Green Dream Poem

Amtrak Acela Express

Green Dream Poem

I took some time to rewrite a poem I had written in May called Green. I changed the title and changed some of the wording. All of the technology is real. There are such things as mag-lev trains and electric cars have improved tremendoulsly. Aquaflow Bionomic has made biocrude. Wave turbines are being placed near Roosevelt Island in the Manhatan, New York harbor. Skyscraper farms is just another term for vertical farms. The vision I have is a very real one. It is something which I hope to see one day.

Maybe with the growth of national platforms like The Pickens Plan http://pickensplan.com/ or The Apollo Alliance http://www.apolloalliance.org/ we will see a national green reindustrialization of America. Both of the candidates for the presidency, Barack Obama and John McCain are attempting to embrace clean technology. Let us see something done about it.

The Green Dream

Green is the ocean
Green is the sea
Green is the river

I ride on a mag-lev train
From New York to San Francisco

Green are the fields
Green are the trees
Green are the grasses

Fields of switchgrass wave in wind
Biocrude refineries dot the land

Green is the lizard
Green is the frog
Green is the snake

Cities bloom brightly like flowers
Small towns are vibrant with growth

Green was the desert
Green was the dump
Green was the land

Every community has a garden
Every community has a park

Green grows the lime
Green grows the grape
Green grows the apple

From the train I see rivers
Clear, pure, clean, sweet water

Green is my mind
Green is my dream
Green is my spirit


There are no landfills
There are no toxic dumps

Green is a color
Green is a feeling
Green is a thought

Windmills spin slowly
Solar towers shine brightly

I wear green collars
I touch green plants
I smell green earth

Electric trucks and automobiles
Roll by on smooth highways

I ride green transport
I buy green products
I invest in green stocks

Tree farms grow fresh timber
Greenhouses bloom on the land

Green is peaceful
Green is quiet
Green is clean

The train glides by the ocean
Wave farms float quietly by

Green is not plastic
Green is not pollution
Green is not garbage

The skyscraper farms of San Francisco
Rise in the distance, vertical, clean, green

Green is the sprout
Green is the twig
Green is the leaf

The city is quiet, peaceful, and clean
America reindustrialized, clean and green

Short list of Environment, Alternative Energy, and Clean Tech Books.

Short list of Environment, Alternative Energy, and Clean Tech Books.

Occassionally I like to summarize some of the books I have read on this subject and reviewed here.

Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy by Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks (This book is about a progressive alliance called the Apollo Alliance).

The Citizen Powered Energy Handbook-- Greg Pahl
The book describes solar power (solar hot water and photovoltaic), water power (micro, small, medium, and large hydro, hydrokinetic, wave power, and tidal power), wind power, biomass (pellets, syngas, wood, cofiring), liquid biofuels (bioidiesel, ethanol, and SVO-- straight vegetable oil), and geothermal energy. Examples are given for both houses, district plants, and community efforts.

The Clean Tech Revolution: Discover the Top Trends, Technologies, and Companies to Watch (Paperback)Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder
(About clean technology investing).

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough, Michael Braungart
(About making thngs so they are reusable)

Earth The Sequel:The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming (Fred Krupp)
(This book is focused on how we can come up with economic and technical solutions to global warming. )

Farewell My Subaru An Epic Adventure In Local Living by Doug Fine
(A story about a man who decides to live locally back to the land)

The First Billion Is the Hardest On a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future by T. Boone Pickens
(A biography, business history, and energy plan.)

Freedom From Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States' Oil Addiction (Hardcover)David Sandalow
(A discussion between the president and his staff on how
they can end America's addiction to oil.)

Green Investing A Guide To Making Money Through Environment-Friendly Stocks by Jack Uldrich
(A nice listing of many different alternative energy stocks.)

Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (Hardcover)by Daniel C. Esty (Author), Andrew S. Winston (Author)
(Covers environmental strategy in business-- lean manufacturing, recycling, clean products, green advertising, waste reduction, alternative energy use in factories.)

Green Your Place In the New Energy Revolution by Jane Hoffman and Michael Hoffman
(An overview of different energy technologies)

Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America by Eric Jay Dolin
(You may not think of it this way, but whaling was America's first energy industry. Whale oil provided candles and oil to light the streets.)

