oil spill photos

i kind of want to collect photos of the oil spill in the gulf of the mexico. scientists, engineers, environmentalists, activists, politicians will need to assemble lots of stuff to help us move away from our dependency on oil (oil is sooo useful, not just in terms of burning it for energy usage but also synthesis of so many different materials). photos are a really powerful and moving medium.

pictures of wildlife being coated with crude oil:http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/caught_in_the_oil.html

if the oil spill was in my backyard visualization: http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/

i think i read in the NYT today that maybe if the US government really wanted to make a statement in the power struggle between corporations (especially BP in this case) and itself, it should yank out the contracts for oil that fuel military operations. which kind of leads to all sorts of interesting questions of what areas make the biggest impact in terms of reducing oil consumption.

transportation is a big one. on a personal level for instance, i regularly take the mbta buses from my house to travel around the boston area and as i was waiting, i noticed that the majority of cars driven on the road are only occupied by 1 person, even when the capacity is like 4. we should drive less by using public transportation, walking, biking more often if possible for running errands or going to appointments, rent cars when we need them instead of buying if that's appropriate for our lifestyle as students or people who live near their jobs, or if we need to commute, buy smaller cars like smart cars.

Boston Greenfest

I went to the Boston Green Fest at Government Center today with Yang and SheeShee. It was really cool, lots of booths from green companies showing off their products and technology from the NE area. I got some contact info, maybe I can intern there or something...

Check it out: http://www.bostongreenfest.org/about.html

(So cool, I can read more or less the four languages: ingles, espanol, frances, chino...creo que mejorar mis lenguajes.)

Energy/Sustainable Development

Just some brief thoughts on energy vs sustainable development--

Energy crisis is really a misnomer, it's more about resource depletion and the difficulty to harness new forms of resources. So it really should be power crisis, because we have the resources like renewables, but we are faced with questions of efficiency, feasibility, extraction, costs, and physical limitations.

There's the question of how to generate power...Thermodynamics is all about asking questions like how do you convert different forms of energy into useful work and heat (1st Law) and then how efficient or irreversible the system is (2nd Law). So nothing will ever be 100% efficient, because of things like heat losses from friction and just entropy generation. If something is 40% efficient, that's like really good, such as for combustion engines or turbines...So there is a tremendous amount of loss right there, and we play around with it, to drive the compression ratio up, to minimize friction or drag, add reheat, etc.

It's not just about getting power to drive our machines and gadgets and communication systems, but also maintaining a decent standard of living, a certain level of comfort, and how we consume it. (I need to read up on the most fundamental of resources, water). In particular, housing and buildings should have a certain comfort level (see ASHRAE comfort zone diagram) by maintaining a certain range of temperature and humidity, as well as indoor air quality. Otherwise, serious health issues can happen if the air is too dry or humid, leading to sick building syndrome and mold. In order to be in this range, cooling/heating load calculations have to be made...so heat transfer (especially conduction, solar radiation, infiltration) is really significant in architecture and contributes to the amount of power we are consuming.

But really, I think that the two main issues here in the energy field are generation and consumption. It's pretty straight forward, it's mostly a technological problem. Energy policy comes in how energy distributed, produced, and consumed for a nation...but really, engineers and scientists need to have incentive to work on this issue of generating power and funding definitely helps. Energy is just one big industry.

On the other hand, sustainable development is more of a way of thinking, strategy, approach, ideas. By its nature it's a little vague yet holistic, because it seeks to "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs": it's about input equals output, minimizing environmental impact. Like really, the policy should definitely play a much bigger role here than in energy, which is more about distribution and regulation. Also, "green building" is part of sustainable development...a building is encouraged to be energy efficient, but there are other requirements that go beyond that. Sustainable development is much more complex...Energy conferences can be more like trade shows, showing off your latest breakthrough idea or gadget, but Sustainbility conferences should be about strategies and marking your progress with certain standards.

I want countries to develop and grow and raise the standard of living...there will be no arguments from me about going back to nature or stopping progress, because it just isn' t practical. I want things to improve on the road to social equality, which often is influenced by a country's economic prosperity. However, I am more interested in learning more about developed countries' strategies for sustainability, because they have the capital there and usually tend to the be the biggest, most wasteful consumers. They also are often the model for developing countries, which is more about education and outreach, so it's important that things start happening in the richer countries, with their influence and political power and intellectual powerhouses.