oil

Written by Jan Lundberg
Thursday, 20 July 2006

Culture Change Letter # 137

Ecovillages and isotherms
CUTTING OUT FOSSIL FUELS BY BUILDING COMMUNITY

The urgent need to slash today's extreme consumption of fossil fuels is not a numbers game, nor is it a matter of degree. Rather, it is a matter of reduction in kind.

We cannot break our hyper-addiction to our fossil-fuelled economy of hyper-consumption incrementally, or gradually, or by means of some pain-free twelve-step program. We have to go cold turkey wherever we can. Right now. We have to begin by taking a good hard look at every single thing we do - at every single thing we have, at every single thing we want. Then we have to start the hard job of cutting out every single thing we can do without. http://i.am/jah/environ.htm

The surging demand for corn, sugar cane and vegetable oils to make Earth-friendlier biofuels is pitting hungry cars against hungry people, and trouble’s brewing, says sustainable development pioneer Lester Brown.

"...In effect what we have are 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and two billion people who want to survive,..."

Richard Clem's rotational engine

Although I do not have any information on Clem or his device, I would like to comment on the principle of operation, which seems quite simple and straightforward to who has studied the writings of Viktor Schauberger, the Austrian naturalist and inventor.

Indeed Schauberger was working with vortex action in liquids (especially in water) and was finding effects that were at the time, and are still now, unexplainable with the normal principles of physics or thermodynamics.

As far as I understand the engine made by Clem was built around a cone with spiralling channels cut into it and when a liquid, in that particular case vegetable oil, got pressed through the channels, they caused the cone to turn and at a certain point the flow of the liquid and the turning of the cone became self-sustaining, up to the point of putting out a good and heavy (350 HP for a 200 pound engine) power output.

China's insatiable demand for proteins as well as oil is turning Brazil into the takeaway for the workforce of the world. In the second part of our series, we reveal how the soya trade is creating a gold rush which is deforesting the Amazon

"...Today the food system is even more reliant on cheap crude oil. Virtually all of the processes in the modern food system are now dependent upon this finite resource, which is nearing its depletion phase."

Climate change over the next 50 years is expected to drive a quarter of land animals and plants into extinction, according to the first
omprehensive study into the effect of higher temperatures on the natural world.