The first 18 years of my life was spent in Hawaii.  Just before starting college, I flew to stay with my brother in Oxnard to work for the summer at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory in Port Hueneme, California.  Oxnard is 60 miles north of Los Angeles. In September of 1958 my brother drove me to the Stanford Campus, located about 35 miles south of San Francisco.  I recall crossing from the west side to the East Bay area on Friday nights to the Garden of Allah, to dance and see entertainers like Bobby Preston and Marty Robbins.  After I graduated in 1962, over the past 62 years, I've returned to San Francisco at least 50 times. Mind you, I don't really like SFO weather.  It's almost always too cold for me.  Something enchanting about the fog, which comes and goes.  But bicycling to class at 7:30AM in the winter was not comfortable.  Stanford is a bit warmer than SFO, but still much too cold in the winter.  In fact, I remember on  21...

I've lived a life where I have been able to professionally dabble in pure fantasies. Three years with the U.S. Senate working on energy and the environmental legislation.  I drafted the bill that created the national hydrogen program in 1979.  Worked on laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ( SETI ) at the NASA Ames Research Center.   I had a full career in renewable energy, directing the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii and co-founding the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research. Here is a  nine-year old posting providing some details on my experience with fusion .  in the mid-1970's I remember having an apartment adjacent to Wente Brothers, and watching the Watergate hearings.  That was almost half a century ago.  At the  end of 2022 : Lawrence Livermore first achieved a net energy gain in a fusion experiment using lasers. That...

 Much of the following comes from  The American Energy Society . To begin. Retrospective: 5 hot topics from 5 years ago (2018) 1. The US surpasses Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world's largest oil producer.   2. Coal barely holds on as top source for generated electricity in the US (the last year).   3. President Trump makes clear that the US opposes the development of the proposed Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.   4. President Trump's cabinet instability (Pruitt resigns and Wheeler takes over as Director of the EPA, US Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke fights to save his job, etc.)   5. Arnold Schwarzenegger — f ormer Terminator and California governor — sues the oil and gas industry for "First Degree Murder."  ******************************************** 2023 : January :  The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab initiates a fusion reaction that produces more energy than it took to ig...