As you may have noted (if anyone actually reads this thing) I’m not a big fan of our foreign policy. The war in Iraq is not about terrorism or Saddam, it’s about oil. This administration, even though their official policy is to cast doubt about global warming, knows we have a major energy problem. They went after Iraq because it has one of the largest oil capacities in the world and we needed to get our hands on it to avert a major economic catastrophe here in the US.

Proof? We are building the largest US Embassy in the world in Baghdad: 100 acres, capable of housing 3000 people at a cost of $600 million. It’s larger than Vatican City. We would not be building this compound if we were really planning on getting out of Iraq in the near future. While we invest nothing in alternative energy projects here in the US, we are ‘investing’ $1.5 billion (yes, billion) a week in the Iraq war. Do we really think this is anti-terrorism money? We haven’t spent anywhere near that amount on domestic security.

We’re investing dollars and lives to acquire an oil field.

In this Washington Post article, the Cass Sunstein makes a very persuasive case for why we won’t see China or the US do anything about climate change until its too late. Basically China will soon move from #2 producer of carbons (we’re #1) to #1 and they can’t slow their economic growth by taking away the fuel that’s powering it including dirty coal plants, cars with no emission standards and their huge population.
The US, on the other hand, has the highest per capita usage by a mile and our economy is totally dependent on oil to the point where we might revert to a very different kind of place if it weren’t available (think medieval villages). Disturbing stuff.

As you may have noticed I have various ads on the site. Recently ads for a Chevron site called willyoujoinus.com have been appearing on Burner Trouble. This Chevron site is allegedly a forum site to discuss energy issues. However the articles on it are ‘written’ by experts from organizations I’ve never heard of and the comments are very strange in that no one seems to ever really say anything.
Their section on global warming has one paragraph of text that says the many people think burning fossil fuels may have caused warming. Nice to see they have made a serious committment to opening up a discussion. Do I smell PR flacks at work?

In Australia there are serious plans to build something straight out of sci-fi, a solar chimney as tall as the Sears tower. The idea is that you build a multi-story tall tube that fans out at the base to cover many acres of land. It is like a greenhouse and open around the edges. The air inside is heated by the greenhouse effect and rises through the tube which is lined with turbines that generate electricity from the rising movement of the air. New air is pulled into the base around perimeter creating a constant flow of air pressure in the tube. The Energy Blog has a great update on this crazy cool technology that generates electricity without any pollutants or fuel.

But what about at night? They’ve figured that out. the base is ringed by salt ponds that store heat during the day and release it at night to power the updraft. It gets even wilder- the Chinese are planning a solar chimney a half mile tall! Can’t wait to see that sucker. I wonder if it is constantly windy around the perimeter of these things.