour. You’ve all seen those huge empty vehicles go by, you just haven’t thought of how inefficient they were. It would be better if off-hours transit was done by much smaller vehicles, but that implies too much capital cost — no transit agency will buy enough equipment for peak times and then buy a second set of equipment for light demand periods.

Some cities do much better than others, and some countries do much better than the US:

This Australian Study cites figures saying that Western Europeans use only 76% of U.S. BTUs/pm in their private transport, and only 38% in their transit — 2.5 times more efficient. Rich Asians do even better at transit — they are almost 4 times as efficient in terms of energy/passenger-mile.

Their private transport is better because they own a lot more motorcycles and scooters, as well as smaller cars. Asians do almost 10x as many miles in motorcyles as Americans. Their transit is better primarily because of ridership. They take 5 to 7 times as many transit trips per person. Asian transit actually attains a higher average speed than private travel, another big booster.

They also have much more efficient vehicles.

Note however that in spite of their much higher ridership, transit in Europe is still only 7% of private vehicle energy use, and I would guess about 5% of total compared to ~1% of total for the USA. Even they have the automobile bug pretty strongly.

It’s worth taking a look at:

Brad Templeton: Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth?

Templeton wonders if it might be more worthwhile to push people towards more fuel efficient vehicles. Along those lines it’s worth considering the MPG Illusion.

(via Robin Hanson, who has a considerably less positive view of transit than Templeton)

An Australian guy hacked a freezer into a super-efficient refrigerator:

Nearly every household on Earth has a fridge that totally wastes at least 30 kwh of energy every month. Most of the energy is wasted every time you open the door. Cold air is heavier and falls out on the floor every time you open your fridge and warm air rises to fill the space it left. But with a top opening fridge; even if you leave the door wide open, gravity effortlessly leaves the heavy cold air inside. [...]

His home-made fridge uses much energy in 24 hours as a 100W light bulb gets through in just an hour.

Not only is it energy efficient; but it’s absolutely silent too. The thing is only running for a minute or two every hour. At all other times it is perfectly quiet and consumes no power whatsoever.

Home Design Find: Green Fridge Invention Uses Almost No Electricity

(via Atom Jack)

I can see why this hasn’t taken off – space constraints. It wouldn’t fit in my kitchen, or in the kitchens of any of the apartments I’ve ever lived in. This may cause a problem for mass production. Still, it’s a smart solution.

Google has begun operating a data center in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, a strategy that will improve its energy efficiency while making local weather forecasting a larger factor in its data center management. [...]

Rather than using chillers part-time, the company has eliminated them entirely in its data center near Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, which began operating in late 2008 and also features an on-site water purification facility that allows it to use water from a nearby industrial canal rather than a municipal water utility.

The climate in Belgium will support free cooling almost year-round, according to Google engineers, with temperatures rising above the acceptable range for free cooling about seven days per year on average. The average temperature in Brussels during summer reaches 66 to 71 degrees, while Google maintains its data centers at temperatures above 80 degrees.

So what happens if the weather gets hot? On those days, Google says it will turn off equipment as needed in Belgium and shift computing load to other data centers. This approach is made possible by the scope of the company’s global network of data centers, which provide the ability to shift an entire data center’s workload to other facilities.

Data Center Knowledge: Google’s Chiller-less Data Center

(via Chris 23)

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

Blackle

(via Wadester23

Oil companies have gained control over billions of gallons of water from Western rivers in preparation for future efforts to extract oil from shale deposits under the Rocky Mountains, according to a new report by an environmental group that opposes such projects.

The group, Western Resource Advocates, used public records to conclude that energy companies are collectively entitled to divert more than 6.5 billion gallons of water a day during peak river flows. The companies also hold rights to store, in dozens of reservoirs, 1.7 million acre feet of water, enough to supply metro Denver for six years.

ndustry representatives said they have substantial holdings of water rights for future use in producing oil from shale, though they could not confirm the precise numbers in the report.

Full Story: Wall Street Journal

“It will be the policy of my administration to reverse our dependence on foreign oil while building a new energy economy that will create millions of jobs”

–Barack Obama

“To keep our economy growing, we also need reliable supplies of affordable, environmentally responsible energy. Nearly four years ago, I submitted a comprehensive energy strategy that encourages conservation, alternative sources, a modernized electricity grid, and more production here at home, including safe, clean nuclear energy. My Clear Skies legislation will cut power plant pollution and improve the health of our citizens. And my budget provides strong funding for leading-edge technology — from hydrogen-fueled cars, to clean coal, to renewable sources such as ethanol. Four years of debate is enough — I urge Congress to pass legislation that makes America more secure and less dependent on foreign energy.”

