The Recovery Scenario is more than just wishful thinking. Rather,
it's an irrational, optimistic belief in fundamental human
sanity.
The trend lines, for those who are paying attention, are quite
bleak. But the ApocoDocs remember that Lake Erie was declared
dead from pollution back in the 70s, yet managed to recover. So
we have hope that we haven't tipped past the tipping point in the
natural world, and that humankind can wake up and repair the
damage we've done. Or, if we have indeed passed some tipping point,
we can move quickly enough to mitigate the impending harm.
Recovery will require sacrifice. This will be difficult for the
generations spoiled by the last fifty years of cheap energy,
bountiful resources, and seemingly limitless capacity for
economic growth. Like a spoiled boy stomping his little foot,
they will believe that they have the natural right to commute
alone in SUVs, the right to convenience at the expense of nature,
the right to dispose of anything they no longer want, the right
to eat fresh fruit in January. Perhaps like that spoiled boy, we
can grow up, and realize that there are limits.
Recovery will require a societal awakening. We need to become
disgusted with ourselves, and embarrassed by what we've done. We
must identify the polluters, and demand they stop -- recognizing
that consumer prices will rise. We will need to find social
systems and economic rewards to motivating right action, and
disregard namecalling regarding "tree huggers" and
"eco-nazis." We must
recognize that occasional terrorist outbreaks are nothing
compared to the terror of environmental collapse.
Recovery will require political action. Small farms should get
more tax benefits than factory farms, penalties for waste must be
devised, carbon taxes must continue to be developed. Mostly, it
will require a common vision that extends beyond the next
political cycle.
Recovery will require scientific action. We must listen to
experts, even if it hurts. It will require encouraging engineers
to develop small-scale and large-scale solutions. It will require
the wealthy world to provide affordable options to the poor
world, so they don't repeat our mistakes.
Above all, recovery will require recognition -- that we all face
up to what we've done, what we're doing, and what will happen if
we don't change. This may be the most difficult task ahead of us.
We are hypothesizing, over the next ten years, the following
scenario:
- Leaders are elected who are willing to risk their offices to
save humanity.
- Small-scale farming, even backyard gardening, is encouraged by
tax benefits and small-business loans
- Small-scale energy options -- backyard wind and solar power --
are similarly encouraged
- The EPA is given power to meaningfully penalize toxic
effluviant
- Genetically modified crops are labeled as such
- Over five years, federal gasoline taxes rise to $5/gallon, to
be used for environmental reparations
- Telecommuting replaces commuting for most white-collar jobs
- Internet/cellphone systems are developed to allow share-a-ride,
bring-the-groceries, and other means of making any drive serve
multiple purposes
- Intense efforts are initiated, regardless of the cost, to scrub
CO2
from coal-fired plants
- An increase in vegetarian diets decreases the demand for beef
- Rainforest logging is stopped worldwide, via support from the
developed nations
- Local, community-based systems for sharing large tools,
tillers, canoes, and more, decreases idle consumption
- Recycling increases, but more importantly, biodegradable
materials are used at the consumer level: no more plastic sacks,
no more plastic plates, no more plastic cups
- A toxin tax is developed, to build the "true cost" of poisoning
the world into the economy
- Public health systems worldwide integrate to recognize and
respond to viral and bacterial outbreaks
- We acknowledge that we have to pay, for the next fifty years,
for the environmental and economic debt accumulated during the
wild party of the last fifty years.
If we can make these, and other changes, then we can help repair
the world. The enemies of recovery are those who have a vested
interest in maintaining the current, wasteful, toxic,
unsustainable system. These enemies have trillions of dollars of
investment in that system, and will struggle mightily -- as they
did on climate warming for the last thirty years -- to confuse
the issue, ridicule the opposition, lobby state and federal
politicians, and avoid responsibility.
We must not let them.
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| Recent Recovery News |
Obama veers from Bush's environmental course
Even before George W. Bush can settle into his new house in Dallas, his legacy on the environment is being dismantled by his replacement in the White House. In less than two months, President Obama has put on hold Bush's plans for power-plant pollution, offshore oil drilling, nuclear waste storage and endangered species.
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Grass-Roots Uprising Against River Dam Challenges Tokyo
First, the farmers objected to an ambitious dam project proposed by the government, saying they did not need irrigation water from the reservoir. Then the commercial fishermen complained that fish would disappear if the Kawabe River's twisting torrents were blocked. Environmentalists worried about losing the river's scenic gorges. Soon, half of this city's 34,000 residents had signed a petition opposing the $3.6 billion project. In September, this rare grassroots uprising scored an even rarer victory when the governor of Kumamoto prefecture, a mountainous area of southern Japan, formally asked Tokyo to suspend construction. The Construction Ministry agreed, temporarily halting an undertaking that had already relocated a half-dozen small villages, though work on the dam itself had not started.
The suspension grabbed national headlines as one of the first times a local governor had succeeded in blocking a megaproject being built by the central government.
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U.S. Climate Official Urges Congress To Curb Greenhouse-Gas Emissions
The top U.S. negotiator of international climate-change agreements urged Congress to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions in advance of an international summit this December, saying it would give other countries "a powerful signal" to cut their own emissions.
"It's been a long time now that countries have been looking to the U.S. to lead," Todd Stern, President Barack Obama's special envoy for climate change, said in response to questions from audience members after a speech at a conference on global warming. Mr. Stern acknowledged that passage of climate-change legislation before December would be "an extremely tall order," but added that "nothing would give a more powerful signal to other countries than to see a significant, major, mandatory plan" from the U.S. before the start of international talks that are intended to forge a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed many industrialized nations to cutting their emissions.