Living Like Ed A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life-- Ed Begley, Jr.
(This is a comprehensive guide on how to live a more environmentally freindly life. It covers the Home, Transportation, Recycling, Energy, In The Garden and Kitchen, Clothing and Hair and Skin Care. )

Natural Capitalism Creating The Next Industrial Revolution by Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken
(A book on how to create a capitalist society based
around green economics. This book is connected with The Rocky Mountain Institute http://www.rmi.org/)

A Safe and Sustainable World, The Promise of Ecological Design by Nancy Todd and John Todd (A rather radical book that talks about how to use ecology to design things. John Todd is the Creator of living machines and is very important in bioremediation.)

Stirring It Up How To Make Money And Save the World--
Gary Hirshberg.
(This is the Story of Stonyfield Farms, a very
environmentally oriented corporation.)

Untapped The Scramble For Africa's Oil-- John Ghazvinian
(An expose on oil in Africa).

Winning The Oil Endgame by Amory Lovins
http://www.oilendgame.com/ReadTheBook.html
(Another plan for oil independence)

Green Investing A Guide To Making Money Through Environment-Friendly Stocks by Jack Uldrich

Green Investing A Guide To Making Money Through Environment-Friendly Stocks by Jack Uldrich is a guide to companies that have alternative energy products.

The first part of the book is about how you need to do your due diligence on stocks. Jack Uldrich warns you against investing in companies that have not yet fully developeda working product that is on the market. Doing this can be extremely risky. I personally lost money on Finavera because of a failed test of their wave buoy energy technology. Unfinished and untested products are a very high risk. Many companies make promises on undeveloped products.

Due diligence is the process of checking companies to see if they are safe to invest in. Thismeans looking at the finances, management, products, marketing, human resources, and everyaspect of the company which you can get your hands on. Do your due diligence when investing.

Jack Uldrich correctly points out that over half of alternative energy investments are occurringin Fortune 500 companies that are doing a variety of different things. Archer Daniels Midland is invested in ethanol, General Electric bought Enron's wind business and made it profitable, Goldman Sachs is investedin Horizon Wind Energies and Sun Edison a solar company. Although, it is not described in the book,Bank of America is working on building the most environmentally friendly office building in the world.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America_Tower_(New_York)

There is tremendous interest in clean technology. It is not just a passing trend. In the chapter on Fortune 500 companies and each proceeding chapter there are brief two page summaries of major companiesthat are invested in alternative energy and energy conservation. Many, but not all of the companies arepublicly traded companies. They are not just in the United States.
The chapters cover biofuels, solar, wind energy,alternative alternative energies, and energy conservation. Alternative alternative energies covers geothermal, wave power, fuel cells, and clean coal.

The book misses the boatwhen it comes to waste to energy conversion. There is nothing on Startech, a company developing a plasmafurnace for garbage http://www.startech.net/faqs.html, or landfill gasification. There is a little bit onanimal waste to biofuel in the chapter on biofuels. I don't think of clean coal as an alternative energysource. It is more of an attempt to clean up a very dirty source of power.

In each chapter, you get summaries of a variety of companies. I found two very interesting companies, Ormat Technologies for geothermal power and FPL Florida Power and Light (the nations largest producer of wind energy). I found in general like most books that advise about stocks, the book tended to be more bullish than bearish in stock opinions. This can be quite dangerous. Most companies are a tremendous risk to invest in. I am not giving any recommendations on investing other than saying it is risky. But, crossingthe street is risky.

This book is very to easy read. It is a general introduction to the subject. If you want to learn the basics of alternative energy investing this book is useful. The summaries are too simple to rely on them for making complete investment choices. I would look at them as snapshots or introductions to companies which you can do research on. The book is written in 2008, so most of the company information is still fairly recent. The book is not very long. The copy I read was a paperback. It is light and easy to carry around so it might make a nice subway read, or a read on an airport flight. I like the design of the book.

Cherry Pal Green Personal Computer

Cherry Pal Green Personal Computer

I did not do a whole lot of reading today. I looked at a few different sites. I came across something rather interesting while I was looking around the internet. Apparently someone is going to build and market a green personal computer. I have no idea what this means. Does it mean you would send the computer back to the company when you are done with it and get a recycling ticket. Dell gives you a discount on a new personal computer if you send in your old personal computer.

