Artificial Leaf Could Be More Efficient Than the Real Thing

By Mark Brown, Wired UK
Speaking at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in California, MIT professor Daniel Nocera claims to have created an artificial leaf made from stable and inexpensive materials that mimics nature’s photosynthesis process.
The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell to be used when producing electricity.
Nocera’s leaf is stable — operating continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity in preliminary tests — and made of widely available, inexpensive materials — like  silicon, electronics and chemical catalysts. It’s also powerful, as much as 10 times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf.
With a single gallon of water, Nocera says, the chip could produce enough electricity to power a house in a developing country for an entire day. Provide every house on the planet with an artificial leaf and we could satisfy our 14-terrawatt need with just one gallon of water a day.

Those are impressive claims, but they’re also not just pie-in-the-sky, conceptual thoughts. Nocera has already signed a contract with a global megafirm to commercialize his groundbreaking idea. The mammoth Indian conglomerate, Tata Group has forged a deal with the MIT professor to build a small power plant, the size of a refrigerator, in about a year and a half.
This isn’t the first ever artificial leaf, of course. The concept of emulating nature’s energy-generating process has been around for decades and many scientists have tried to create leaves in that time. The first, built more than 10 years ago by John Turner of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was efficient at faking photosynthesis but was made of rare and hugely expensive materials. It was also highly unstable, and had a lifespan of barely one day.
For now, Nocera is setting his sights on developing countries. “Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” he said. “One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.”

Source:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/artificial-leaf/

Get Gapminder

The Magic Washing Macine

Leave Your Lights On This Saturday: Earth Hour Celebrates Ignorance, Poverty and Backwardness

Source:http://mjperry.blogspot.com/

"Earth Hour 2011 will take place this Saturday 26 March at 8.30PM (local time). This Earth Hour we want you to go beyond the hour, so after the lights go back on think about what else you can do to make a difference. Together our actions add up.

Earth Hour has done a lot to raise awareness of sustainability issues. But there’s more to it than switching off lights for one hour once a year. It’s all about giving people a voice and working together to create a better future for our planet."

Canadian economist Ross McKitrick responds:

"I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. 

Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading. 

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases.

Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed. The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. 

Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. 

People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too. 

I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on."

HT: Pete Friedlander

Greatest Reduction in World Poverty Ever in History: Isn't Free Trade Partly Responsible?

Ian Fletcher claims here that "Free Trade Isn't Helping World Poverty," and Don Boudreaux responds here.  Here's some related research:

From a 2009 NBER working paper "Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income," by Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Columbia University):

Abstract: We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distribution of Income and estimate poverty rates, poverty counts and various measures of income inequality and welfare. Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that world poverty rates have fallen by 80% from 0.268 in 1970 to 0.054 in 2006 (see chart above). The corresponding total number of poor has fallen from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006. Our estimates of the global poverty count in 2006 are much smaller than found by other researchers. We also find similar reductions in poverty if we use other poverty lines. We find that various measures of global inequality have declined substantially and measures of global welfare increased by somewhere between 128% and 145%. We analyze poverty in various regions.

MP: The bottom chart above shows poverty rates for the five regions analyzed in the paper, with some pretty amazing results for East Asia (includes mainland China, Taiwan and S. Korea), which in 1960 had the highest regional poverty rate in the world by far, at 58.8%, compared to 39.9% for Africa, 11.6% for Latin America, 8.4% for MENA (Middle East, N. Africa) and South Asia (20.1%). In the 36-year period between 1970 and 2006, the poverty rate in East Asia fell to only 1.7% by 2006, which was below any of the other four regions: Africa (31.8%), Latin America (3.1%), MENA (5.2%) and South Asia (2.6%).

Both graphs are based on a poverty measure of $1/day, but the authors obtain similar results using four other measures of poverty from $2 to $10 per day, both for the overall reduction in world poverty (top graph) and the regional differences (bottom graph).

Bottom Line: Assuming these estimates are accurate, the 80% reduction in poverty between 1970 and 2006 has to be the greatest reduction in world poverty in such a short time span in the history of the world, and the 97% reduction in East Asia has to be the most significant improvement in regional standard of living in history as well. The authors don't explore the reasons for the record reduction in world poverty, but some likely candidates might be: globalization, market-based reforms, liberalization, Information Age technology, productivity gains in agriculture, the collapse of central planning in China and India, etc.