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Going green: Entire Swedish city switches to biofuels to become environmentally friendly
KALMAR, Sweden -- Though a fraction of Chicago's size, this industrial city in southeast Sweden has plenty of similarities with it, including a long, snowy winter and a football team the town's crazy about.
One thing is dramatically different about Kalmar, however: It is on the verge of eliminating the use of fossil fuels, for good, and with minimal effect on its standard of living.
The city of 60,000—and its surrounding 12-town region, with a quarter-million people—has traded in most of its oil, gas and electric furnaces for community "district heat," produced at plants that burn sawdust and wood waste left by timber companies. Hydropower, nuclear power and windmills now provide more than 90 percent of the region's electricity.... Just as important, the switch from oil and gas is helping slash fuel bills and preserve jobs in a worldwide economic downturn. And despite dramatic drops in fossil fuel consumption, residents say nobody has been forced to give up the car or huddle around the dining table wearing three sweaters to stay warm.
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Can a 'smart grid' turn us on to energy efficiency?
... According to research sponsored by the U.S. Government, improving the efficiency of the national electricity grid by 5 percent would be the equivalent of eliminating the fuel use and carbon emissions of 53 million cars.
For years environmentalists have been talking up the idea of a "smart grid" -- an electricity distribution system that uses digital technology to eliminate waste and improve reliability -- as a way of achieving this.
Advocates of a "smart grid" also say that it would open up new markets for large and small scale alternative energy producers by decentralizing generation.
"It would give consumers the potential to have a much more complex relationship with their energy supplier," says John Loughhead, Executive Director of the United Kingdom Energy Research Center.
"Essentially, with a smart grid, traffic goes both ways. If you wanted to install some kind of micro-generation facility in your home, you could use it to sell to the grid and get money back."
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Obama's Backing Raises Hopes for Climate Pact
Until recently, the idea that the world’s most powerful nations might come together to tackle global warming seemed an environmentalist's pipe dream. The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, was widely viewed as badly flawed. Many countries that signed the accord lagged far behind their targets in curbing carbon dioxide emissions. The United States refused even to ratify it. And the treaty gave a pass to major emitters in the developing world like China and India.
But within weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama's chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty -- to be signed in Copenhagen in December -- "in a robust way."
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Obama's Greenhouse Gas Gamble
In proposing mandatory caps on the greenhouse gases linked to global warming and a system for auctioning permits to companies that emit them, President Obama is taking on a huge political and economic challenge.
Business lobbies and many Republicans raised loud objections to the cap-and-trade program Mr. Obama proposed as part of his budget this week, saying the plan amounted to a gigantic and permanent tax on oil, electricity and manufactured goods, a shock they said the country could not handle during economic distress.... "Let’s just be honest and call it a carbon tax that will increase taxes on all Americans who drive a car, who have a job, who turn on a light switch, pure and simple," said John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader. "And if you look at this whole budget plan, they use this carbon tax as a way to fund all of their big government ideas." ... "It's a coal state stickup," ...
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Solar Energy Performance With Plastic Solar Cells Improved With New Method
The University of Alberta and the National Research Council's National Institute (NINT) for Nanotechnology have engineered an approach that is leading to improved performance of plastic solar cells (hybrid organic solar cells). The development of inexpensive, mass-produced plastic solar panels is a goal of intense interest for many of the world's scientists and engineers because of the high cost and shortage of the ultra-high purity silicon and other materials normally required.... "[A metaphor might be] a clubhouse sandwich, with many different layers. One layer absorbs the light, another helps to generate the electricity, and others help to draw the electricity out of the device. Normally, the layers don't stick well, and so the electricity ends up stuck and never gets out, leading to inefficient devices. We are working on the mayonnaise, the mustard, the butter and other 'special sauces' that bring the sandwich together, and make each of the layers work together. That makes a better sandwich, and makes a better solar cell, in our case".... After two years of research, these U of A and NINT scientists have, by only working on one part of the sandwich, seen improvements of about 30 per cent in the efficiency of the working model.... The team estimates it will be five to seven years before plastic solar panels will be mass produced but Buriak adds that when it happens solar energy will be available to everyone. She says the next generation of solar technology belongs to plastic.
"Plastic solar cell material will be made cheaply and quickly and in massive quantities by ink jet-like printers."
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Aquamarine Power touts 'biggest deal in the history of marine energy'
Fresh from securing "the biggest deal in the history of marine energy" with Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), wave and tidal power specialist Aquamarine Power is in talks to agree similar supply deals with utilities in Ireland and Portugal.
Earlier this week, the company signed a major alliance with SSE's renewables division Airtricity that could see the developer of tidal and wave energy systems provide the company with up to one gigawatt of marine energy by 2020.
Under the terms of the deal, the two companies will launch a 50:50 joint venture that will work to gain consent for wave and tidal energy sites in the UK and Ireland.
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RIP -- rest in (freeze-dried) pieces
BODIES could be freeze-dried and shattered into dust to save space and help the environment, under plans being considered by a Scottish local authority.
East Lothian Council thinks the technique, invented in Sweden, could help ease cemetery congestion, while cutting emissions from cremations.
The process would involve freezing the dead body to -18C before submerging it in liquid nitrogen.