Claiming to be green is one thing. Will it be more energy efficient like Energy Star brands. Do they use lean manufacturing like in Toyota. Or is it just a marketing ploy. There are generally two steps in green manufacturing, less waste in production, and less energy to produce.

I rather liked the advertising. I found it a bit facetious in some ways. I don't quite embrace the style they are putting in the advertisement. I also have not decided to market the thing yet. If I knew a little more, I might consider it. The marketing piece was at least entertaining. Riding a bike in New York is insane. I take the subway. Where is the urban appeal for New York.
http://www.cherrypal.com/ .

If I was going to decide to put a note on my blog, I would expect they would at least be kind enough to send me a widget to put on my blog. They said the announcement date was July...

Who knows, maybe I will get a chance to replace my ancient four year old dell desktop computer.

Ah here it is, now I know what it is? It was described on Treehugger. It is a 2 watt computer. This is kind of interesting. I don't know if it really matches what I am looking for. The release date is August 4.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/cherrypal-2-watt-green-computer.php

Clean Technology

Pelamis Wave Energy Converter. This image is Copyleft.

Clean Technology (The titles in italics are book titles).

I have been posting some of my green political ideas on various forums. I have always been fascinated by green technology. I follow it pretty closely. I am a big fan of the Apollo Alliance http://www.apolloalliance.org/ . I reviewed a book on this organization called Apollo's Fire Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy.

The idea that we can completely eliminate oil is not a new one. I also posted Winning The Oil Endgame by Amory Lovins. http://www.oilendgame.com/ReadTheBook.html The Rocky Mountain Institute has http://www.rmi.org/ pointed the way on building a clean economy focused on what would be called Natural Capitalism-- http://www.natcap.org/ . It is possible to build a clean energy economy. It is more of a matter of political will than anything else.

There is more than one roadmap to a clean technology future with a revived industrial base for the United States. Listening to the endless drivel which we are being fed every day won't get us to where we want to be. Not only do we need to talk to our politicians, we need to invest in the future technologies which will make a clean future. Silicon Valley is more than willing to create a surge of investment in clean technology. http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_9308526

Another book which I reviewed earlier was The clean tech revolution : the next big growth and investment opportunity. This book covers environmentally sound technologies which can offer changes in industry because they are cleaner, more energy efficient, and use less waste. It covers things like green buildings, efficient appliances, renewable energy, and other clean tech.

Contrary to what many more conservative people say, clean technology will not drive the country into a recession, quite the opposite will happen. At a minimum it will create whole new industries and massive economic growth. There is a potential of at least 3 million new jobs created. These jobs are industrial jobs and manufacturing jobs, not service jobs.

In Freedom From Oil by David Sandalow which I reviewed earlier, he pointed out that there is no magical formula for energy independence. It is not hard to figure out what we need to do. We need to plug our cars into a wall socket. The majority of our non-transportation energy comes from energy that is not dependent on oil. This means we should be building more hybrid cars and more electric cars. We should also as an interim step increase the amount of ethanol blended with gasoline as well as biodiesel blended with diesel.

The coal industry, the nuclear industry, and the oil and gas industry are mature industries. This means there is very little room for growth. The newer clean technologies have room to grow and develop. They also offer significant environmental benefits.

Investing in clean technologies could provide the boost to create what would be renewable energy cheaper than coal. We are not as far from this as you might think. Wind power with economies of scale could also approach this. This is what the coal industry is afraid of. It is not about destroying our economy, it is about the process of capitalism, creative destruction.
http://cleantechnica.com/2008/05/10/solar-power-goes-to-extremes-for-5cents-per-watt/

I think there is real potential for green economics to be much more potent. There is increasing interest. I read http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/ occassionally.

I also follow a variety of publicly traded companies, verenium (vrnm), mgp ingredients (mgpi), capstone turbine (cpst), finavera (fvr.v), and others. I think there is a real interest in investing in green technology.

People spend a lot of time writing about companies like http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com/ and http://www.teslamotors.com/ which represent near term change. Without people being aware of these kind of companies and buying their products, they will never get off the ground.