–George W. Bush

“Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977, never.”

–Jimmy Carter

“We will never again permit any foreign nation to have Uncle Sam over a barrel of oil.”

–Gerald Ford.

“Let this be our national goal: At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep our transportation moving.”

–Richard Nixon

Full Story: Pizza SEO

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The ruble has fallen 19 percent against the basket since Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August, to 34.8216. That five-day war, the global credit squeeze and plunging oil prices have led investors to pull more than $200 billion out of Russian investments in the last five months, according to BNP Paribas SA.

“A large part of the government’s revenues, such as oil and gas export duties and extraction taxes, is dollar-denominated, so the ruble weakening certainly helps both the budget and income statements of the oil and gas producers,” said Ronald Smith, head of research at Alfa Bank in Moscow.

Full Story: Bloomberg

(via Cryptogon)

Terrible idea for so many reasons…

“As Oregonians drive less and demand more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is increasingly important that the state find a new way, other than the gas tax, to finance our transportation system.”

According to the policies he has outlined online, Kulongoski proposes to continue the work of the special task force that came up with and tested the idea of a mileage tax to replace the gas tax. [...]

A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.

Full Story: Albany Democrat Herald

(via Cryptogon)

Global oil demand will collapse next year and commodities will not return to the highs they reached this summer in the foreseeable future, two authoritative reports said on Tuesday as they forecast a long and painful worldwide recession.

The stark conclusions came as the World Bank’s chief economist predicted that the world faced “the worst recession since the Great Depression”. [...]

Meanwhile, the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report said the commodities boom of the past five years – which drove up prices 130 per cent – had “come to an end”.

The World Bank’s analysis of the commodities boom contrasts with the prevalent view among natural resources companies – and most Wall Street analysts – that the ongoing price drop is a correction within an upward trend.

Although it ruled out a return to the torrid high prices of this summer, it said commodities prices would not fall back to the depressed levels of the 1990s.

Oil would return to about $75 a barrel within the next three years, it said, while food would trade 60 per cent higher than in 2003, but about half below this year’s record.

Full Story: the Financial Times

Remember the arrogance of that Obama turnaround on FISA? Well, the answer is, under the current Daily Kos construction, we have no where else to turn. What else can we do? “Where else can you dirty fucking internet beatnik hippies go? Just give me some more money and shut the fuck up,” Obama might as well have said. He’ll probably say something like that a lot during the next four years. Obama will probably do things that any sensible person would never equate with real “change”.

Here are the Markos rules as far as I can figure them out: We support the democrats no matter what they do. We don’t support Republicans, which I think is smart because they’re an evil party (there shouldn’t be a party that represents private interests against the greater good at every fucking turn)but we also don’t support third party candidates who would better represent us. Further, we won’t expend any energy into building viable third party candidates and/or well funded well organized third party runs. Now, to me, those last two facts, the reality that we don’t support third party candidates or will work to build a viable third party infrastructure, doom us to irrelevance. This is why we lose. I might stress that this is also why we will continue to lose. They simply don’t fear us. Finally, this Markos construction is a boon to the Republicans. I can very easily see a scenario where the republicans stop all meaningful reform/stimulus over the next two years, declare all dem efforts “fails” and make big gains in 2010.

Three: What is a viable third party run?You don’t need a 50 state plan, at least initially, to prove our point to the democrats. You really need to focus on what I’ve been calling my 5/25 plan. You need to fund 25 house races and 5 senate races. You need at least 1 million dollars to compete for a house seat and at least 2 million to compete, realistically and viably for a senate seat. Now, this is where the expertise of the Kos community could come in handy. What 25 house seats would you pick to make your point? I frankly think they should run “Lieberman” style. Run them in the primary first and even if they lose run them in the general. We already have two senate opportunities in Delaware and Illinois for 2010. Tom Morello has openly talked about dipping his toe into the political waters in Illinois. I actually wouldn’t mind Ralph Nader as a Delaware senator because I think he would use the fillibuster. The truth of the matter is that five senators that use the old fashioned Jimmy Stewart fillibuster could change congress. Just once, I’d like to see a senator as supportive of child healthcare as they are for wall street bailouts. I’d love to see a senator talk about that over a several day fillibuster as well. (You would need a stubborn asshole to do that…Nader looks right to me…)

Full Story: American Samizdat

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  (tags: china global iraq war energy)

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, surpassing the speed of light, approximately 300,000km/second, is impossible because it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object past that speed. However, two German scientists claim to have surpassed this limit by use of a phenomenon known as “quantum tunneling.”