This would make the body so brittle it would disintegrate into dust when a vibration was passed through it... The process, known as promession, is considered more environmentally friendly than cremation, largely because it avoids the mercury pollution created by burning fillings in teeth and other metal objects in the body, such as replacement joints or surgical implants.
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First Solar reaches 'dollar per watt milestone'
The company said that during the fourth quarter of last year, the manufacturing cost for its solar modules stood at 98 cents per watt, taking it below the $1 per watt mark for the first time.... First Solar said it was confident that plans to more than double its production capacity through 2009 to more than one gigawatt would allow it to reduce costs further to a point where energy from solar panels can undercut that from natural gas and coal.
According to the company, it has already reduced costs from more than $3 a watt in 2004 to less than $1 a watt now and there is every indication that the trend will continue as production capacity increases.
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Peptides-on-demand: McGill researcher's radical new green chemistry makes the impossible possible
Fast and simple 'enabling technology' being offered to the world on open basis... McGill University chemistry professor Chao-Jun (C.J.) Li is known as one of the world leading pioneers in green chemistry, an entirely new approach to the science which eschews the use of toxic, petrochemical-based solvents in favour of basic substances like water and new ways of making molecules.
The environmental benefits of the green approach are obvious and significant, but following the road less travelled is also paying off in purely scientific terms. With these alternative methods, Li and his colleagues have discovered an entirely new way of synthesizing peptides using simple reagents, a process that would be impossible in classical chemistry.... "This is really an enabling new technology," he added, "and since McGill has decided not to patent it, we're making our method available to everyone. We are paying the journal's open access fee, so anyone in the world can access the paper."
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Chicago touts environmental efforts
Plants cool 3 million square feet of rooftops throughout the city. Wind, hydropower and biofuels provide one-fifth of its energy. And last year, the mayor announced one of the country's most ambitious plans to slash greenhouse-gas emissions.
So when Chicago promises to host the greenest Summer Olympics ever if it's awarded the 2016 games, organizers say it's not a gimmick. It's an extension of efforts that have been transforming this former Rust Belt city for years.
"We've got a real opportunity to take the best aspects of our city, the parks, the lakefront and the environmentalism and bring a real asset to the table," Chicago 2016 spokesman Patrick Sandusky said. "It's certainly one of the great strengths of the city of Chicago that we have to offer."
In Chicago's official Olympic bid book, released earlier this month, organizers tout a low-carbon "blue-green" event, with most venues along Lake Michigan, which is lined with parks, and a focus on environmentalism. Regardless of whether Chicago gets the Olympics, Mayor Richard M. Daley says he'll continue to focus on a goal he set a long time ago: to make his city the greenest in the United States.
"When I started planting trees they thought it was a waste of money," Daley said during an interview at his City Hall office. "We started planting a green roof. They said, 'Oh, this is silly. What are we doing that for?'"
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Antibodies Offer a New Path for Fighting Flu
In a discovery that could radically change how the world fights influenza, researchers have engineered antibodies that protect against many strains of the virus, including even the 1918 Spanish flu and the H5N1 bird flu. The discovery, experts said, could lead to the development of a flu vaccine that would not have to be changed yearly. And the antibodies already developed can be injected as a treatment, going after the virus in ways that drugs like Tamiflu do not.
Clinical trials to prove that the antibodies are safe in humans could begin within three years, a researcher estimated.... "It's not yet at the point of practicality, but the concept is really quite interesting."
The work is so promising that Dr. Fauci's institute will offer the researchers grants and access to its ferrets, which can catch human flu.
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The Short List: The Most Effective Actions U.S. Households Can Take to Curb Climate Change
U.S. households account for about 38 percent of national carbon emissions through their direct actions, a level of emissions greater than that of any entire country except China and larger than the entire U.S. industrial sector. By changing their selection and use of household and motor vehicle technologies, without waiting for new technologies to appear, making major economic sacrifices, or losing a sense of well-being, households can reduce energy consumption by almost 30 percent -- about 11 percent of total U.S. consumption.... Table 3 below, based on Table 2, prioritizes actions in a few simple categories. It stands in contrast to common laundry lists by providing a short, prioritized, accurate, accessible, and actionable list of the most effective household actions to help limit climate change.
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Greenest Nation
This is a trick question. What big country is, by most measures, greener than Japan and Germany and produces more geothermal energy than all of Europe combined? It might help to know that this nation is also a pioneer in environmental stewardship, having passed many of the world's toughest regulations on vehicle emissions, energy efficiency and nature conservation.... California, with its 37 million people, emits 20 percent less CO2 per dollar of GDP than Germany. It generates 24 percent of its electrical power from renewable fuels like wind and solar, compared with only 15 percent in Germany and 11 percent in Japan. It also has the world's largest solar-power plant (550 megawatts in the Mojave Desert), the largest wind farm (7,000 turbines at Altamont Pass) and the most powerful geothermal installation (750 megawatts at The Geysers north of San Francisco). Although California isn't immune to the economic crisis -- its finances are on the brink of collapse, which could translate into growing support for those who argue that green measures cost jobs -- its green accomplishments put it at the head of the pack. If California were a country, its economy would rank as the world's 10th largest and could lay claim to be one of the world's greenest.
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Investors put Chevron on 'climate watch'
A group of activist investors, including the giant California State Teachers' Retirement System, on Wednesday placed Chevron Corp. and eight other companies on a "climate watch list" of corporations that aren't adequately addressing global warming. The investors want the companies to pay more attention to how their operations are affecting, and will be affected by, climate change.
