03-01 Desalination
If there is a guaranteed growth industry, it is water desalination. All of the water stressed nations are engaged in some kind of desalination research and development. The big issue is the use of filtration systems to remove salt rather than distillation because of the reduced needs for power. Look to solar powered desalination systems…
03-01 Small Nuclear
Mini nuclear sites to power electric tanks and armoured vehicles. More power from less fuel. My boss at the Cities Service refinery at Bronte, Ontario in 1960 was a full colonel from WW2. And he liked me to call him “Colonel”. His job during the war, not unlike his current job, was the logistics of…
03-01 Understanding
Technology underpins the global economy. It is all about the Internet and information services, cell phones, networks and personal computers. In 1975, at the International Small Business Symposium in Tokyo, five small business leaders, of which I was one, pledged to create a global small business organization that would meet once a year to exchange…
03-02 Internet and Information Services
We have pure Internet companies today where everything that is made and sold is done via the web. And all software services employed are web savvy. Like accounting services, an e-commerce platform and a range of marketing and communication tools. It was 1996 and I was trying get my head around the concept of using…
03-02 Irrigation
It should be no surprise that about 2/3rd of the water we draw from lakes, streams and aquifers is for the irrigation of crops. And that as the planet warms, the demands for irrigation will increase. Surface irrigation, sprinkler irrigation and drip irrigation. The scientists at the Ministries of Agriculture around the world must be…
03-02 Off the Grid
Millions around the world will soon be able to charge their cell phones. A toaster and real toast. And I could read in bed at night. This is about coming onto the grid at our cottage at age 14. It was 1947. Being off the grid meant coal oil lamps, an ice box, and a…
03-03 Battery Buzz
Frog batteries? Half the number of cars will be EVs. Half the refineries will shut down. Have you ever heard of a “frog battery”? Well, in 1845 a scientist put a strip of metal in a dead frog’s leg and an entirely different strip of metal in the other leg. And low and behold, there…
03-03 Robotics
Robotics is about reducing the labor content in manufacturing and distribution. It is helping industry focus on growing shortages of labor in all the industrialized nations of the world. In the military, robotics is about saving lives. It is easy to understand robotics improving the quality of manufacturing processes. And industrial robots are now used…
03-03 Water from Air
If 2 billion people today do not have access to clean, safe drinking water, assume we will face an even greater crisis as the planet warms. Water from air technologies are exploding powered by electricity. But solar driven technologies are on the horizon. Water from air sounds simple. The air is filtered, then condensed, and…
03-04 Agrivoltaics
Growing veggies under solar panels is quirky. Veggies and bees love the shade. It would be no surprise to anyone that farmland is an obvious place to put a solar panel facility. And this, of course, represents a new source of farm income. The photo shows a relatively large prosperous farm that has several acres…
03-04 Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Globalism is changing and it is more than robots replacing humans or finding cheaper sources of labor. International activity of every kind is also changing because machines are being developed than can perform tasks that require human intelligence. I remember with humor discussing government forecasting with former Finance Minister and Prime Minister of Canada, Paul…
03-04 Potable Water
Climate change means more of the world becoming water stressed. This requires more technologies to treat all kinds of water so it becomes potable or drinkable. Treating water from the Great Lakes, for example, is not as complex as treating water from the Nile. It was 1943 and our first cottage was on Lake Simcoe…
03-05 Rare Earths
China’s control of rare earths holds the world at ransom. Time for a new Canada-US partnership. Loved learning about the “Periodic Table” in high school. Hydrogen was called H and it had one proton in its atom. And copper was called Cu and it had 29 protons. Then lead was called Pb and it had…
03-05 Toilet to Faucet
The treatment of waste water or sewage is about sending it back into rivers, lake and aquifers. But recent “toilet to faucet” technologies take treated waste water and turn it into potable water. Drinking former waste water is a little “yucky”, but it’s actually purer than distilled water. Childhood cottage memories are all about “out-houses”…
03-06 Solar Surprises
Solar sidewalks in the Netherlands. Solar highways in China. Solar panels covering canals in India to prevent evaporation. Surprises. I remember my first trip to the Netherlands and noticing how crops were growing right up to the side of a local highway. No space is wasted when such a large population occupies such a small…
03-07 Hemp
Hemp is exciting. Hemp based plastic can replace petroleum plastic. Then there is hemp concrete and cheaper houses. Do not read this chapter unless you can handle excitement. It is about hemp saving the planet. The photo shows hemp, a plant that will grow to a height of 13 feet in 100 days.We have heard…
03-08 Green Hydrogen
Producing hydrogen from water rather than natural gas will impact climate change. Green hydrogen is like wind and solar. There was never a day as a young boy that my mother wasn’t swabbing hydrogen peroxide on the cuts and scrapes of myself and my brothers. Scrapes were about ripping about on our scooters and tricycles.Of…
03-09 Small Wind
Small wind turbines, like rooftop solar, will provide off grid electricity to the remote and undeveloped areas of the world. There was a “back to the earth movement” in the 1970s, and a highlight in Canada was a “home of the future” on Prince Edward Island that produced its own electricity and grew its own…
03-10 Ocean Currents
Ocean currents impact our weather. And climate change is impacting ocean currents. A threat to our future. A professor at Teachers’ College in 1963 told us our job was to help young people understand what they don’t know. What he said impacted my life as much as my students.You just never appreciate the complexity of…
03-11 Energy Storage
If the world becomes free of fossil fuels, it will be because of energy storage. Something bigger than lithium-ion batteries. It was the spring of 1953, and I was a first-year engineering student looking for a summer job. My father, who operated a men’s clothing business, came to my rescue. He called one of his…
03-12 EVs
Demand for EVs will explode when we have low-cost batteries. It’s about better technology, not the environment. This fun photo shows an electric vehicle or EV at an auto show in 1912. It’s the one on the left. And there were 30,000 of them in the US. But there were also 40,000 driven by steam,…
03-13 Recycling
Recycling old batteries for raw materials like Lithium, Nickel and Cobalt is the secret to bringing down the costs of batteries for Electric Vehicles. Anyone interested in technology and climate change is interested in the growth of the Electric Vehicle (EV) market. Because as the sale of EVs explode, the sale of gasoline will decline…
03-14 Carbon Capture
There are energy-intensive industries like cement and steel that put large amounts of CO2 into the air that cannot use an alternative to fossil fuels. The answer is to filter out the CO2 from the smokestacks. It is called carbon capture. In the world of climate change, there is a public focus on replacing the…