The scientists – whose claims have yet to be verified by the scientific community at large – performed an experiment where microwave photons appear to travel almost instantaneously between two prisms in a “tunnel” where instant travel – and an apparent violation of the laws of special relativity – took place.

Full story at ZDNet.

I found this interesting, especially since I just rediscovered my copy of T.A.Z., by Hakim Bey. I think we often neglect to remember that it only takes a wee bit of energy to make a significant change in the so-called Black Iron Prison around us. Is it really that hard?

Sometimes, a hug is all what we need. Free hugs is a real life controversial story of Juan Mann, A man whos sole mission was to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives.

In this age of social disconnectivity and lack of human contact, the effects of the Free Hugs campaign became phenomenal.

As this symbol of human hope spread accross the city, police and officials ordered the Free Hugs campaign BANNED. What we then witness is the true spirit of humanity come together in what can only be described as awe inspiring.

Here’s an interesting, NLP-esque ritual from TOPY.
Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan LeVine Gallery is proud to announce the opening of The Left Hand Path, a solo exhibition of new works by celebrated artist Doze Green.

His exhibition of new paintings is inspired from roots in modern graffiti and based upon metaphysical and ethereal ideologies.

For The Left Hand Path, Doze Green translates complex metaphysical concepts through his paintings, such as the possible manipulation of energy and matter to create a timeless space.

He explores meditations on matter and anti-matter, layers of consciousness, and different possibilities based on cosmology.

continued via Dexigner

www.dozegreen.com

Jonathan LeVine Gallery | 529 West 20th Street | NYC
www.jonathanlevinegallery.com

For millennia, people have hitched beasts to plows to exploit the animals’ strength and energy. In a modern variant of that practice, scientists have chemically harnessed bacteria to a micromotor so that they can make the device’s rotor slowly turn.

Full Story: Science News.

Pop Thought interview Morrison on the craft of writing:

I wrote The Invisibles Vol 1 issue 23 on my living room couch, hallucinating, and dying of MRSA-related septicaemia, (those cranky descriptions of demons and the crystal crown biting into Mister Six’s head and the Gnostic Christ saying ‘I am not the God of your fathers…’ were scrawled notes from the delirious no-man’s land between life and giving up) and the following issue was written from a hospital ward, waiting to hear if the near-fatal staph aureus infection I’d contracted had spread to my heart. I was there for two weeks, working as often as I could between tests and treatment, with the intention of writing myself out of trouble (as a mad sidebar, after beating off the infection with the aid of antibiotics, I became inexplicably obsessed with eating raw carrots for the remainder of my stay in hospital – only to find out last week that staph aureus – ‘golden’ staphylococcus – gets its distinctive color from carotene. I must have been so stuffed to the fucking guts with carotene-pigmented bastards when the bacteria was swarming through me that I went into withdrawal for the stuff when the bugs were finally wiped out!).

And Silver Bullet interviews him about his current and future DC projects:

I’m armpit-deep in the “52″ project which I’m plotting and writing along with Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka and Keith Giffen with JG Jones on covers, I see this project as the first ‘album’ from DCs first creative ’super group’ and it’s been the most fun I’ve had in this business to date. I just got back from a series of incredible creative summits in New York and couldn’t believe the energy, imagination and refreshing lack of prima donna ego bullshit on show. “52″ is being planned meticulously and written like a TV drama. Based on the material we’ve got so far, I think this project will break new ground for mainstream comics and I can’t imagine any other company being capable of anything like it right now, so it’s going to be very unique and absorbing read, squeezing down four years of continuity into one. It’s the first real, full-length ‘graphic novel’ about superheroes and is likely to change the way we think of what can be done with them.

