Tales of Energy Efficiency

Pretty neat:

Nokia, however, has taken another baby step in that direction with the invention of a cell phone that recharges itself using a unique system: It harvests ambient radio waves from the air, and turns that energy into usable power. Enough, at least, to keep a cell phone from running out of juice.

...

Mind you, harvesting ambient electromagnetic energy is never going to offer enough electricity to power your whole house or office, but it just might be enough to keep a cell phone alive and kicking. Currently Nokia is able to harvest all of 5 milliwatts from the air; the goal is to increase that to 20 milliwatts in the short term and 50 milliwatts down the line. That wouldn't be enough to keep the phone alive during an active call, but would be enough to slowly recharge the cell phone battery while it's in standby mode, theoretically offering infinite power -- provided you're not stuck deep underground where radio waves can't penetrate.

Nokia says it hopes to commercialize the technology in three to five years.

(Photo by MRBECK)

Additional note, about carbon pricing

Looking at the post below, you get an idea of how difficult it is to a) calculate the ecological impact of spending behavior, and b) actually follow through on adhering to an optimum spending behavior once you figure out what it is. At the end of the day, it's very convoluted and difficult to keep track of, and all sort of hopeless because people, by and large, are not going to exert the effort required to eat sustainably--and if 90% of the people aren't on board, then what's the point of trying?

This is why carbon pricing--i.e., factoring the ecological cost of products into their price via a tax--is such a beautiful idea. What you do is target a few key carbon producers way "upstream" in the chain of production, so that the increased cost of carbon filters down into the price of everything. For example, say you were to slap a carbon tax on barrels of oil sold. This would result in higher prices--and less demand--not just for gasoline, but, say, for a toy manufacturer that transports stuffed dolls halfway around the world in a fuel-ineffecient fleet of boats and trucks. If you slapped a carbon tax on energy, then suddenly everyone's electricity bills would rise and you would see alternative energy sources like solar, wind, gas, and nuclear start to become competitive with coal. Competition in the free market--rather than arbitrary government grants and subsidies--would then determine which alternative energy source becomes dominant. Shopping at the market, you would have to look no further than the price tag to compare the ecological impact of different foods; if a food is very carbon intensive, then this will naturally be reflected in a higher price.

As it is right now, the costs of climate change end up being socialized, because it is tax-payer backed governments that fix (or in the future will fix) the damage. These costs should not remain external to the market, but should instead be internalized into the market, via a carbon tax, so that the costs are distributed proportionately to those who are causing the problem.

McCain's HO scale solutions

McCain's big emphasis on energy policy has been opening up more coastlines for domestic offshore drilling; his big emphasis on taxes/fiscal policy is to eliminate earmark spending. Here is, respectively, the amount of extra oil that will be produced from drilling, and the proportion of federal spending that is allocated as earmarks:


The bottom line is that domestic drilling will not affect oil prices, and that reducing earmarks--even if you could eliminate all of them without reinserting them somewhere else into the budget--will have no significant impact on spending.

These components of McCain's solutions aren't serious, because they cannot plausibly help to solve anything. Personally, on energy policy I'd like to see a tax on carbon and massive investment in alternative energy and public transit, and on fiscal policy I'd like to see--gasp!--higher taxes. Obama's proposals are signifcantly to the center of those--but at least they deal seriously with the problems we face in reality, and have more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting through Congress.

A McCain presidency will mean a lot of good--or at least, semi-decent--Democratic legislation getting vetoed or amended beyond recognition. If we want to make serious progress in the next four years on energy and fiscal responsibility, we will need Democrats in control of the Congress and the White House.

(Oil chart via Ezra Klein; earmarks chart via Sullivan.)

Why we say, "Drilling will not affect the price of oil"

Via Klein via Grist:

This should be made into a T-shirt. Like, now.

Rice prices up 35% in SF

It's caused a run on rice in Chinatown:

At the Sun Kau Shing grocery, for example, 50-pound bags of long-grain rice were selling for $32 to $38 on Tuesday. That, customers said, was an increase of about 35 percent over a month ago. It was enough to stop amazed pedestrians in their tracks.

It appears that higher energy costs are part of what's driving the prices up:

Likewise, while California rice farmers have begun planting this year’s crop of half a million acres, the high prices may prove only enough to cover their increased costs of fuel and fertilizer, industry officials say.

“Diesel is up 40 percent, and fertilizer has doubled,” said Tim Johnson, president and chief executive of the California Rice Commission, a trade group in the nation’s second-largest rice-producing state, after Arkansas.

Pretty alarming.