Vision of Earth is proud to announce that we have been selected as a semi-finalist for the New Shape Prize from the Global Challenges Foundation. We’ve made our submission open to the public.
Category: Featured Articles
Our most major works.
Morph My City Report – Transforming Regina: Planning for 2040 and beyond
We’re releasing our entire urban design report on the city of Regina. Originally developed for the Morph My City design competition and the National Infrastructure Summit, this report contains our main insights into the future of Regina and other North American Cities.
Vision of Earth submission chosen as finalist in Morph My City Competition
Vision of Earth has been selected as a finalist in the Regina Morph My City competition. We’ll be presenting our work at the National Infrastructure Summit and releasing all of it to the public.
Opportunities and perils of natural gas usage on the road to renewables
Our increasing reliance on natural gas brings with it both opportunities and dangers during the shift towards renewable energy. This issue deals with some major issues regarding natural gas deployment in industry, power generation, food production, and heating.
Capitalism’s Labour Transitions – An Argument for Social Welfare
Capitalist labour transitions are a heavy burden on the working class and society in general, but they are also one of the cornerstones of progress. We can solve this problem in an economically practical as well as morally and socially desirable through the creation of a strong social welfare system.
A renewed look at 2010, a sustainable vision for 2011
Here we review major renewable energy topics from 2010 and then turn towards analyzing energy issues for 2011 and beyond.
Curtis Dorosh: Green living, building, and volunteering
How to live green? Build green buildings? Put our efforts towards a better future? Curtis Dorosh has spent much of his life trying to answer these questions. Collected here are some of his answers.
How trolls and extremists are damaging our public discourse
Trolls and extremists contaminate our public discourse with falsehoods, logical fallacies, irrational argument, poisoning the well, false expertise, and the creation of de-facto knowledge. Individuals must learn to resist the onslaught of ideas driven by these sections of society.
How can we create power from nuclear fusion?
Achieving sustained nuclear fusion for power production is incredibly challenging. Scientists have been working on this problem for decades. This piece is an overview of the basic concepts and technologies needed for nuclear fusion power. One could also view this as a tutorial, or a crash-course, in fusion power.
How can you deliberately change your society?
How do people try to chance society? Why do these methods work? How can they be resisted? Progressive and regressive change can depend on many of the same basic techniques.
Media we find worthwhile
The Vision of Earth team has decided to begin briefly reviewing media that we find compelling, interesting, or useful. A lot of media exists that has enriched our lives immensely. This project is an effort to share that richness with you the reader.
Coal power: Pollution, politics, and profits
Burning coal releases heat energy, but it also releases many other products. Combustion products such as carbon dioxide, water vapour, nitrous oxides, sulphur oxides, particulate matter, and fly ash are also produced in varying amounts.
Solar power from photovoltaic panels
Photovoltaic solar power is the technical term for solar panels that convert sunlight directly into electricity. This is in contrast to techniques that capture solar energy in other ways, or for different uses. Other techniques include hot water heating, interior temperature control, and concentrated heat for electricity production.
Renewable Energy Review Blog Carnival
Vision of Earth is the host of the newly created renewable energy review. This is a blog carnival attempting to look at the development of renewable energy in the world today. Submitted articles will be judged on their quality, accuracy, and relevance. Once enough high-quality submissions are accumulated for a publication, our editors will write a brief review piece, linking to these novel contributions. We intend to comment meaningfully on the developments in renewable energy in our world.
Publicly Administered Green Energy Futures
Our goal is to keep our physical power infrastructure publicly owned, but gain some of the advantages of the private sector. The key to our recommendation is voluntary public investment from the people of Saskatchewan. In order to stimulate new renewable energy construction, we recommend that SaskPower open up renewable energy projects for direct public investment.
Personal and social change for a green energy future
The question is: what can we do to be more in harmony with the environment? The answers we present here are intended to be practical pieces of an answer to that question.
Publicly Owned Renewable Energy
We want the ability to directly support the development of renewable electricity generation. We don’t just mean buying GreenPower from sources that already exist. We want to be able to choose to put our money out there so that these things can actually happen. We want to support projects that haven’t yet been built, or even started.
Solar Thermal Power
Solar thermal power generation presents a unique opportunity among renewable technologies today. It is well-understood. Prototypes and commercial power plants of this sort exist. It has capabilities for both baseload and peak-matching power generation. It is affordable in locations with lots of sunlight. Costs are in the range 10-15¢/kWh currently, with great potential for the future.
Leverage hydro to use wind
When wind isn’t blowing hard, use a dispatchable source such as hydro to produce power. Let’s assume that we have 150 MW of hydro on hand to cover the Centennial Wind Farm when the wind isn’t blowing. If we look at entire year of production, we can expect that about 42.4% of all energy will have come from the wind, and that the remaining 57.6% of the energy would have come from the hydro. What is necessary for a system like this to work is to have enough water behind the hydro dam that it can cover a fairly long spell of low winds. This could be as long as several days. If our hydro reservoir is big enough to cover that time, we should be able to cover the intermittent nature of the wind for the whole year. If it isn’t big enough, we will have to get our power from elsewhere. Perhaps importing it from neighboring grids or by using another source such as natural gas.
Does nuclear power lead to weapons proliferation?
Arguments can certainly be made to support either side of this argument. This article gives examples of valid arguments on both sides of the issue. In general it is clear that understanding of nuclear energy fundamentals is a prerequisite for creating nuclear weapons. In this area however, the proverbial cat is out of the bag. Pandora’s box has been opened. The knowledge exists and is relatively widespread. The real question is what to choose to do with the knowledge that the world now has.