René O'Deay gBlog

Southeast
Louisiana, High and dry: That's exactly how Bob and Sherry Bourg expect
to spend the 2009 storm season, now that their new hurricane-resistant home
has been installed on the shores of Lake Catherine.

Deltec, an Asheville, N.C., business, designs hurricane-resistant circular (technically, polygonal) homes and produces kits for assembly. The company trains contractors
in various locales to ensure that kits are assembled according to company standards.
Locals who follow "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" were introduced to the company when Ty Pennington and crew landed in town last spring and replaced the storm-and tornado-damaged home of a Westwego first responder and his extended family using a Deltec product.

Survived Katrina in Pass Christian, Mississippi:

A sales brochure for Deltec Homes says "round for a reason".

Dale and Carolyn Medley of Pass Christian now understand the reason, courtesy of Hurricane Katrina. The couple's unusual home withstood the storm's fury.

"We've had several people come by and look at it since the storm," said Dale Medley, while giving a tour of his unusually-shaped home.

The round house in Timber Ridge proved its worth in Katrina.

"My son's an architect and he advised that a round house, he explained to me, that the wind goes around it and it's safer with high winds than a square house," said Carolyn Medley.

Dozens of nearby houses in the Timber Ridge subdivision gave way to Katrina's wind and water. The Medley home survived the storm's wind with very little damage.

Deltec helped build home for Westwego couple and rebuild a church: banding
together with Extreme Makeover Home Edition and construction crews from around the country for 7-day rebuild of the New Orleans area home and a church damaged by Hurricane Katrina and tornadoes.

For more information visit http://www.DeltecHomes.com/

Notice the homebuilding seminars also on the site.

Grand Isle 'Round House' Post-Katrina, a survivor.

See you in a couple of weeks. Gone to Taos!

René O'Deay

René O'Deay, March 15, 2007
A report from Purdue University Scientists on a new process of creating biofuels could lead to the US becoming an exporter of oil, instead of an importer.

"Hybrid hydrogen-carbon process," or H2CAR, will enable us to use the current fuel delivery infrastructure and internal combustion engine tech, a huge economic advantage. The method can be used to produce liquid gas from coal without the production of Carbon Dioxide, eliminating the need for proposed dangerous carbon dioxide "sequestering."

The process uses biomass mass more efficiently, can use diverse biomass, reducing the stress on the land, less pesticides and fertilizers, less CO-2 released, for a more efficient fuel that could potentially produce more fuel than needed for transportation.

The process, gassification, uses hydrogen, now expensive to produce. Advances in more economical production and use of hydrogen are also under research by the Universities of Minnesota, Nevada and Wisconsin-Madison, among others around the world.

...making the concept economically competitive with gasoline and diesel fuel would require research in two areas: finding ways to produce cheap hydrogen from carbon-free sources and developing a new type of gasifier needed for the process.

"Having said that, this is the first concept for creating a sustainable system that derives all of our transportation fuels from biomass," said Rakesh Agrawal, Purdue's Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering.

And that biomass can include wastes of all kinds, even manure. Conversion techniques use the more energy efficient solar power. No CO-2 is produced while producing the fuel or using it, and H2CAR can be used by conventional engines: autos, trains and planes.

Take heart, Global Warming freaks. Help is on its way.

But. It would behoove us all to keep a sharp eye on developments, lest certain corporations or foreign entities try to derail these projects, or deep six them.


Purdue University News Online

For Breaking News in Science: Science Daily

Thanks to nukegingrich for the tip on NowPublic.

Nuke asked, "Is this big?"

I'd say this is really BIG.

Review of Eating Better Than Organic
Eating better than Organic --TIME by John Cloud, Time Magazine Article Online: March 2, 2007

".... the organic-vs.-local debate has become one of the liveliest in the food world....

Cloud presents arguments from both sides and his own observations and experience about the pros and cons of organic foods versus locally grown food. He chronicles his personal quest for answers from local stores and farms, farmers markets, and organic stores like Whole Foods.

Answers he found raised more questions. Some organic foods have higher vitamin content and some don't. Locally grown produce can also be organic, but even if they are not, they are fresher, have less food-miles on them, and can be significantly cheaper. Cloud also provided a link to: Find Organic Local Harvest near you: LocalHarvest.org

A related news item on JourneytoForever.org, indicates: Hi-tech crops are bad for the brain:

"High-yielding Green Revolution crops were introduced in poorer countries to overcome famine," the report says. "But these are now blamed for causing intellectual deficits, because they do not take up essential micronutrients." The report is written by Dr Christopher Williams, a research fellow with the Global Environmental Change Programme, who estimates one quarter of the world's population is affected.

JourneytoForever also defines the idea of "Food Miles: How Far has Your Food Traveled" and fuel conservation.

" Imported food releases 90 times as much carbon as locally grown food."

Another consideration for consumers in their food choices.
I do recommend that you explore your own communities' resources for locally grown and organic products. Cloud documents how he did it, and his own personal reasons for some of the answers and decisions he made.

Make your own.