A problem that worsens each decade for southern cities such as Houston or Phoenix is an effect called the Urban Heat Island (UHI_), for which inner city temperatures have been observed to exceed temperatures measured in nearby rural areas by amounts now approaching 20 F. This article proposes a novel and simple means of mitigating this by installing a straight-forward technology, called the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE). it is estimated that, by installing AVE facilities that could continuously elevate 1000 m3/s of air per square kilometer of surface from the inner city into the mid troposphere. During hot summer months, approximately 0.3-0.5 kwh/m2/day of heat (~ 65% via evaporation) would be removed and a mean temperature reduction of 3-4 oF could thereby be achieved as cooler, drier air from rural areas is pulled in to replace the warmer, wetter air that would be ejected from the region.
This, the fifth article in the series The Two-Headed Dragon ~ Energy/Water/Food Scarcity and Climate Change. Top Ten Policies that Feed it, and Two New Technologies that Could Enable us to Slay It and Save the Planet discusses why the short term mindset that prevails in our culture is preventing us from addressing the existential problems of climate change and rapidly disappearing fossil energy reserves. It touches on our nation’s irrational tax code, which provides a powerful incentive for wasteful practices and continued reliance on fossil fuels. It also suggests that the profound ignorance in energy matters is one of the key reasons why we have such poor energy policy, suggesting that our politicians should attend an energy boot camp and learn the fundamentals of energy.
This post, by Jerry J. Toman, ScM, ChE examines five policies that are setting our future up for failure. They are: Reliance on the old-time political religion of economic growth (usually defined as by economists as GDP growth); Continue to practice incrementalism above all else, as the dominant means of solving the problems; Embarking willy-nilly into mega-projects that utilize technologies that often are half-baked in terms of knowing what the overall costs, impacts and benefits would be; Ignoring the “carbon balance” aspects of current practices and future remedies; and relying on technologies that involve extensive “mining” of the earth’s solid surface for minerals, as a means to achieve sustainability.
