Carbon Capture and Storage Worlwide Map: in Brazil, nada!

One of the poor conclusion you can make when you look at CCS WW map: In South America, Russia and greatest part of Africa, no CCS. The latter is understandable since they have the lowest energy consumption. Now Russia? Brazil? India? South Africa? Where are the BRICS?
See the link here to a google map.

First duty of intelligence: the obvious

An article from MIT's Kevin Bullis has been quite reposted and mashed, I end up doing the same  ^_^.
The statement is the follow:

Siemens says it would make sense to build solar power plants in sunny countries in Europe rather than in cloudy ones. And wind turbines should be built in windy places.

These blindingly obvious suggestions run contrary to what’s actually happening. For example, a solar panel in Spain generates about twice as much electricity as the same-size solar panel in Germany

The following graph is a good representation of what happens and (by way of consequence) what could be done to optimize the use of current resources in Europe:

Spot on!

War on (water) terror

Two disturbing news that confirms a trend that water will overwhelm energy as the next tension maker of the international politic landscape. A conflict threat over water in the Asia-Pacific region and more regional is a tension threat over a river running between the two main economical states of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo for water supply. Regionally and internationally we can see growing tensions over water resources for irrigation, fishery or simple fresh water resource for local population. Climate change is not helping re-drawing the water distribution and industries are entering the game of water utilization exploring the law gaps for their own interest. Ever since China took over Tibet 50 years ago and decided not to release control over it for no other motives that Tibet is the water font of most of the Chinese provinces.

"Inside Job" with an economist driving me through

I did wait a long time I confess to watch that movie (you can check their facebook page too), problem is, I could probably not understand it as best as I did a couple of days ago if I did not watch it with my wife. Inside Job is "how we fucked up for the 6th time but this time it really hurt people" and "by the way we didn't get hurt so we might do it again". The way the famous top 1% is so far away from reality that they feel they are above the law, and it would not be normal otherwise. It's game of throne all over, except you reign over people's wallet (so you reign over them too) but nobody knows you're the King until you hit the news for fraud (or major economic breakdown). Inside job is a good documentary that tells you you should not entrust anyone with your money if you cannot see physically where you apply it. I found the movie to be a sequel of "Bowling for Columbine" in the way events where depicted and how they interviewed their guests. Don't be fooled though, it is a documentary, with a message in mind. They did the movie edition to keep their message all through the documentary so it's as powerful as you want it to be. What I gained from this documentary is that I need to know more of economics and finances in general so that I don't get hurt and that I need to document myself more about this crisis to understand what really happened. There is the romanticised version of the crisis HBO film "Too Big To Fail" where you can see more of it and temper the documentary. One big missing element on "inside job": the absence of Paul Krugman and his position on the crisis. Or (and I need to thank my wife for driving me through) on the contrary the documentary was completely following Krugman's line of thoughts.