While podcasts are great to listen to, they often need to be taken with a grain of salt as personal opinions and bias are widespread in popular culture. For this week, I have attached a spotify podcast series episode called “Make Me Smart”. The hosts, Kai and Molly, are very smart people and have a background to back up many of their facts and opinions. Alas, this is a talk show, so their content lacks citations and therefore should not be used in any official argumentation unless further research is done on the claims. Only one person/view can be right, so while they are both very smart individuals, their opposing views on certain topics show that someone has to be wrong to some degree. This podcast is specifically about the future of clean/renewable energy and the challenges that it will have to overcome, and directly relates to my sustainable technology major.

Hawken, Paul. Drawdown: the Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Roll Back Global Warming. Penguin Books, 2018.

This book, spearheaded by Paul Hawken, is a comprehensive study on sustainable technologies and practices and their potential impact on the world around us. Many scientists contributed to the work, and includes sustainable sources from across the board, including the environmental benefits of having higher educated women, globally. In my field of sustainable technology, direct and indirect consequences can make gathering information about the benefits of a certain technology tough, as the information tends to be very vague. This book, “Drawdown”, is important to me because it gives an in depth look at so many scenarios and possibilities to reduce green house gas emissions, which is a large part of my major. The creation of comprehensive works such as this one allow people new to a subject to be able to look at the information holistically.

What is your major or chosen field and what work that is being done in that field is exciting or inspiring to you?

My major is sustainable technology, which is pretty unique but has a few different specialization tracks and options within it. I have found an interest on electricity/energy storage, specifically energy storage not using electro-chemical batteries. There is a growing need for energy storage on the electrical grid in order to allow higher penetrations of wind and solar energy, which are intermittent and electricity production is variable, unlike coal or nuclear power. Short-term energy storage for improved frequency regulation and electricity ramping is another type of energy storage that often goes overlooked. Over the past decade, many creative ways to store and release electricity have been applied and tested, showing the true possibilities for efficient and clean energy.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.