The investors placed San Ramon's Chevron on the list because of its investments in Canadian oil sands. Squeezing petroleum from the sand releases more greenhouse gas emissions than ordinary oil production does.
A Chevron spokesman on Wednesday did not address the sand issue but noted that Chevron has its own climate change action plan and has a subsidiary that promotes energy efficiency and renewable power.
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E.P.A. Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide
The decision, which most likely would play out in stages over a period of months, would have a profound impact on transportation, manufacturing costs and how utilities generate power. It could accelerate the progress of energy and climate change legislation in Congress and form a basis for the United States' negotiating position at United Nations climate talks set for December in Copenhagen.... "We here know how momentous that decision could be," Ms. Jackson said. "We have to lay out a road map."
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Abandon hope
Do you "hope" that everyone will see the light and start living more sustainably to save the environment? If so, you may be doing more harm than good.... For decades, say Vucetich and Nelson, we have been hammered by the ceaseless thunder of messages predicting imminent environmental cataclysm: global climate change, air and water pollution, destruction of wildlife habitat, holes in the ozone. The response of environmentalists—from Al Gore to Jane Goodall—to this persistent message of hopelessness has focused on the need to remain hopeful.
But hope may actually be counter-productive, Vucetich and Nelson suggest. "I have little reason to live sustainably if the only reason to do so is to hope for a sustainable future, because every other message I receive suggests that disaster is guaranteed," they explain.
People are hearing radically contradictory messages:
- Scientists present evidence that profound environmental disaster is imminent.
- It is urgent to live up to an extremely high standard of sustainable living.
- The reason to live sustainably is that doing so gives hope for averting disaster.
- Yet disaster is inevitable....
"Instead of hope, we need to provide young people with reasons to live sustainably that are rational and effective," they say. "We need to lift up examples of sustainable living motivated by virtue more than by a dubious belief that such actions will avert environmental disaster."
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Customising clouds to stop global warming
Stephen Salter, professor of engineering design at the University Edinburgh, and Professor John Latham, from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, have been using Salt Flares to test if it is possible to seed or even create Marine Stratocumulus Clouds.
These clouds, which are common, low-flying clouds, could help reflect the suns rays and therefore combat global warming.
Prof Salter said: "We need to make them reflect about 10 per cent more than they are reflecting now."
Prof Latham added: "We’ve got the most massive global problem that we’ve ever had, so we’ve got to think big."
The flares will spray up salt water into the clouds. When the particles rise into a cloud they redistribute the moisture, increasing its reflectivity.
As a result the cloud bounces more sunlight back into space.
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Hunt begins for world's most polluted places
Researchers will fan out across more than 80 developing countries beginning this month to hunt out and assess many of the world's dirtiest industrial waste sites.
The New York-based nonprofit Blacksmith Institute is training the researchers from local semi-government agencies, universities and nonprofit groups in the countries to create a database of the sites called the Global Inventory Project.... the inventory is a "first step" to help governments and international organizations prioritize the clean up of waste sites that pose health threats to people including cancer risks to adults and learning disability risks to children. Asthma and other respiratory ailments are other problems millions of locals suffer at sites like abandoned metal mines in Africa and factories that made weapons or industrial chemicals in former Soviet Union states.
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Cleaning the atmosphere of carbon: African forests out of balance
"If you assume that these forests should be in equilibrium, then the best way to explain why trees are growing bigger is anthropogenic global change -- the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could essentially be acting as fertilizer." says Muller-Landau, "But it's also possible that tropical forests are still growing back following past clearing or fire or other disturbance. Given increasing evidence that tropical forests have a long history of human occupation, recovery from past disturbance is almost certainly part of the reason these forests are taking up carbon today."
Muller-Landau, who directs a project to monitor carbon budgets in forest study sites worldwide as part of the Smithsonian's Center for Tropical Forest Science and the HSBC Climate Partnership, advises that this newfound sink shouldn't be taken for granted, or presumed to continue indefinitely. "While we still can't explain exactly what is behind this carbon sink, one thing we know for sure is that it can't be a sink forever. Trees and forests just can't keep getting bigger. Tropical forests are buying us a bit more time right now, but we can't count on them to continue to offset our carbon emissions in the future."
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Manure could power two million homes
According to Defra, the UK produces more than 100 million tonnes of organic material per year that could be used to produce biogas, 90 million tonnes of which comes from manure and slurry.
The National Farmers' Union has a target to have 1,000 on-farm anaerobic digestion (AD) plants by 2020, which will power farms and produce fertilisers as a by-product of the process.
Speaking at the NFU conference in Birmingham today, Farming and Environment Minister Jane Kennedy is expected to say: "We're producing more organic waste in this country than we can handle, over 12 million tonnes of food waste a year -- and farmers know too well the challenges of managing manure and slurry.
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Beaver sighted in Detroit River; first in 75 years
DETROIT – Wildlife officials are celebrating the sighting of a beaver in the Detroit River for the first time in decades, signaling that efforts to clean up the waterway are paying off.
The Detroit Free Press reports that a beaver lodge has been discovered in an intake canal at a Detroit Edison riverfront plant. Officials believe the beaver spotted by the utility's motion-sensitive camera marks the animal's return to the river for the first time in at least 75 years.
Photos and video were taken in November, but Detroit Edison didn't want to release them until they could ensure the animal's safety.
John Hartig, Detroit River refuge manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says the cleanup along the river has also brought back sturgeons, peregrine falcons and other species.