There is a real interest in seeing the idea of the electric car revived. I look forward to seeing when General Motors rolls out the Chevrolet Volt http://www.chevrolet.com/electriccar/ . There is not too much hope for GM unless there is real change.

Americans are facing a real crisis in our manufacturing industries and blue collar jobs. Greening them will end up saving a lot of jobs and bringing a lot of change. Change that will be uncomfortable, but in the long run necessary.

The best thing that can happen now is to level the playing field and make the energy industry much more competitive.

What got me so interested in the concepts of a sustainable future was a book called Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology As The Basis of Design by John and Nancy Todd. It was written in 1984. The writers described how to design cities that were extremely green, introduced concepts like aquaculture, vertical farms, and many radical scientific ideas on treating wastewater and solids using ecological designs. At the time the time they were writing no one was even close to thinking about things like this.

John Todd currently runs http://www.toddecological.com/ . I tried to place their more recent work, A Safe and Sustainable World, The Promise of Ecological Design by Nancy Todd and John Todd on hold through interlibrary loan but could not get it. I am debating on whether to just purchase it.

Earlier, I had a vague idea of civilization being able to run on renewables. R. Buckminster Fuller had predicted that in the future society would run on renewable energy, the sun and the wind. Also, I had come across the idea of a "Technic" civilization or a society that ran on wind and water technology proposed by Lewis Mumford. Lewis Mumford's book Technics and Civilization is a brilliant, if somewhat bizarre history of the development of technology.

Apollo's Fire Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy-- By Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks-- Review

Solar Tower, Sandia National Laboratory, United States

Apollo's Fire Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy by Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks, Foreword by President Bill Clinton is a very political left leaning book. It is an energy plan to change the economic base of the United States to more renewable energy. The book is very big government oriented. When I read the book, I had to wade through a lot of rhetoric and political jargon. This book compares a large scale energy plan to the Apollo Project which sent man to the moon. They sound the alarm on global warming, petropolitics, and national security.

In the opening chapters, the story of Felix Kramer who created the first plug in electric hybrid with $700 worth of nickel hydride batteries is told. Austin Energy is already selling conversion kits to turn hybrid electric cars into plug in hybrid cars. Although, the story is not in the book, the story of http://www.greasecar.com/ which provides kits to convert diesel engines to run on vegetable oil is very similar. This is of course a very inspiring story.

They then describe how we can encourage the big three automakers to convert to mass producing plug in hybrid electric vehicles. This is not very convincing. General Motors killed both the EV-1 electric car and the multi-fuel turbine car. The Volt is the planned plug in hybrid of General Motors. The authors did mention Tesla Motors http://www.teslamotors.com/ which is producing a high end $92,000 electric sportscar and plans on producing an all electric sedan for $50,000. Supposedly the government should buy lots of plug in hybrids, this will supposedly encourage people to buy more plug in hybrids. Also they mention Senator Obama's "Healthcare for Hybrids" plan to retool America's auto factories. I really didn't get how it was supposed to work. I wish the authors had instead discussed how we should encourage more innovation inside the country to create a more competitive automobile market for alternative cars.

The section on solar energy is not very convincing. Solar energy is very expensive and we are far behind Japan and Germany. Investing in photovoltaics seems like a long term project. It is at the end of the chapter where things get interesting. Solar turbine technology in large installations has grid parity in pricing with non-renewable energy. It is just getting off the ground. Solar concentrators also seem to be much more affordable than photovoltaics.

The best eneryg policy is energy efficiency. It costs half as much to reduce energy use as to introduce new energy. The United States uses more energy per capita than most industrialized nations. Japan uses 4000 kilowatt hours per person, California uses 8000 kilowatt hours, and the rest of the United States uses 14,000 kilowatt hours per person. I didn't know California was a separate country from the rest of the United States. The book suggests we should adopt California's energy efficiency legislation for the whole country. Different methods for energy efficiency like fluorescent or led lighting, green buildings, energy saving appliances, and insulation are discussed.

A central idea of this book is that the United States should revitalize our economy by investing in "Green Collar" jobs in every community. The environmental industry is worth $341 billion dollars and provides 5.3 million jobs. I am interested in knowing which sectors of the economy exactly are part of the environmental industry. This is not explained completely. "Green Collar" jobs are high technology jobs focused on energy efficiency, clean energy, green buildings, mass transit, and clean cars. This is essential to jump start our economy for the 21st century. Part of this is investing in massive Hoover Dam style projects like rebuilding the energy grid along more distributed lines and building lots of new clean light rail mass transit.

