I recently discovered a cool site that highlights solar and wind energy using buildings called “MetaEfficient.com”:http://www.metaefficient.com/. Just looking through their archives I’ve found a lot of fascinating buildings and building technologies. For example, the above building is Sanyo’s “Solar Ark”:, a 315 meter long building incorporating 5,046 individual solar panels in central Japan. There’s also a “solar skyscraper”:http://www.cis.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?cid=1116834043894&pagename=CoopBank/Page/tplBlank&c=Page in Manchester that’s worth looking at if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
If you happen to be building yourself, you might also want to look at these “solar tiles”:http://www.sunpowercorp.com/homebuilders/suntile.html or this “domestic turbine”:http://www.mariah-power.com/.
Tag Archives: environment
Sustainable paper products
Apparently the big brands in disposable paper products are not environmentally responsible. While this isn’t much of a surprise to me, it has been to some of the people I’ve told, so up on the site it goes. As usual, Greenpeace has done all the work and put together “Kleercut.net”:http://kleercut.net/en/, a site dedicated to the fight for sustainable paper products. It turns out that Kimberly-Clark, the owner of the Kleenex brand, has a habit of not using recycled paper and instead getting their pulp from ancient-growth forests. Other brands to avoid (unless you for some reason hate the world) are Kleenex, Scott, Scottbrand, Cottonelle, and Viva.
Feeling guilty about going through boxes and boxes of Kleenex this past winter? Buy a “Greenpeace hankie”:http://www.strategicprofitsinc.com/mastercart/Cart/product_details.php?mid=685968961088617609&product_id=454502751098677958.
First aquanaut emerges from two weeks of underwater living
Lloyd Godson, an Australian marine biologist with the “BioSUB project”:http://www.biosub.com.au/ has been living underwater for two weeks. His home was this “underwater room”:http://www.biosub.com.au/Down%20under.htm fully-equipped with internet access, an electricity-generating exercise bike and an algae farm. Some of the stuff on board was pretty innovative, including the “‘biocoil'”:http://advbio.cascadeschools.org/Biocoil.html photosynthetic bioreactor developed by a high school in Idaho. From what I can gather, the point of the experiment was to show how people can create sustainable ecosystems underwater and live without bringing all their gases/needs with them. Now this is me thinking out loud, but could this be the key to living in similarly hostile environments like space?
There are a lot of interesting things to learn about this, so start out by reading this “TreeHugger post”:http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/man_underwater.php about the project before it started and “this one”:http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/man_resurfaces.php about the end of it. There’s also this “short report”:http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200704/s1900699.htm from ABC Australia.
Another problem with Ethanol
I’ve never been a big fan of ethanol-fueled cars because our system of growing commodity corn, the source of all ethanol, is so drenched in petroleum-based fertilizers and herbicides that I don’t think it actually changes our dependence on oil. As it turns out, there are other reasons to not immediately embrace ethanol, it makes our air less clean. According to a recent study out of Stanford, the air pollution effects of ethanol vs. gasoline emissions are actually worse and would cause more smog-related illnesses and deaths. There’s more on this “here”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070418/ap_on_he_me/ethanol_health_risks;_ylt=AlksYcHSz0fQmP.hn.zzG7Ws0NUE or you can just read the report (“PDF”:http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_on_he_me/storytext/ethanol_health_risks/22684790/SIG=121piiffo/*http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/E85PaperEST0207.pdf).
Ontario bans incandescent bulbs
They won’t be completely eliminated until 2012, but the legislation promises to save Ontarians six million megawatt hours per year, enough power to run 600,000 homes. It looks like the future will be full of CFLs, and no, I don’t mean the “Canadian Football League”:http://www.cfl.ca/.
More about the move (and a good look at the alternatives to incandescent bulbs) at “treehugger”:http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/ontario_governm.php and a more detailed/boring “piece”:http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/April2007/18/c6405.html at Canada Newswire.
Floating nuclear reactor built by Russians
In a move straight out of a bad James Bond plot (is there another kind?) Russia is building is building a nuclear power plant on a free-floating ship. Developed to power far-off Siberian ports and shipyards, this reactor-ship is the first of seven planned. There’s probably a lot to say about the ludicrous nature of putting a nuclear power generator on a boat, but I’ll leave that to you. For now, here’s a picture:
Here’s a “BBC article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6562925.stm for more information
Betting on global warming
If there’s something out there to bet on, people will. That seems to be the principle behind the latest round of bets being taken at gambling site, “BetUS.com”:http://www.betus.com/. It seems that online gamblers have taken to betting on what the effects of global warming will be. The consensus: Manhattan will be underwater by 2012. Other interesting stats to note: BetUS gives the odds of Capes Henry and Hatteras being part of the ocean floor by 2015 at 200- and 300-to-1 respectively.
Go on and place a bet, global warming might just be good for someone yet. Thanks to “Yahoo! News”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070413/ap_on_fe_st/odds_global_warming_bets for the lead on the story. The picture is from “The Day After Tomorrow”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262/.
Colin Beavan, the no impact man
Striving to neutralize their carbon impact on the world, author Colin Beavan and his family are going completely no impact for a whole year. That is to say that living in Manhattan, this family is using no paper, no razors, nothing to be thrown away. They’re also not buying anything in packaging, composting their waste (hard to do in a 750 sq ft apartment), and walking everywhere. Check out this amazing experiment at Colin’s “blog”:http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/.
Here’s a recent interview of Beavan on the Colbert Report:
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Barcelona goes bikes
Following successful programs in Amsterdam and Copenhagen (along with less successful programs elsewhere) Barcelona is investing in bicycles. The program, called Bicing, will consist of 200 (a goal of 1,500 knock on wood) bikes, accessed by a membership card at one of 14 dedicated racks. The group’s website offers online tracking of the bikes which should help with distribution. Free for the first half hour, the Barcelona system should be able to escape the main problem with free bike programs, accountability, by using membership cards linked to real money. If you can read Spanish, or Catalan for that matter, head over to “bicing.com”:http://bicing.com and learn more about it.
These sorts of community bike projects are an especially dear interest of mine because my first endeavor into public life was an effort at creating a “free bike” system at my “university”:http://uiuc.edu/. It didn’t work out, but the effort lives on in a bike co-op that is still running, “The Bike Project”:http://thebikeproject.org/. Thanks to “this article”:http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006444.html from “World Changing”:http://www.worldchanging.com/ for keeping me up to date.
Virgin Earth Challenge
http://duenos.net/article/123/ a couple of days ago about the X Prize for auto efficiency, I bring you the Virgin Earth Challenge. Launched in February, 2007 Challenge prize of $25m will go to ??"whoever can demonstrate to the judges' satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate."??
Just like the X Prize, I hope this will provide the necessary impetus to get innovators and entrepreneurs to take the task of dealing with global warming seriously. For more about the competition, check out "the website":http://www.virginearth.com/.