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The Stimulus Goes Green
The conference bill's near-final numbers contain $11 billion for the creation of a smart energy grid; $8.4 billion for public transit; $6.3 billion for state and local energy efficiency grants; $6 billion for the cleanup of contaminated Department of Defense sites; $4.5 billion to green federal buildings; and $1.2 billion for the EPA's cleanup programs. Loan guarantees for nuclear and so-called clean coal technology development -- included in the Senate bill -- were cut. Tax credit programs, incentivizing research and investment in clean renewable energy, will add further to the bill's green tally.
"This is unbelievable," says Josh Dorner, a spokesman for Sierra Club. "This is an unprecedented investment in building a clean energy economy. The Clinton Global Initiative, about a year or so ago, their big challenge was to get spending on energy efficiency to reach $1.5 billion, total, in all of America. And this bill, just on federal buildings, has $4.5 billion. It's just kind of sinking in that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and Congress and President Obama really stepped up to the plate."
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Microsoft takes carbon reporting to the mainstream
In contrast, Microsoft is going after the mainstream.... Microsoft's Dynamics AX 2009 business application suite -- to which it has just added a free Environmental Sustainability Dashboard capable of providing execs with access to data on their company's fuel consumption, energy use and carbon footprint, amongst other performance indicators -- is aimed squarely at midmarket firms... And once all executives, regardless of their company's size, know how much carbon their organisation is emitting they are in the perfect position to start doing something about it.
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Bringing Wind Turbines to Ordinary Rooftops
WIND turbines typically spin from tall towers on hills and plains. But in these green times, some companies hope smaller turbines will soon rise above a more domestic spot: homes and garages. The rooftop turbines send the electricity they generate straight on to the home's circuit box. Then owners in a suitably wind-swept location can watch the needle on their electricity meter turn backward instead of forward, reducing their utility bills while using a renewable resource.
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Biologist discusses sacred nature of sustainability
Like all religious traditions, religious naturalism is anchored in a cosmological narrative, a set of stories accounting how the earth and its inhabitants came to be.
While conventional religions are generally based on older cosmological narratives such as those found in the Old and New Testaments, religious naturalism is based on a much more recent narrative.... She explains, "In more and more mainstream religions, you're seeing an increased emphasis on the earth and its creatures as sacred." This paradigm shift is due, at least in part, to a growing awareness that the old stories might not be sufficient to frame an ethic that alters the environment's current trajectory. She suggests that the new story offers a basis for understanding what a sustainable trajectory might look like.
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Sea sponge shows promise as superbug antidote
CHICAGO (Reuters) -- A compound from a sea sponge was able to reverse antibiotic resistance in several strains of bacteria, making once-resistant strains succumb to readily available antibiotics, U.S. researchers said on Friday.
"We can resensitize these pathogenic bacteria to standard, current-generation antibiotics," said Peter Moeller of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Hollings Marine Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina.
Drug-resistant bacteria are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, marked by the rise of superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus, or MRSA. Such infections kill about 19,000 people a year in the United States.
Moeller, who is working with researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and North Carolina State University, said the team noticed a sponge thriving in what was an otherwise dead coral reef.
"It begged the question how is it surviving when everything else is dying?" Moeller told reporters at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago. "This opened up a whole new arena for us."
The researchers began chopping the sponge into smaller and smaller bits to isolate the properties that helped the sponge thrive in hostile marine conditions.
The team found that these bits of sponge were able to repel bacterial biofilms -- a slimy substance bacteria form to help stick to surfaces.
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Big Science Role Is Seen in Global Warming Cure
WASHINGTON -- Steven Chu, the new secretary of energy, said Wednesday that solving the world�s energy and environment problems would require Nobel-level breakthroughs in three areas: electric batteries, solar power and the development of new crops that can be turned into fuel....Dr. Chu said a "revolution" in science and technology would be required if the world is to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.
Solar technology, he said, will have to get five times better than it is today, and scientists will need to find new types of plants that require little energy to grow and that can be converted to clean and cheap alternatives to fossil fuels.
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Eating less meat could cut climate costs
Cutting back on beefburgers and bacon could wipe $20 trillion off the cost of fighting climate change. That's the dramatic conclusion of a study that totted up the economic costs of modern meat-heavy diets.
The researchers involved say that reducing our intake of beef and pork would lead to the creation of a huge new carbon sink, as vegetation would thrive on unused farmland.
The model takes into account farmland that is used to grow extra food to make up for the lost meat, but that requires less area, so some will be abandoned. Millions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, would also be saved every year due to reduced emissions from farms.
These impacts would lessen the need for expensive carbon-saving technologies, such as "clean coal" power plants, and so save huge sums, say Elke Stehfest of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and colleagues.
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Can algae save the world - again?
Can algae save the world again? The microscopic green plants cleaned up the earth's atmosphere millions of years ago and scientists hope they can do it now by helping remove greenhouse gases and create new oil reserves.
In the distant past, algae helped turn the earth's then inhospitable atmosphere into one that could support modern life through photosynthesis, which plants use to turn carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugars and oxygen.
Some of the algae sank to sea or lake beds and slowly became oil. "All we're doing is turning the clock back," says Steve Skill, a biochemist at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
"Nature has done this many millions of years ago in producing the crude oil we're burning today. So as far as nature is concerned this is nothing new," he said.
The race is now on to find economic ways to turn algae, one of the planet's oldest life forms, into vegetable oil that can be made into biodiesel, jet fuel, other fuels and plastic products.
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New antibiotics would silence bugs, not kill them
In future, the most effective antibiotics might be those that don't kill any bacteria. Instead the drugs will simply prevent the bacteria from talking with one another.