After talking about "Green Collar" jobs the book reveals an interesting plan for farmers. There are some dubious qualities about it. Biofuels are going to jump start the heartland. Greys Harbor, Washington where Imperium Renewables has set up a clean biodiesel plant is trumpeted as the town of the future. We get a picture of where first farmers build biofuel plants, then they invest in wind turbines to sell wind energy, then they convert their farm machinery to biodiesel, then they invest in solid waste digester for manure to produce methanol and fertilizer. A kind of clean energy farm for the future.

The main dubious idea is that corn ethanol is good and that cellulosic ethanol is the fuel of the future. Ethanol will never be completely oil free, it is blended with gasoline. There are also only 378 E85 ethanol pumps in the country. The United States can't even get a blending standard of 10% ethanol in all gasoline passed. The idea that somehow we will force the big oil companies to install massive amounts of E85 pumps is very far fetched.

This is one of the reasons I am a big fan of biodiesel. Biodiesel can be pumped from any regular diesel pump which is available at a gas station. There is no need for a new biodiesel infrastructure, it can simply be expanded. It is also the fastest growing of the alternative fuels. Diesel engines were originally designed to run on peanut oil.

Biodiesel is growing very fast because centralized fleets of heavy diesel equipment can simply switch the fuel they are using to biodiesel easily. It also provides less wear and tear on engines and burns cleaner than regular diesel. Also, biodiesel was recently used to power a jet plane. We can keep our aircraft if we use biodiesel. http://www.greenflightinternational.com/

The next section is on wind energy. Wind Energy is the first truly profitable renewable energy source. The breakthrough in making wind energy profitable is when research started working on creating tidal turbines for the ocean. The blades and engines of tidal turbines could handle far more torque than regular wind mills. This design allowed the creation of 2.5 megawatt 200 foot tall wind turbines like the ones produced by the Clipper company. One of these turbines can power 800 homes. Tidal energy of course is fascinating. Although, it isn't mentioned in the book, Finavera is opening the first tidal power plant in alliance with PG&E on the United States west coast in 2012. According to the book tidal power could provide potentially between 8-20% of our energy and wind could provide 20% of the United States energy. If they are going to talk about tidal and wind energy, why don't they talk about distributed hydroelectric. There is nothing in this book about improving hydroelectric energy which is the largest portion of renewable energy used by the United States.

Coal energy and nuclear are discussed. Clean coal which is a process of capturing carbon and sequestering it in the ground is described. What is missing from the description is the idea of cofiring coal with biomass to reduce emissions. There is a little bit of discussion of GreenFuel Technologies at MIT, but it does not have much detail on using algae to scrub CO2 from coal plants. http://www.greenfuelonline.com/ . Sequestration is a good idea, but reducing emissions at the source seems to me to be a better idea. The description of nuclear energy here is at best cursory. It describes how nuclear energy is completely unsafe. Coal represents 50% of the United States utility use.

The final chapters are a summary of what needs to be done. The Apollo Alliance combines a coaltion of labor, environmentalists, businesses, and community based organizations. It aims to create "Green Collar" jobs and improve the environment. They have proposed a five point plan to change the United States economy.

1) Increase energy efficiency with green manufacturing of appliances, lighting, and transportation, improve conservation, and build green buildings.

2) Reduce reliance on oil by increasing mileage standards for vehicles, introducing biofuels, and plug in hybrid electric vehicles.

3) Reward renewables and carbon free electricity. They suggest a 25% renewable portfolio standard for utilities by the year 2025. This is a pretty steep expectation.

4)Build cities that are more dense and green with light rail, an improved distributed energy grid, and more green buildings.

5)Put carbon caps in place. They suggest a carbon tax. This will not be very popular with most businesses. The other option they suggest is a cap and trade system where carbon emissions are given a specific value. This is much more likely to inspire innovation, but will still leave some rampant polluters.

The problem with this whole idea is the cost. This will cost $300 billion dollars, $30 billion dollars per year for ten years. The legislation was tried in 2005, but it didn't even make it to vote. http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2005/05/18/inslee-apollo/index.html .

