Published

1 year ago

January 25, 2025

Alice Rush

Many of history’s great scientists, Einstein in particular, remarked on our fragile position on Earth, and cautioned us to be kind to one another. Carl Sagan was another vocal proponent of the unity of humankind. At left is what the 20th Century intellectual giant Buckminster Fuller had to say on the subject.

It’s worth noting that, in contrast, none of our most intelligent ancestors said, “Ya know what? Screw other people. If they can’t fend for themselves and make a success of themselves under capitalism, let them starve, or at least, suffer.”

A friend of mine has a huge client in Helsinki, and he asked me the other day if I was aware that Finland was perennially at the top or near of the World Happiness Rankings. I smiled, and replied that I happen to write about this frequently on 2GreenEnergy.com. I went on to explain that there are several key differences between that region of the world and the U.S., but that two of them are major. Scandinavians pay higher taxes, but:

1) They derive huge benefits in terms of free college education and healthcare. They don’t have people who live without education simply because they can’t afford tuition, and they don’t have people dying of treatable diseases because they don’t have health insurance.

2) They live with a sense of community that is extremely rare in the United States. Sure, we have the Amish and ethic communities like our Chinatowns and Little Italys. But in the main, as a Swede I met recently told me, Americans caring about the welfare of others are almost completely nonexistent.

The Challenges Facing Spaceship Earth

Renewable Energy

The Positive Effects We’ve Had on Others Are Profound, Whether We Know It or Not

Published

8 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

There’s a theory that most people underestimate the positive effects they’ve had on other people.

Yes, that’s the theme of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it’s also the core of the 1995 film “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” in which a music teacher who deemed that his life had been a failure because he never completed writing a great symphony, is gently and beautifully corrected. Please see below.

The Positive Effects We’ve Had on Others Are Profound, Whether We Know It or Not

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

21 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.