The news about the H1N1 flu pandemic is turning out to be very interesting in unexpected ways.
It is critical to understand that, starting in 1980 with Pres. Reagan, our public health infrastructure has been eviscerated. After all, if the government can do no good and is by definition “the problem”, why pay for a public [...]

Perhaps we need to confront an old myth:
Myth X: The market functions well enough today because it’s pricing function is accurate.
My thesis is that the pricing function we have today is actually pathological and is based on playing with crooked dice and marked cards. We want the answer to be “cheap” — so we lie [...]

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson wrote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the [...]

Biomass solutions should be clean, affordable, feasible, practical and simultaneously provide as many of these benefits as possible:
1. improve soil health & create compounding increases in annual food production by sequestering in the soil carbon extracted from the atmosphere by photosynthesis then captured in stable form by pyrolysis.
2. improve the conditions and viability of [...]

What I would at like to see are Community Supported Energy projects, CSEs, modeled after Community Supported Agriculture [CSAs]. A CSE, operating within about a 5 mile radius, would convert locally sourced biomass into fuel for carbon negative heat for local buildings. The biochar produced by the heating systems would then [...]

As we develop near zero net energy houses with no furnaces, can we start replacing strongly carbon positive fossil fuel powered thermal energy systems with carbon negative alternatives?
Here is one possible path.
We can convert biomass, such as:

Wood chips from beetle killed trees in Colorado.
and turn them into this:

Biochar
In a system such as:

Biochar 1000 prototype [...]

Islam: Environmental Protection
[...]

Author: Michael D. McDonald, Dr.P.H.
Will the remnants of 20th Century national security mechanisms derail our own recovery and jeopardize the health, well-being and prosperity of Americans by consuming our societal attention and resources around the potential or actual next large terrorist attack, while other greater threats to our society and to the world continue to [...]

Author: Aldon Hynes
In 2001, Robert Putnam published a seminal book on the decline of civic engagement. Entitled Bowling Alone, it traced the decline in participation in a wide range of community organizations, from voting and church attendance to bowling leagues. The election of Barack Obama with massive citizen involvement and the hope [...]