Drug-resistant bugs are winning the war against standard antibiotics as they evolve resistance to even the most lethal drugs. It happens because a dose of antibiotics strongly selects for resistance by killing the most susceptible bacteria first.
If, however, researchers can identify antibiotics that neutralise dangerous bacteria without killing them, the pressure to evolve resistance can be reduced. One way to do that is to target the constant stream of chatter that passes between bacteria as molecular signals.... Individual bacteria monitor the concentration of signalling molecules, and when it reaches a certain level, change their behaviour. That concentration provides a rough indication of when the number of cells in a particular population has reached a certain critical mass - known as a quorum.
When a quorum is reached, pathogenic bacteria shift from a benign state and begin attacking the host by secreting toxins.
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Urbanisation threatens food security
Since 2001 the area under crops has dropped from more than 4.3 million ha to 4.13 million ha, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
In 2007 alone, the area under rice shrank by 125,000 ha, as authorities tried to restructure crop patterns and develop the services and industrial sectors and urban sprawl overran surrounding areas.
Farmlands are forecast to continue shrinking as they are appropriated for non-agricultural purposes.
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Tories propose 'biocredits' to put cash value on damage to habitats and species
Under radical new Conservative proposals to stop biodiversity loss in the UK, all would be given a cash value.
The scheme is designed to halt the decline of hundreds of habitats and species by assigning a cost to be paid by proposed development schemes that would lead to their destruction. The damage done by a project would be given a cash value and developers asked to compensate for that damage by investing an equivalent amount in projects to protect or improve biodiversity at another location.
The plan being put forward by the new Conservative shadow environment secretary, Nick Herbert, is modelled on similar "bio-credits" initiatives, including in the US, Malaysia and Australia, which have created markets in biodiversity worth tens of millions of pounds a year.
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Emergency Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen to be held in March
Climate change scientists are to hold an emergency summit in Copenhagen next month to collate the latest findings in climate science and step up pressure on the UN negotiating process to ensure any deal agreed later this year is informed by the scientific realities of global warming.
The International Scientific Congress on Climate Change will run from 10-12 March and is being organised by the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), including the University of Copenhagen, Yale, UC Berkeley, Tokyo, Oxford and Cambridge.
It will feature keynotes from IPCC Chairman Dr. RK Pachauri, Lord Nicholas Stern, and President of the European Commission Jose M. Barroso, as well as a raft of the world's top climate scientists and will address the extent to which a "technological fix" to climate change is now possible, the likely costs of inaction, and the scale of the global security threat climate change presents.
In addition, the conference aims to "bridge the four year data gap left by the leading global scientific body on climate change -- the IPCC -- with its latest reports".
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Anti-idling truck law goes into effect
As of Friday, most trucks and buses are no longer allowed to sit with their engines running for more than five minutes out of every hour.
The enactment of statewide legislation was sweet and long-awaited news for members of the Clean Air Board of Central Pennsylvania (CAB), which advocated such a bill for two years before it was passed in October 2008.
"We had our usual monthly public meeting on Thursday night, and we were celebrating," said CAB board member Rev. Duane Fickeisen of Unitarian Universalists of Cumberland Valley. CAB's emphasis has been on reducing the level of PM 2.5, a fine air particulate that is produced by diesel engines and linked to a variety of heart and lung ailments, and Fickeisen said he thinks the new law will help but not cure the problem.
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Citizen scientists' notes document affects of climate change
WASHINGTON -- It has to do with brown-headed cowbirds and clear-cut forests, lilacs and wildfires, vineyards in the Rhine Valley, marmots, dandelions, tadpoles, cherry trees around the Tidal Basin in Washington and musty old records stuffed in shoe boxes in people's closets and stacked on museum shelves.
As scientists track global warming, they're using sometimes centuries-old data to assess its impact on plants, animals, insects, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Increasingly, they're discovering that it can take only one seemingly insignificant change to disrupt an entire ecosystem.
"People talk about a 1- or 2-degree rise in temperature and it's inconsequential to us. Who cares?" said Greg Jones, an environmental studies professor at Southern Oregon University who's been studying wine grapes. "But in an ecosystem it can have dramatic effects." As the study of phenology, or life cycles, attracts growing attention, researchers are turning more and more to citizen scientists for help.
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US green groups hail reversal of Bush-era land lease
WASHINGTON (AFP) -- US environmentalists including actor Robert Redford have hailed US President Barack Obama's administration's reversal of a Bush-era move to lease wilderness land in Utah to energy companies.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ordered the Bureau of Land Management "not to accept the bids on 77 parcels" that, he said, former president George W. Bush's administration had rushed to sell off in its dying days in office.
The lands involved sit "at the doorstep of some of our nation's most treasured landscapes in Utah," including Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Parks, Dinosaur National Monument and Nine Mile Canyon, Salazar said Wednesday.
Actor, environmental activist and Utah resident Robert Redford called the move "a sign that after eight long years of rapacious greed and backdoor dealings, our government is returning a sense of balance to the way it manages our lands."
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U.S. Arctic May Close to Fishing
All U.S. waters north of the Bering Strait may soon be closed to commercial fishing. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council—the government body charged with administering Alaskan waters—voted unanimously in Seattle today to close 196,000 square miles (150,000 square nautical miles) of ocean to any fishing.