 

Source:http://mjperry.blogspot.com/

 

Deaths per Energy Source

 

Data in the chart above are from the Next Big Future blog. 

Source: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/

Unions vs. Taxpayers

Japan’s Coming Debt Tsunami

by Chriss W. Street

http://biggovernment.com/cstreet/2011/03/16/japans-coming-debt-tsunami/

The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on Friday has caused tragic devastation to lives and property, but Japan may soon be over-whelmed by a debt crisis tsunami of epic proportions. With crony deficit spending by the Japanese government having destroyed its economy over the last two decades; Japan now has a real national crisis that will force the government to engage in massive deficit spending. There is a strong risk of a financial melt-down in the world’s most indebted nation.

After the credit-induced boom in the late 1980s, Japan’s high rate of growth stumbled and bank loan defaults sky-rocketed. Over the last twenty years, asset prices are down by 65% for the Nikkei stock index, 50% for residential real estate, and 70% for commercial real estate. The centrally planned Japanese government responded to this crisis of falling asset values with wave after wave of colossal deficit spending stimulus. Japan’s public debt rose from virtually nothing to 225% of gross domestic product (GDP), but the economy has remained stagnant.
Japan has engaged in about the same level of 7% deficit spending as the US has averaged for the last two years, except Japan has sustained this level of spending for the last twenty years. Normally, heavy deficit spending quickly exhausts a nation’s internal markets to buy its own debt and the country is forced to auction bonds at higher and higher interest rates to outsiders; which also increases the costs of the debt and forces the nation to sell even more debt. At some point the country becomes so indebted that credit agencies downgrade the country’s quality rating to junk, foreigners refuse to buy new debt, and the country defaults. Japan has avoided this deficit financing end-game, because the nation has been able to finance 95% of its debt at home. Over the last year Greece with a third less and Ireland with less than half the debt to GDP ratio of Japan, imploded when foreigners refused to invest.
As deficit spending has remained extraordinarily high for such a long period, Japan has maintained a 41% corporate tax rate; the highest in the world, 10% above the US and Europe and triple the fast growing Asian economies of Taiwan and Singapore. This has made Japan an unattractive location for private investment. The complete lack job security for young workers who can only find temporary employment has made life difficult for new families and caused the birth rate for Japanese women to be cut in half. Lower family formation has caused the household savings rate for the thrifty Japanese to fall from 5% at the end of the 1990’s to just above 2% currently.
Japan has maintained current-account surplus and has been sending more than 3% of its GDP abroad, providing more than $175 billion of funds this year for other countries to borrow. This paradox of a stunningly indebted nation financing the world is explained by a combination of high corporate saving and low levels of residential and non-residential fixed investment due to poor investment opportunities in Japan. That money is gone after this crisis. Millions of Japanese savers are about to start spending their savings on essentials, since they have lost their jobs and businesses due to the damage. Tokyo Electric Power Company will suffer losses of over $100 billion from its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melt-down and most of Japan’s northern corporate facilities that hug the eastern coastline have been destroyed or incapacitated.
Japan averages one earthquake every four minutes, but Friday’s quake and tsunami were both the largest in the history of the country. Earthquake insurance in Japan is very expensive and only 10% of homeowners buy coverage. Therefore, the Japanese government will be on the hook for several hundred billion in infrastructure and reconstruction costs.
Many naive analysts are commenting about how this natural disaster will be good for the Japanese economy, because of the substantial rebuilding program. That might have been true if Japan was not already on the verge of a man-made debt disaster prior to this natural disaster. Standard & Poor’s credit rating service had just downgraded Japan’s sovereign debt to AA- in mid-January. The huge increase in the costs for welfare and unemployment payments, the economic disruption, the scale of the devastation, the lack of insurance and the minimum five years to rebuild the country may take Japan’s credit rating down to “junk bond” levels. The earthquake and tsunami that have devastated Japan came with quickly and violently. The debt crisis tsunami has been building for twenty years and may be much more devastating to the future of Japan.

Map: Where Americans Are Moving

Cool Map to see moving patterns

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-interactive-counties-map.html?preload=16001