Tag archives: energy

How can we use behavior science to persuade people to solve the Climate Crisis? I recently attended a UCSB Psychology talk on this subject. To me, facts and evidence should be enough. It takes a lot more than that for most people. It turns out that people who are most environmentally aware are often worse […]

Soon after I was first elected to the Sierra Club board, a fourth-grade teacher invited me to speak to her class. I came prepared with a list of questions, rather than a speech. I asked the class to imagine a car that runs on an unlimited source of energy that never runs out. And to […]

Here at the Montecito Journal, we have long believed in offering a variety of views, letting each side have its space to speak. In light of the upcoming election, two of our longtime contributors have written in on what they think you should consider when heading to the ballot box this November 8. With Rinaldo […]

Bravo (yet again) to Rinaldo Brutoco’s August 11 column. He always comes up with the best adjectives when clashing up against “Big Power” greed: “Preposterous shibboleth” … Makes me laugh every time I look at it! In throwing big shade last week at the PG&E & Edison monopolies, he calls back to his group’s white […]

The last two columns in this space revealed the ridiculousness of burning more natural gas as a way to combat climate change just because it is half the carbon of coal.  In case everyone isn’t already aware, the time for half measures is way gone! Greece, France, and other major areas of Europe are on […]

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Dobbs opinion by the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices is the certainty that further assaults on our basic freedoms are coming. Not only on women’s reproductive rights, protected since 1973 under Roe v. Wade, but privileges and liberties Americans have long enjoyed, and encompassed in […]

Electric cars are gushing onto our streets from Tesla, and from Nissan, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, and a half dozen other car manufacturers (450 different models globally!). Elon Musk succeeded beyond Detroit’s wildest dreams in convincing first the American public, and then the global marketplace, that driving an electric car was “cool.” Everyone wanted one, and […]

On April 14, this column introduced the concept of “Freedom Fuel.” It outlined the potential unlocked by shifting from a planetary fuel system based on fossil fuels to a system based on the wide availability of hydrogen created by electrolyzing water with renewable energy (so called “Green Hydrogen”) at prices below fossil fuel. As that […]

1,000,000,000 = 1 billion Euros ($110 billion in U.S. dollars) per day. That’s what Europe sends to Russia in cash every single day. At that rate Russia can finance a war for a very long time. At that rate, Russia can commit unlimited atrocities. And, even though some are afraid to call what Russia is […]

Carlos, The Bear, set his Fender Telecaster guitar on its stand, sat back in his bean bag chair, crossed his arms, and began humming a tune. His mind was remembering his early days. He was a smallish bear, nothing like the one he saw on CNN earlier that day, Hank the Tank. No, Carlos was […]

Last summer, just a couple of months before Montecito Journal’s 2nd annual The Giving List book was published, Clean Coalition’s work to stage a Community Microgrid in Montecito – a first step toward establishing renewables-driven energy resilience for the vulnerable area – was still largely in the planning stage. The goal to establish individual Solar […]

Last week this column skewered the plaintive cry of the character Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street when he propounded that “Greed is good.” In doing so we wrapped up the article by quoting one of the most famous and powerful of all capitalists, Chairman and CEO Larry Fink of BlackRock. The firm Fink […]

Investor-Owned Utilities (“Utilities”) are plotting to kill California’s solar program. Apparently, avarice, and the ability to get away with causing 85 percent of area lost in recent forest fires in California, are not enough, and they are now coming up with ways to dramatically reduce all new solar installations in California. Can you believe that […]

As I write this, countries from around the world are convening in Glasgow for COP26 to solve the climate crisis. It is 26 because for 26 years these meetings have been going on and the threat keeps getting worse. I first began talking about the climate crisis in 1981 when it was called Global Warming […]

Brown Hydrogen, Grey Hydrogen, Blue Hydrogen, Green Hydrogen. Who knew hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe (76 percent of all molecules in the universe are hydrogen), came in so many colors! Actually, it doesn’t. Those color references relate to how hydrogen (“H2”) is made. If the source of electricity for electrolyzing H2 from […]

Our town’s innovative business, Next Energy Technologies Inc. (NEXT), a solar technology company with the motto “Windows Power Buildings” is co-founded by Gen-X’ers Corey Hoven PhD, Chief Technology Officer, from Montana and Daniel Emmett CEO from Carpinteria and a Cate School graduate. It was Corey’s research and studies in Materials Science, organic photovoltaics, with a […]

The world is going LOCAL. Or at least it should be. Every day we have more proof that food, information, energy infrastructure, and leadership have the most integrity and most power to do good when they have the least distance to travel. When it’s locally sourced. Distance dissipates. It is a fact of life. How […]

Looking Back / Looking Forward Santa Barbara is often referred to as the “birthplace of the Environmental Movement.” It is true that back on April 22, 1970, Santa Barbara had become a key catalyst for the first Earth Day, having galvanized public outrage a year earlier when it experienced the worst oil spill in U.S. […]