by Spring Bright

Created on: April 15, 2008

The most important aspect of alternative fuels is its newness. It is an ocean of possibilities and opportunities. Each of us is capable of coming up with or using ways to solve individual fuel problems, together creating a steaming stew of solutions, clean, and smart and limited only by our commitment to tasting the fresh horizon.

We've only been building fields of windmills for thirty years. Yet we power cities from them, and they are generations old, used for hundreds of years in Amsterdam and on hundreds of farms and homes that are too far from cities to get electrical service.

Last month I bought solar water heating and solar pool heating equipment, and although the water heater was too much for my regular gas water heater, which leaked, then leaked more, then was removed and replaced. My gas bill dropped two/thirds that month, hitting a comfortable winter level of $80.00.

I put in an experimental garden of all the local crops last hear, thinking of local stills extracting local ethanol, this one smelling of butternut squash, easy grow, high yeild, like bonds, that one the overflow of an old apple garden, collected by high schools in teams, donated untiil they were full to food banks locally, the rest for the still, everything high sugar, sweat to eat.

These beauties, we turn them into ethanol. I need a still and that recipe that the students at ASU, is it, turned into a burnable cooking fuel to send to Africa? It's needed all over the world. And can be made not from corn alone, and grass, but sugar kane and sugar beet and squash and apples and wheat and fallen leaves.

We all need to know what else. What have you farmers, painters, potters, thinkers, workers, growers come up with that could be the source of ethanol. You are the source of this information. Please put it HERE, on Helium, so that others will see it and be able to take the information they need to keep comforts without destroying the earth.

One true suggestion is limit your children. Each one in this culture will expect all that the country promises, and if the world were right and righteous, they would get it, and maybe it can be if we work on it now.

Use an eco-friendly heating and cooling system. It's got a liquid in pipes, planted deep underground where the temperature is always fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. So in winter the air brought into the heater is fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit already,. At ground level, it may be 10 degrees. You pay for the equipment and small electrical costs of the pump moving the liquid around, and in hot summer, you've got cool, quiet chilly air, and no guilt about using it. It's heaven.

We're looking for a pure electric car, since we're putting solar panels for electrical enough to make APS buy it back at peak times, and then we'll be the source, not simply the buyer, and we'll live freer, fearing not the gas and electric bills, the storm that tears the wires, no threat.

We have been looking at alternatives fuels, thinking we were going forward, when in fact we are reemerging from the black clouds into cleaner skies and lungs with the use of knowledge gleaned by generations all over the world. A woman in Africa sells a cardboard tin lined cooking stand that includes a black painted pot. Food in pot/pot in plastic bag/hours of work done/dinner is ready from the sun, they eat.

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