Euro Freeze, Global Weirding?

Meteorologists say the cold weather is caused by a negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation, which means that cold Arctic air is flowing into southern latitudes that are normally much warmer.

This is the explanation for the recent European freezing weather and snow as mentioned in CNN. Sounds awfully like what scientists said would happen through global warming, or as Thomas Friedman called it, global weirding. Freaky. This is record-breaking weather over there, and hopefully is not a harbinger of things to come.

One man's garbage is another man's biogas

Awesome article in the New York times regarding how Kristianstad, Sweden has converted their biowaste into biofuel - heating most of the city and providing biogas to all government-operated vehicles. This has pretty much cut out all needs for municipal and utility petroleum-based fuels.

The city of Kristianstad (which was apparently nearly bankrupted during the oil shocks of the 1970s from fuel costs) pay half for energy than they would if they relied on oil, easily get rid of biowaste from their agricultural sector that would have to be disposed of anyways and could intoxicate the water supply if not properly taken care of, employ tons of people, and have as a byproduct, produced technology and expertise within their citizens that could be exported probably for loads of cash.

So, so, fricking smart. Why can't we do this?

It can be done!

Although he may be oversimplifying a bit, Thomas Friedman details a case study of Denmark's energy strategy, which has led them to be completely independent from the Middle East's petroleum.

Denmark accomplished this through government intervention in setting the stage for making innovation in the energy field competitive, and then let their domestic entrepreneurs and markets take off. This has also positively affected their unemployment rate as Denmark is becoming a front runner in alternative energy technology and is turning it's market view towards the rest of the world.

Denmark is significantly smaller than the US, China, India, and many other of the top petroleum importers, but still, if they can do it, there's no reason others can't.