This entry has nothing particularly stringent to do with the occult, but more with beauty. I just spent the past two days north, past Athabasca (where Nightbreed, the movie based on Clive Barker’s Cabal, has its city of monsters, Midian, located somewhere nearby ? we’ve never found it) at a small lake called Baptiste, and all last night ? between drinking and fireworks mishaps (no injuries, though a few would’ve been funnier in retrospect) ? the aurora borealis were out, aka “northern lights.”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacehutobservatory/sets/210704/

Because I’ve spent little time in the U.S. outside of my experiences staying in Seattle (and being attacked by what I swear was a leper, while attempting to purchase a tasty croissant), I have no clue whether as many people have the opportunity to witness this amazing fucking phenomenon first-hand? Two things to living this far north are that a) the sun is up till like 23:00 in the middle of summer, allowing for much more bare-clad women and drinking without stumbling over what you can’t see, and b) in the dead of winter we get maybe seven hours of daylight, if that, and it’s hard to explain how far my penis shrinks back inside of body when the temperature drops to -30?C on a regular basis (I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit, but it’s freakin’ cold). Benefits, year-round I think, are that we do happen to get northern lights.

And it’s just impossible to explain how insanely cool it is to sit beneath a sky aflame in green and red plasma. It’s kind of like Star Trek or something. Some years ago, I was driving down a major road in Edmonton and traffic just stopped. The whole of the sky, literally a good 80 per cent of the sky had erupted into brilliant pink and deep reds. They light up everything, the city, forests, mountains, lakes, et cetera. The whole city stopped to watch, it seemed like.

We are all surrounded by beauty, and while I don’t have the fortune of aurora every night, I tend to personally lose myself in the cloud formations we get during summer here. I love the skies.

Perhaps next time you’re outside (or wherever) consciously see if you can actually find something you like to just lose yourself to. It’s a god-given gift to be able to see beauty, and I think so many of us forget that or take it for granted.

Aurora folklore, via Wikipedia:?

It is believed that during the first millennium AD, auroral activity was low. This might be the explanation as to why northern lights are never mentioned in the Eddas of Norse mythology. The first Old Norse account of nor?rlj?s is found in the Norwegian chronicle Konungs Skuggsj? from 1250 AD.

An old Scandinavian name for northern lights translates as herring flash. It was believed that northern lights were the reflections cast by large swarms of herring onto the sky.

The Finnish name for northern lights is revontulet, fox fires. According to legend, foxes made of fire lived in Lapland, and revontulet were the sparks they whisked up into the atmosphere with their tails.

The Sami people believed that one should be particularly careful and quiet when observed by the guovssahasat.

In Inuit folklore, northern lights were the spirits of the dead playing football with a walrus skull over the sky.

Other older theories speculated in that aurora borealis were the fires of the purgatory mountain on the reverse side of the globe; that the sun flares could reach around the world to its night side, or that glaciers could store energy so that they eventually became fluorescent (because of the midnight sun, northern lights can only be observed during winter in the polar regions).

Speaking of P. Orridge, here’s a new interview with him:

I had an epiphany about the nature of the words themselves. Each word behaves in ways that attest to the idea that in a very particular way it, THE WORD is alive and can even have its own agenda as a result of repetition and transmission in ever more compressed layers over linear time whilst apparently serving the message of the being using the word. I believe words are alive then in a very literal sense, and because each word is alive it?s another hologram, another iceberg. Everyone who has ever said that particular word has invested it with their story and anyone who hears that word puts the context of their life around that word. So each word is a memory box and a prophecy box simultaneously. They?re very precious, powerful particles of thought and energy.

Link (via New World Disorder)

Lots of information about alternative energy techniques, and countries’ plans for implementing alternative energy.

Link.

LVX23 says:

My practice has been veering more and more towards generating a deeper relationship with nature. I’ve always had a strong bond with nature, thanks in large part to my parents for making such great efforts when I was a child to spend as much time as possible exploring the wilderness of the West Coast. Now as an adult it’s painfully apparent how our consumer lifestyles are impacting the biosphere. So, along with modifying my behaviors as a consumer, I have been modifying my spiritual/magickal practice to give more energy back to the Earth. My notion is that by healing the planet we heal ourselves, and vice versa.

Link.

