An incredibly insightful video on turning fallow land productive
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Yesterday, there was a newsbrief about how cow manure can be used to generate 3 percent of North America’s electricity needs while significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This technology is not news to Indian villagers who have been using Gobar Gas for decades. Doing a little digging I came across this interview (conducted in 1972!) with India’s pioneer in the design, construction and roll-out of low-cost biogas plants that use cow manure. For farmers in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil with huge cattle populations it makes sense to consider Indian biogas technology for price-performance considerations.
The Plowboy Interview(1972) – Ram Bux Singh
Ram Bux Singh has developed a keen interest in helping to design, construct and promote the use of bio-gas plants here in the United States. “Two billion tons of manure is wasted annually in the U.S., ” he says, “and that is actual food and actual power that you could save with the inexpensive composters we have developed in India.’
PLOWBOY: But you have been experimenting with methane conversion for some time and your work in the field is considered quite important by scientists and technicians all over the world. Obviously you’ve contributed something of value to the search for ways to recycle waste into non-polluting fuel.
RAM BUX SINGH: In 1955, the government of India appointed me to simplify the construction of bio-gas plants. There was no question that such units would produce
methane but, up to that time, most gas generators were very large and costly. Even the small plants built in Germany during the war were quite expensive. So what we have done at the Gobar Gas Research Station in India is to simplify the construction of bio-gas generators.
We have designed efficient plants that are small enough for a single
village or one farmer to build and we have found ways to construct
these gas generators for very little money. We have made the bio-gas
plant economical for small farms.Let me give you an example of what we have done. When recently visited a
sewage plant at Charleston, West Virginia, the engineer there told me
that seventy million dollars had been spent on the facility. If we were
to try to scale down to: village or farm size the technology used in
that plant, the smaller waste disposal unit might still cost half a
million dollars Now, no village in India and no farmer—even in the United States—is
going to spend a half million dollars to process waste. But we have
designed bio-gas plants which both purify waste and produce
non-polluting fuel . . . and some of these units can be built for as
little as $100! With our designs and a relatively minor investment,
then, a farmer or small group of people can now construct a
self-contained system that will recycle plant and animal waste into
high-quality fertilizer anti non-polluting fuel. The fuel can then be
used to cook with, to heat the farmhouse and to power machinery. A
bio-gas plant can make a farm more self-contained and independent.
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Image via WikipediaUnity between India and Brazil is crucial to break the deadlock and resist attempts to divide developing countries at world trade talks, a former Indian trade negotiator said here Friday.
The effort of the United States and the European Union has been to create division. India and Brazil, who have very different interests, must resist such attempts for the sake of all developing countries,” Atul Kaushik, a senior former commerce ministry official, said.
Kaushik told IANS known differences among members of the influential Group of 20 developing countries (G-20) should be kept out of the negotiating room at the World Trade Organization here.
Kaushik, who has negotiated for India on intellectual property rights and environment, named India and Brazil in particular as the countries with divergent interests in agriculture.
Brazil has “offensive agricultural interests” - where it would like all countries, including India, to lower tariffs and other barriers to its farm exports.
India, on the other hand, has “defensive interests” in agriculture, which means it would like to retain as many of these tariffs and barriers as possible in order to protect the lives of its estimated 600 million small farmers.
“India and Brazil are the two developing countries at the centre table, and they will be taken seriously only if they remain united,” said Kaushik, who now heads the Geneva Resource Centre of CUTS, an international non-government body working on international issues of trade.
he said Brazil’s powerful agri-business sector had intervened at least twice during recent negotiations to try and persuade their government to “step away from an alliance with China and India” and he praised the Brazilian government for resisting such pressure.
Brazilian farmers, representing the most productive sector of their country’s economy, feel Indian positions on manufacturing and services – where India has offensive interests – have complicated negotiations.
However, he said: “It became apparent to Brazil early on in the life of the G-20 that it had to work in tandem with other developing countries in order to achieve its own offensive interests in agriculture.”
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Image via WikipediaOver the past four years, Vinod Khosla has become the world’s foremost investor in environmental startups. He has committed an estimated $450 million of his personal fortune to financing 45 ethanol factories, solar-power parks, and makers of environmentally friendly lightbulbs, batteries, and automotive components. These investments have made him the most prominent of an increasingly rare breed, the so-called angel investors who put their own funds into the youngest of companies — including outfits that are pursuing the most innovative, but not yet commercially viable, approaches to serious problems such as global warming. During nearly two decades at Kleiner Perkins, he was most closely involved with 42 startups. … And measured by return on
invested capital, Khosla’s record has been outstanding. His half-dozen best deals at Kleiner Perkins multiplied $314 million in investments into $15 billion in cash and stock — an increase of nearly fiftyfold, and five times more than all the money invested in all 42 companies. It was at the peak of his success in late 2000 and early 2001 — when Fortune named him the “most successful venture capitalist of all time”In 2004, he struck out on his own. “I felt that energy needed more
exploring than a responsible venture fund should do,” he says.At Khosla Ventures, he has put his own money into graphics-display,
data-center, and wireless technologies, but environmental startups are
what excite him. He has been on a campaign to end American dependence
on petroleum since oil was trading at a quarter of its present price. Khosla is unemotional about going green. He hopes to improve the world by developing, for example,
cleaner-burning coal and cars that run leaner, but his more fundamental
motivations seem to be the size of the potential market and, even more
important, the intellectual challenge of intractable problems.
He was smitten by Silicon Valley as a teenager in New Delhi in the
1970s. Every week, he would rent and carefully read worn-out copies of
what was then the startup publication of record, Electronic Engineering Times.
In the 1990s, he was inspired to concentrate on optical communications
while reading books on the physics of optics — during a vacation in
Hawaii. On another typical summer break, he studied complex systems at
the Santa Fe Institute; to prepare, he worked for six months with a
tutor, brushing up on calculus and linear algebra. When he got
interested in climate change, he prepared an extensive briefing book
for himself, loosely based on Danish political scientist Bjørn
Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.The presentation …, his favorite, is entitled “Mostly
Convenient Truths From a Technology Optimist” — among them that global
warming is “a technology crisis, not a resource crisis” and that
solutions to large problems require “a dash of greed.”“There are only four problems with global warming,” he tells me,
“oil, coal, cement, and steel. If we do those four, we’re done.”
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