www.enreport.com

• it would take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat for palm oil
• The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a hungry person for a year;
• first new U.S. reactor is only scheduled for 2017
• average U.S. household now has 26 plug-in devices
• Only 4 percent of the energy used to power a typical incandescent bulb produces light; the rest is wasted
• China is expected to build more square feet of real estate in the next 15 years than the United States has built in its entire history, and it has no green building codes or green building experience.
• modern American refrigerators use three times less energy than 1970s models
  
  Baris's note : such a shame : "we can subtract a coal-fired megawatt every time we add a wind-powered megawatt". Coal works 6500-7000 hours/year, where wind hardly sees 3000 hours/year. It's capacity factor!

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/12/seven_myths_about_alternative_energy?page=full

Matthew Simmons' article is the most visited in FP's web site for a couple of days. Before reading his article, as he suggests, check the links in this paragraph:
"The four pieces were Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin's seven-page article in Foreign Policy, energy analyst Michael Lynch's three column op-ed in the New York Times, analyst Edward Morse's essay in Foreign Affairs, and scholar Amy Jaffe's paper published by the Baker Institute at Rice University." http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/04/oil_spin?page=0,0

Pretty interesting piece to read:

China's economy grew at an annualized 6.1 percent rate in the first quarter, and
7.9 percent in the second. Yet electricity usage, a key indicator in industrial
growth and a harder metric to manipulate, declined 2.2 percent in the first six
months of the year.

Ref:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/03/how_china_cooks_its_books?page=0,1

A professor fed up with his wife's phone beeping for low battery came up with this idea, which is not very complex. It is charging by induction I guess. But there is a video and pdf file to see.
Video: http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html?CNN=YES
PDF: http://www.witricity.com/pdfs/4.0_home_news_2008_03-04.pdf

Ref:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24023/?nlid=2294
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23839/#comment-212835
http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.1827
http://www.er.ethz.ch/fco/

Two discussions

1. Very classic discussion topic but quite a debate mainly about world's carrying capacity.
There are two main arguments.
a.The collapse of civilisation will bring us a saner world, Paul Kingsnorth. (Collapse )
b.No, counters George Monbiot – we can't let billions perish (Human wisdom will save us)

2. Alternative to banking systems?: Web based lending and borrowing services such as Zopa described as

"a website that describes itself as a place "where people meet to lend and borrow money … sidestepping the banks". The idea is pretty simple. Someone who has money to spare goes online, says how much he's ready to lend and at what rate of interest – and waits for would-be borrowers to take him up on his offer. If both sides are happy – and Zopa stands for the negotiating term "zone of possible agreement" – then the deal goes ahead. Quite a few of them, as it happens: Zopa has now facilitated £50m worth of loans, from one ordinary Briton to another"

Reason? Quite simple according to article : " it turns out that nine of those banks who between them trousered $175bn of the American public's money in bailout funds – have fallen back into their old habits: last year they paid their top staff $32.6bn in bonuses."

According the Wall Street Journal,

• 4.4% electricity demand drop in the largest US power market (consisting of13 states east of Mississippi)
• Average spot price in the same region drops by 40%. ($61.72/ MWh from $129.48/Mwh)

"Generally, the declines in demand and prices are the most precipitous and most sustained seen in the United States since the 1950s."

Ref:

IEEE Spectrum, 12 August 2009