What's That Stink?!: Low Sulfer Diesel.. One Small Step for Man..

Soundtrack: I always thought this song was called What´s That Stink, but it's What´s at Stake, which is somehow even more appropriate for this post:
Mighty Mighty Bosstones: What´s at Stake
If I had a version of hell as a kid, it was being stuck in the back of the family Station Wagon, the seats all taken by others, trekking down an anonymous American Interstate, in the families 1980 Diesel Station Wagon. It was the Griswalds meet something out of the horror movie Hostel. The stench from the sulfur from both our car and the surrounding trucks made me want to pass out more than once, and perhaps once or twice I did, propped up between my dad´s musty suitcases and the back window, which I used to beg to have opened from 12 feet away to the front seat for air, just to have the stench kick in from the tailpipe, curling up in the icy slipstream of what was usually a New England winter, and make me realize the true devils bargain I had struck, and that we were striking with Diesel. We had a cat named Snowball that gave up the ghost on one of these trips. We assumed it was because my older sister, also once stuck in what we called the Waaay Back with me due maybe to a family friend along (she used to use her 2 years advantage in size in any way possible to avoid this fate), clogged off his little cat box breathing holes with the necessary down jacket some winter trip, but I´m now going to chalk it up to carbon dioxide poisoning in my past the environmental innocence of the 70´s´ new found awareness (this post ifs for you, Snowball!.. sniffle...). I didn´t think much about conservation at age 5, but I sure as hell knew something wasn't right. This car, by the way, became a legendary turkey, is now on the list of ten worst cars of all times, the Oldsmobile, Buick, or GM station wagons from 1980. You see, Diesel is powerful, and needs a high compression ratio to burn (1 to 9 is typical for a gas engine, like ti was supposed to be, and for a Diesel, you start at 1 to 14 minimum, and go up from there to as high as maybe 1 to 24), especially with just a glow plug instead of a spark to make it commbust, and what GM did, since it takes about 2 years to cure the steel an engine block properly, or at least did in the technology of the day, is take a bunch of gas engines they had on hand, and just call them diesel after the country went mad for fuel efficiency in the wake of the Gas shortages during the OPEC crisis.. since they were short on appropriate ones and people were clamboring for diesel. The end result, to the endless snickers of the Click and Clack´s of the world, was that the crank shaft would literally blow off the bottom of the engine after a while...

10 worst cars of all time

There she is.. the Cutlass Cruiser.. our´s was light blue..
should have been a warning!

So diesel, you have smelled it for years unless you grew up like Romulus and Remus.. it is the power of world ground transportation, and much of our medium scale water transportation as well..

The Expansion of Wind's Power

Somehow Windmills have become the poster child of the Green Revolution..

they are, well, pretty in the abstract, and in person, kind of impressive, form follows function, and they are somehow calming, and like a wind chime, cooling, and they are popping up in large installations it seems just about everywhere (except for the coast of California, but for once I will try not to be grumpy)..the biggest onshore I can find is 5 Gigawatts of potential in north west China, and another in the North Sea might hit 9 Gigawatts.
I can name a few spots I have seen them in my travels. The old famous Farms were the highways east of San Francisco and LA, on 580 and I-10, Altamont and San Gorgonio Pass respectively (the latter also the home of the giant dinosaurs at the truck stop in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, which I know is more important to you than anything that follows). These installations are somehow a vestige of the first Obama administration, known to many as the Carter Administration (or maybe the third Wilson Administration perhaps..), since it was the environmental movement of the 70's that laid the seeds of today's progress, but they lay dormant in some ways for years as we kind of cleaned up many a mess from our wild industrial times before we could step it up to move forward as we are now.