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Hans De Keulenaer

WattHead - Energy News and Commentary: Solar Leasing: An Exciting New Way to Get Solar ... - 0 views

www.watthead.org/...g-exciting-new-way-to-get.html

leasing renewables usa

shared by Hans De Keulenaer on 22 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • They come in many forms, but for the most part they are called solar leasing programs. You may also hear them called solar financing, solar power purchase agreements, or solar rental programs.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Profits before people: The great African liquidation sale - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...60010

food agriculture africa development crisis security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 Nov 09 - Cached
  • So what do the world’s great investors have their eyes on in Africa, in addition to the usual natural resources – minerals, petroleum and timber – that they’ve always coveted? In a word, land. Lots of it. The land-grabbing 'investors' are purchasing or leasing large chunks of African land to produce food crops or agrofuels or both, or just scooping up farmland as an investment,
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 07 Nov 09
       
      Biofuels are not sustainable energy. They do not protect food resources.
  • At the moment, the grabbing of Africa’s land is shrouded in secrecy and proceeding at an unprecedented rate, spurred on by the global food and financial crises. GRAIN, a non-profit organisation that supports farm families in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, works daily to try to keep up with the deals on its farmlandgrab.org website.[vi]
  • Apart from the African governments and chiefs who are happily and quietly selling or leasing the land right out from under their own citizens, those who are promoting the new wave of rapacious investment include the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and many other powerful nations and institutions. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation is helping to reform new land ownership laws – privatising land – in some of its member countries. The imported idea that user rights are not sufficient, that land must be privately owned, will efface traditional approaches to land use in Africa, and make the selling off of Africa even easier. GRAIN notes the complicity of African elites and says some African 'barons' are also snapping up land.
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  • another big plan is buffeting Africa’s farmers. It’s the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which claims it is working in smallholder farmers’ interests by 'catalysing' a Green Revolution in Africa. Green Revolution Number Two.
  • Arabica Robusta on 07 Nov 09
     
    "it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups and activists who work to protect Africa's genetic heritage, farmer rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. All these knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable. At least for those who design and make them."
Hans De Keulenaer

IEEE Spectrum: Can plug-in hybrid electric vehicles keep the electric grid stable? - 0 views

www.spectrum.ieee.org/5630

plug-in hybrids smart grid storage usa

shared by Hans De Keulenaer on 17 Oct 07 - Cached
  • After safety, the longevity of the batteries in a plug-in hybrid is the greatest unknown. Can a plug-in hybrid’s battery pack retain the bulk of its energy capacity over 10 years of daily use and more than 4000 full-discharge cycles? (For a deeper look at the challenges facing plug-in hybrid batteries, see “Lithium Batteries Take to the Road”.)[ LINK: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep07/5490 ] As Don Hillebrand of Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, said tartly, “Batteries are the showstopper.” Periodic demands from the grid, even for only a small fraction of the battery’s stored energy, would clearly affect the cells’ life span—but no one has data on how much. Another open issue is the development of creative financing models for replacement battery packs costing several thousand U.S. dollars even after mass production is achieved. Third-party battery leasing could be one answer, if combined with a secondary market for batteries whose performance has fallen below automotive levels. Carmakers, electric utilities, and large consumer-financing groups are quietly batting around these notions to see if they can build a financial model that makes sense for all three parties.
Hans De Keulenaer

Can Think's electric car revolutionize the auto industry? - August 1, 2007 - 0 views

money.cnn.com/...index.htm

electric vehicles stirling lithium

shared by Hans De Keulenaer on 03 Aug 07 - Cached
  • Jon-Olaf Williams, the CEO of Think, will see the City but lease its battery as part of a 'mobility fee' that may include insurance and Wi-Fi access.
Arabica Robusta

Water, Capitalism and Catastrophism » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names th... - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...r-capitalism-and-catastrophism

water climate change

shared by Arabica Robusta on 19 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Taking the holistic view, one can understand how some of the most basic conditions of life are threatened by a basic contradiction. Civilization, the quintessential expression of Enlightenment values that relies on ever-expanding energy, threatens to reduce humanity to barbarism if not extinction through exactly such energy production.
  • or every farmer or rancher who has leased his land for drilling, there are many homeowners living nearby who get nothing but the shitty end of the stick: pollution, noise and a loss of property value.
  • What gives the film its power is the attention paid to people like Stevens who organized petition drives and showed up at town council meetings to voice their opposition to fracking. They look like Tea Party activists or Walmart shoppers, mostly white and plain as a barn door, but they know that they do not want drilling in their townships and are willing to fight tooth and nail to prevent it. For all of the left’s dismay about its lack of power, the film’s closing credits reveal that there are 312 local anti-fracking groups in Pennsylvania made up of exactly such people who will likely be our allies as the environmental crisis deepens.
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  • In the collection “Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth”, Eddie Yuen takes issue with an “apocalyptic” streak in exactly such articles since they lead to fear and paralysis. A good deal of his article appears to take issue with the sort of analysis developed by Naomi Klein, a bugbear to many convinced of the need to defend “classical” Marxism against fearmongering. Klein is a convenient target but the criticisms could easily apply as well to Mike Davis whose reputation is unimpeachable. Klein’s latest book has served to focus the debate even more sharply as her critics accuse her of letting capitalism off the hook.
  • While I am inclined to agree with Malm that it is the drive for profit that explains fracking and all the rest, and that the benefits of energy production are not shared equally among nations and social classes, there is still a need to examine “civilization”. If we can easily enough discard the notion of the “Anthropocene” as the cause of global warming, the task remains: how can the planet survive when the benefits of bestowing the benefits of “civilization” across the planet so that everyone can enjoy the lifestyle of a middle-class American (or German more recently) remains the goal of socialism?
  • Ironically, this was the same argument made in the NY Times on April 14th by Eduardo Porter in an article titled “A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development”. He refers to the West’s environmental priorities blocking the access to energy in countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh and Cambodia now flocking to China’s new infrastructure investment bank that will most certainly not be bothered by deforestation, river blockage by megadams, air pollution and other impediments to progress.
  • Yuen’s article is filled with allusions to Malthusianism, a tendency I have seen over the years from those who simply deny the existence of ecological limits. While there is every reason to reject Malthus’s theories, there was always the false hope offered by the Green Revolution that supposedly rendered them obsolete. In 1960 SWP leader Joseph Hansen wrote a short book titled “Too Many Babies” that looked to the Green Revolution as a solution to Malthus’s theory but it failed to account for its destructive tendencies, a necessary consequence of using chemicals and monoculture.
  • To think of a way in which homo sapiens and the rest of the animal and vegetable world can co-exist, however, will become more and more urgent as people begin to discover that the old way of doing things is impossible.
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