"This will close the Arctic to all commercial fishing," says Jim Ayers, vice president for Pacific and Arctic affairs at Oceana, based in Juneau, who testified before the vote. "This is the beginning of a concept of large protected marine areas." ... While this is good news for fish, it does not mean that the Arctic is free from industrial threats. The Bush administration sold leases for oil and gas exploration in the Chukchi Sea to Shell and global warming is wreaking havoc by melting sea ice, softening permafrost and even eroding villages and towns. That prompted towns like Shishmaref to file a lawsuit requiring a reduction in greenhouse gases to preserve their traditional way of life.
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A natural, alternative insect repellent to DEET
Isolongifolenone, a natural compound found in the Tauroniro tree (Humiria balsamifera) of South America, has been found to effectively deter biting of mosquitoes and to repel ticks, both of which are known spreaders of diseases such as malaria, West Nile virus, and Lyme disease.
Derivatives of isolongifolenone have been widely and safely used as fragrances in cosmetics, perfumes, deodorants, and paper products, and new processing methods may make it as cheap to produce as DEET.... Since "isolongifolenone is easily synthesized from inexpensive turpentine oil feedstock," the authors write, "we are therefore confident that the compound has significant potential as an inexpensive and safe repellent for protection of large human populations against blood-feeding arthropods."
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Experts in U.S. and China See a Chance for Cooperation Against Climate Change
BEIJING -- When Chinese officials and the Obama administration begin serious discussions over issues at the heart of relations between China and the United States, the usual suspects will no doubt emerge: trade, North Korea, human rights, Taiwan. But an increasing number of officials and scholars from both countries say climate change is likely to become another focal point in the dialogue. American and Chinese leaders recognize the urgency of global warming, the scholars and officials say, and believe that a new international climate treaty is impossible without agreements between their nations, the world's two largest emitters of greenhouse gases.... "I believe climate change may become a very important issue which will put China-U.S. relations in a new framework in the 21st century because the stakes are high," said Wu Jianmin, a senior adviser to the Foreign Ministry. "We all understand we don't have much time left. We've got to work together."
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Software could save organizations $19,000 each month
Software designed by the University of Liverpool which automatically shuts down computer systems after usage, is saving large organisations up to £13,000 in electricity costs each month.... Using the University of Liverpool as a test model the team discovered that 1,600 library-based PC's alone were using 20,000 kW each week unnecessarily – equating to approximately £2,400 in current electricity prices. PowerDown has so far recovered 24 million hours of PC inactivity within the University.
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Parched Perth embarks on water rescue
Turning the sea into drinking water is at the heart of Western Australia's multi-faceted approach to satisfying the thirst of a booming population that lives on the edge of a desert. "We had a history of taking gutsy decisions," said Jim Gill, former chief executive of the Water Corporation of Western Australia, a government-owned monopoly.
"And that's what put us in a position of world leadership in terms of dealing with a drying climate."
The corporation opened the southern hemisphere's first desalination plant, south of Perth, in November 2006.
Powered by a wind farm, the move was prompted by the driest winter ever recorded in Western Australia (WA) - a region that was among the first to see the effects of a shifting climate.
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Wind jobs outstrip coal mining jobs
Here's a talking point in the green jobs debate: The wind industry now employs more people than coal mining in the United States.
Wind industry jobs jumped to 85,000 in 2008, a 70 percent increase from the previous year, according to a report released Tuesday from the American Wind Energy Association. In contrast, coal mining employs about 81,000 workers. (Those figures are from a 2007 U.S. Department of Energy report but coal employment has remained steady in recent years though it's down by nearly 50 percent since 1986.) Wind industry employment includes 13,000 manufacturing jobs concentrated in regions of the country hard hit by the deindustrialization of the past two decades.
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Ecologists report quantifiable measures of nature's services to humans
Some of the best-described ecosystem services include pollination of crops, flood and storm protection, water filtration and recreation. The challenging part is translating these services into something with a measurable value. Economic valuation methods take changes in the supply of ecosystem services and translate these into changes in human welfare.... The InVEST software has also shown that high levels of biodiversity often go hand-in-hand with the provision of more ecosystem services, suggesting that the preservation of biodiversity will enhance ecosystem services. This correlation is also reflected in the success of ecosystem service projects: The authors report that although conservation initiatives that focus on ecosystem services are still in their infancy, many are as successful as traditional biodiversity preservation approaches, and can often garner as much or more funding from the private sector.
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North Sea sees recovery of cod stocks
New figures from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (Ices) show that the number of adult fish in the North Sea is expected to increase by 42 per cent this year, the largest rise in almost 30 years.
Significantly, the quantity of fish capable of reproducing is this year expected to exceed 70,000 tons -- the number set by scientists to mark the lowest level possible to ensure the species' long term survival.
It is the first time in a decade that the stock has risen above this milestone.
The recovery is likely to lead to further calls from British fishermen to increase the quota of cod they are permitted to catch.
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Two children should be limit, says green guru
Couples who have more than two children are being "irresponsible" by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government's green adviser has warned.
Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government's Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.
A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning.
"I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate," Porritt said.
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Praise the Lord and Green the Roof
...In setting out to construct an environmentally advanced building to replace the trio of connected brownstones that they now call home, the Episcopal sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit were taking a giant step in their decade-long journey to weave ecological concerns into their daily ministry. While they have long tried to reduce their carbon footprint at 113th Street, the new convent, for which construction will begin in March, will help them be green from the ground up.
Of the 14 firms that the sisters had invited to submit proposals, BKSK ultimately wooed them with a plan that features rooftop gardens, water heated by solar power, rainwater collection, natural light and ventilation and the use of environmentally sensitive materials throughout.