The ideas in this book need to be brought down to earth and made into a more manageable form. There is a lot of dreaming and political rhetoric and not enough hard nuts and bolts solutions. The five proposals of the Apollo Alliance seem to cross party lines and pieces of them could be implemented. There are a lot of very interesting ideas in this book. Because of its very liberal slant, it might be a hard read for libertarians or republicans.

The Clean Tech Revolution by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder-- Review

Venture One Hybrid Three Wheel Vehicle

The book The Clean Tech Revolution The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder is about how green technology will be a tremendous future business opportunity.

The writing is very exuberant with an almost bouncy quality to it. It reminds me of Red Herring during the dotcom boom, or Wired Magazine. It can get annoying at times. However, it does bring out the quality of showing you a lot of information very fast in a fun manner.

Another unfortunate aspect of the book is that many of the companies that are investments are not publicly traded. I was hoping that I could find publicly traded stocks to investigate. There are some of these like Cree, Florida Power and Light, and GE. Also there are a lot of foreign stocks listed like Q-Cell AG and Vestas which are on foreign exchanges. I even saw some stocks from the Indian and Spanish stock exchange.


The book is initially broken down into eight sections on different kinds of technology; solar energy, wind power, biofuels and biomaterials, green buildings, personal transportation, smart grid, mobile applications, and water filtration. I think the book is more an introduction to the topic than for an advanced reader. I had a number of quibbles with the content in the book.

The section on solar energy focuses on how solar will scale up with larger production. One of the major problems with solar power is that it is not profitable unless it is on the large industrial scale. Walmart for example has invested in buying bulk quantities of solar panels and using them to power a lot of their stores. They believe this will lead them to long term savings. There is a bit on solar in developing countries. Solar power is non-grid based so it can be used to make things like solar powered lanterns for developing countries like India. For investments, there were not a lot of companies I was interested in.

The next section on wind energy was much better. In November of 2005 in Colorado, Xcel energy sold wind power for cheaper than natural gas or coal to 33,000 customers. Wind power for the first time had achieved parity in pricing with other forms of energy. This has led to a boom in production of wind energy in the United States as a viable alternative form of energy. I was quite happy with this chapter. It is very hard to find out about publicly traded companies for wind energy. I know of one that wasn't listed here, Western Wind Energy, but the listing for Florida Power and Light was quite useful to me as an invester.

I thought the chapter on biofuels and biomaterials was shoddily done. I don't think they gave the concept of the biorefinery justice in this chapter. The one point which I liked is that they described the point where ethanol mixed with gasoline became cheaper than just gasoline alone. Biodiesel and ethanol are currently cheaper than gasoline at the pump. There was also an over focus on cellulosic ethanol a future technology which is in development. Cellulosic ethanol seems to be pie in the sky to me.

I think they are much closer to developing ethanol from algae than cellulosic ethanol. Two companies that are working on algae ethanol are Aquaflow Bionomics in New Zealand and Greenfuel Technologies in the United States. These companies are already in the demonstration stages for commercial production of biodiesel from algae.

The picks for stocks annoyed me as well. I understand the choice of ADM, the monster of ethanol and agribusiness giant. But, they aren't exactly an environmentalists dream. If I had a choice to put down a company instead, I would have put down MGPI http://www.mgpingredients.com/ , a company that makes multiple products from wheat, alcohol-- including ethanol, personal care products, pet products, vegetarian products, and biopolymers. MGP Ingredients is a very interesting example of a biorefinery, or a refinery which makes multiple products from a single biological source. An interesting tidbit from the chapter was that Toyota plans to produce $30 billion dollars of bioplastics per year.

The chapter on green buildings was one of the better chapters in the book. It gave good descriptions of the benefits of green buildings. Green buildings cost slightly more but in the long run save money on energy, sewage, recycling, water reclamation, and air conditioning. It is interesting to note that 46% of our energy usage comes from the built environment, and 76% of electricity use. The dichotomy of long term planning versus short term profits comes out very clearly in this chapter. A green building will pay for itself in approximately 8.1 years. From my understanding, most companies survive for approximately 20 years. This means that huge green buildings won't be viable except for larger corporations with strong finances that can plan for the long term. For example, Bank of America is working on building the greenest building in the world. http://newsroom.bankofamerica.com/index.php?s=press_releases&item=4405

The book also talks about the concept of the ZEB-- Zero Energy Building. This is being done with large housing developments where houses are built green from the start and include energy efficient insulation, solar power, water conservation and enough green features to make them not need the energy grid most of the time. The features are amortized into the mortgage, ultimately saving money in the long run.