First in a (belated) series of practical magick and the upcoming opportunity to dethrone George II, let us visit The Green Dragon for some inspiration, straight outta those chaotic days of good old August 2004:

Starhawk recounts:

Our friends with the dragon had offered to help us if we wanted to do a spiral dance in front of the Garden, so as we got near I began drawing the cluster together, speaking to our friends in the Rhythm Workers? Union to coordinate some drumming of a rhythm we could chant to, looking for an open space. We found it, around 33rd St. We dropped back behind the dragon, because the sound system inside it was too loud for our ears. The police are rumored to have a sound weapon that will disperse crowds with painful levels of noise, but this was friendly fire that drove us back. Where the crowd thinned just slightly, we grabbed the opportunity, formed our circle and began to spiral in, chanting,

No army can hold back a thought, No fence can chain the sea, The earth cannot be sold or bought, All life shall be free.

The spiral stopped the already slow march, and I felt guilty about that, but the march had been stopping anyway for hours and we felt another five minutes or so wouldn?t kill anyone. Then some energy roared through me like a freight train, and I stopped feeling anything else. Some of it was horrible, nauseating energy that needed to be released and cleansed. Some of it was powerful, earth energy, a kind of raw life force that pulsed and thundered and rose up into a great, focused cone of power. Someone told me to look behind, and in the relatively empty space between us and the line of cops at 34th St., the dragon was burning.

The flames rose up and in that moment, it seemed a perfect icon of our magic, a powerful spell, although I can?t rationally explain why. Later Delight said the dragon is luck and the Republicans? luck was burning. Of course, it had tactical repercussions…

(… continue with her entire account of witchjamming the RNC.)

Someone, for some reason, wanted Tesla’s work suppressed…

At the top of the suspected conspirator list is Thomas Edison. Edison despised his former employee’s success with AC, and it is known that he set out on a campaign to smear Tesla’s name. He held demonstrations at which animals were lethally electrocuted with AC-powered devices, in a deceptive and inhumane effort to warn the public of the danger posed by Tesla and Westinghouse’s “unsafe” new electrical system. Edison also sat on the War Department advisory board that rejected Tesla’s proposals of the death ray and his radar-like device.

J. P. Morgan is also implicated in the anti-Tesla cover-up. Morgan counted on increasing his already monumental wealth by exploiting Tesla’s ideas, until he learned that Tesla was considering the free distribution of energy — a terrifying idea to any self-respecting capitalist. He ended his funding of Tesla’s experiments at once, and some think he used his considerable clout to ensure that no one else would bankroll Tesla’s threatening schemes. [Source]

Tesla’s (web archived) life story: index, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6 (originally hosted at parascope.com)

There was a PBS documentary, and there’s some interesting (albeit derivative) information at viewzone.com on modern uses ov Tesla’s inventions and research, from radio transmitters to weather control to transcranial magnetic stimulation through electromagnetic fields (God Helmets – DIY)

(and that’s without mentioning Project Rainbow, the Montauk Project, or the whole Ong’s Hat mess)

Another do-it-yourself project: Building a Tesla Coil

personally, I think Tesla rocked

A Guardian article about Gysin by P Orridge

To me, Gysin was the source of the energy we associate with the most radical experiments of the Beats. He was the real source of the ideas; other people just applied them. That was a really important shift in my appreciation of the Beatnik phenomenon. From that moment I was hooked, fascinated and impressed by each layer of Gysin I discovered. As I peeled things away over the years, I was never disappointed. There was never an end to it. He was the only person I’ve met whom I would unquestioningly call a genius.

Link (via Disinfo)

Adam Greenfield has posted his review of a 1994 ?Tchkung! show. I saw them a few months ago, 8 years after this review was written, and it still holds true.

What did I want them to do with that energy? What might I have done with it myself? Alternately, what might I have done if only it was asked of me in that interval before the showbuzz wore off? Part of the problem here is that ?Tchkung! is playing with fire, in more ways than the merely literal. The piercing, the firebreathing, the dervish-dancing, the relentless rhythms: these are all shamanic techniques for the alteration of consciousness, and there is no doubt but that they work. In their original contexts, they are all used by people undertaking specific initiatory journeys, when guided by others steeped in the traditions of their use. Of course, none of these conditions obtains at a ?Tchkung! show. What happens when you put several hundred people into a suggestible state, in an environment filled with extraordinarily powerful signs of no fixed meaning?

Link.