alt.energy.renewable

Eeyore wrote:

| To be fair, Americans could 'give up' a heck of a lot by being more
| energy efficient and less wasteful all round and it wouldn't
| degrade their lifestyle one jot.

Actually, Americans _could_ be considerably more energy efficient and
less wasteful. My own take is that it could be done without lifestyle
degradation, but that's a purely subjective matter. A change that's
acceptable to one person may not be to another.

To be completely fair, it should probably be pointed out that
Americans are indeed working to make more efficient use of resources,
to become more energy efficient, to learn from successes elsewhere, to
develop new energy-saving/producing technologies and products, and to
share our solutions with others.

This particular American (with a nudge from a young Scottish physicist
and considerable encouragement from American friends and neighbors)
has developed a solar panel with an absorber/heat exchanger that
efficiently absorbs radiant energy at all wavelengths, from UV down -
in a very stealth-like way. When I'm not working to build and deliver
those panels (to fellow Americans trying to reduce their carbon-based
energy consumption!), I'm working to complete development of a
multi-horsepower solar-powered fluidyne engine/pump and solar-powered
double-fluidyne air-conditioner (someone elsethread mentioned
air-conditioning - it's on the way!). And I'm just one out of many.

In the interest of fairness, once again, I'll mention that the
fluidyne is a liquid-piston Stirling cycle engine, and that the
Stirling engine was invented by a Brit more than a century ago.

More fairness: There are people all over the US doing serious work to
solve problems we /all/ face. You won't see 'em on the BBC (or
American broadcast networks) but they're there. We're going as fast as
we can, but nowhere near as fast as we'd like.

My experience on this side of the Atlantic is that the unsolved
problems get a great deal more press than do the solutions - but the
Internet helps.

While we do have a long way to go, we /know/ it - and we're working to
make improvements as rapidly as we can. If you've been expecting
everything to happen overnight (or in a few short years) you'll
continue to be disappointed...

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
/DeSoto/