The next section is on personal transportation. I found the focus on personal transportation only to be odd. From the perspective of clean transportation, clean trains and airplanes ultimately have more environmental impact. I understand the urge to have your own car. I even think that the description of the Toyota prius becoming a mainstream vehicle is very interesting. I also think the concept of the Tesla all electric sports car is interesting. But, the Tesla is still $92,000 to buy, not exactly a mainstream item.

I am going to add in my own two cents here. I wished they had included things like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, a new passenger airplane that is 20% more efficient in fuel usage than other planes. http://www.boeing.com/commercial/787family/ . Also a bit on trains like the Green Goat hybrid diesel electric train being developed by Railpower would have been nice.

The section on the smart grid fails to hold my attention. While it is interesting, they are talking about using superconductors to transmit power as well as carbon nanotube power lines. These are very interesting subjects, but they seem to be ten to twenty years from now. Their story on grid monitoring software to check peak usage seems to be the most practical thing being discussed. They also mention in passing that Google locates some of its data centers near hydroelectric power plants to guarantee a continuous supply of power. Again, they fail to mention a very important technology, net metering, meters designed to allow people to sell excess solar and wind power back to utilities.

I found the section on mobile technologies to be very future oriented. Too future oriented. They talk about things like portable fuel cells and carbon nanotube ultracapacitors. These seem to be things that are in the future not now.

The water filtration section was kind of odd. It was a step away from the talk about energy usage and efficiency. It almost didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the book. They posit that water will be the new oil. People need to make massive investments in desalinization plants along the coastlines to meet the United States water needs. It was a little bit too much hype for my tastes.

Where the book fails is that it makes no mention of updating existing hydroelectric dams so they produce more energy and are more environmentally sound, nor does it mention geothermal energy.

The final sections of the book are "cool". I especially like the chapter called "Create Your Own Silicon Valley". This sets up steps on how to encourage clean tech centers in cities which create new jobs, encourage research, and improve the economies of cities. The writers of the book do a very good job with this because it seems to be what they are focused on in real life. Their website http://www.cleanedge.com/ is basically about publicly traded clean technology stocks and clean venture capital.

I would recommend this book as an introduction to the concept of "clean technology." However, if you are beyond the introductory stage you might have some difficulties with the book.

Clean Technology (Green Technology) and Natural Capitalism Books,

I am very interested in industrial ecology and clean technology. It is very hard to get good reading material on this subject. I tried to get A Safe and Sustainable World by Nancy Jack Todd: The Promise of Ecological Design. John Todd is the inventor of Living Machines and Artificial Wetlands. His site Ocean Arks International is very interesting http://www.oceanarks.org/

Currently, The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder is on reserve at the library for me. I also have Freedom From Oil: How The Next President Can End The United States Oil Addiction by David Sandalow on reserve.

Two books which talk about natural capitalism, or green business practices which I can recommend are Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Amory R. Lovins and Paul Hawken, and Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage. The article which the book Natural Capitalism came from is here,
http://www.engineering.ucsb.edu/~ewb-ucsb/documents/articles/natcap.pdf



There is not a whole lot written on this material. I am taking home Green Gold Japan, Germany, and the United States Race For Environmental Technologies by Curtis Moore and Alan Miller. I read this but it was not that good. The information was very dated. It was written in 1994 and much of what was being talked about has changed considerably. I would suggest reading something more recent.

Getting back on topic. Recently, I had mentioned a failure by Finavera to commercialize their wave energy buoy. They wrote the technology down to zero value. Something unusual has happened. After they wrote the value of their wave energy buoy technology down to zero, they are opening a wave energy project with PG&E http://www.energy-businessreview.com/article_news.asp?guid=135144DB-4CD2-4116-9987-1425D809CAF7

It is an utterly odd experience going from thinking a company is worthless and will never do any wave energy projects to the first commercializer in the United States of wave energy.