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Cheap, super-efficient LED lights on the horizon
Although the ultimate dominance of LED lights has long been predicted, the expense of the super-efficient technology has made the timescale uncertain. The researchers now say LED bulbs based on their new process could be commercially available within five years.
Gallium nitride (GaN) LEDs have many advantages over compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and incandescent bulbs. They switch on instantly, with no gradual warm-up, and can burn for an average of 100,000 hours before they need replacing -- 10 times as long as fluorescent lamps and some 130 times as long as an incandescent bulb. CFLs also contain small levels of mercury, which makes environmentally-friendly disposal of spent bulbs difficult.
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EU spending spree brings carbon capture closer to reality
The European commission today proposed earmarking €1.25bn to kickstart carbon capture and storage (CCS) at 11 coal-fired plants across Europe, including four in Britain....CCS involves capturing CO2 at power stations and burying it in disused oil/gas fields or other undersea rock formations....
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Most effective climate engineering solutions revealed
Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia, UK, has put together the first comparative assessment of climate-altering proposals such pumping sulphur into the atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect of volcanic emissions, or fertilising the oceans with iron.
"There is a worrying feeling that we're not going to get our act together fast enough," says Lenton, referring to international efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists have reached a "social tipping point" and are starting to wonder which techniques might complement emissions cuts, he says.... First, Lenton says the exercise shows there is no "silver bullet" -- no single method that will safely reverse climate change on its own.
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In climate fight, a time for civil disobedience?
Take the train. Dial down your heat. Write your senator.
Taking those individual steps surely helps in the battle against global warming. But, scientists and advocates warn, it's no longer enough to fend off climate disaster.
Get ready, some of them say, to hijack oil-lease sales (like a college student did in Utah), to climb smokestacks in protest (like Greenpeace activists did in England), to trespass at power plants (like demonstrators plan to do in Washington, D.C.).
It's time, these environmentalists say, for some good, old-fashioned civil disobedience -- the types of nonviolent acts proven effective by the famous (Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks) and the faceless (students at Tiananmen Square, anti-war protesters on college campuses, women suffragists in street marches).
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Supermarket chain bans use of pesticides in bid to save bees
The supermarket chain Co-op has banned foods grown using pesticides that harm honey bees.... The use of pesticides have been blamed for the collapse and yesterday the Co-operative announced it was banning any foods grown using the chemicals from their own range of fresh products.... Co-operative Farms -- the UK's biggest farmer with 25,000 hectares -- will also invite beekeepers to establish hives on its land as part of a 10-point "Plan Bee".
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Tougher rules to end overfishing in US waters
NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Ocean conservationists are hailing former President Bush for passing tough rules to end the overfishing of 40 struggling marine species before he left the White House.
The rules were issued on Jan. 15 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees U.S. oceans policy. Passage of the rules garnered little attention as President Barack Obama prepared to take power.
Under the new rules, the nation's eight regional fishery management councils will be forced to draw up measures to end overfishing by 2010. In most instances, this would involve putting caps on how many fish can be caught each year.
Fishery managers will need to establish catch limits and goals for each overfished stock. The rules provide for "strong accountability measures" to enforce catch limits, NOAA said.
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Hospitals will take meat off menus in bid to cut carbon
Meat-free menus are to be promoted in hospitals as part of a strategy to cut global warming emissions across the National Health Service.
The plan to offer patients menus that would have no meat option is part of a strategy to be published tomorrow that will cover proposals ranging from more phone-in GP surgeries to closing outpatient departments and instead asking surgeons to visit people at their local doctor's surgery.
Some suggestions are likely to be controversial with patients' groups, especially attempts to curb meat eating and car use. Plans to reuse more equipment could raise concern about infection with superbugs such as MRSA.
Dr David Pencheon, director of the NHS sustainable development unit, said the amount of NHS emissions meant it had to act to make cuts, and the changes would save money, which could be spent on better services for patients.
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'Climate hope' in economic plans
Economic stimulus packages being drawn up around the world show governments are taking the environment seriously, the UN's top climate official believes.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN climate convention, cited plans to boost growth by investing in renewable energy and public transport.
He said leaders "could not afford to fail" on climate change.... Mr de Boer, who heads negotiations within the UN climate convention, said developments in Beijing and Washington were signs that governments were using the economic troubles as a window of opportunity for reforming their economies.
"The high emissions, debt-driven, resource intensive model is dying," he said.
"The impacts of climate change would put the final nail in its coffin."
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Green-Light Specials, Now at Wal-Mart
...Today, the roughly 200 million customers who pass through Wal-Mart's doors each year buy fluorescent light bulbs that use up to 75 percent less electricity than incandescent bulbs, concentrated laundry detergent that uses 50 percent less water and prescription drugs that contain 50 percent less packaging.
"If all this sustainability stuff is just for the well-to-do, it's not going to make a difference," said Jib Ellison, the founder of Blu Skye, a sustainability consultant who has worked with Wal-Mart.
As the saying goes, Wal-Mart has also done well by doing good. Along with the McDonald's Corporation, it was one of only two companies in the Dow Jones industrial average whose share price rose last year.
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World's biggest wind turbine-maker says global downturn slashing demand
The world's biggest wind turbine manufacturer Vestas says the current economic downturn has left it with 15 percent excess manufacturing capacity as demand for the technology falls short of projections. The news came as company works to restore its reputation following the discovery of fraud in its Spanish subsidiary.... "Six months ago everyone (in the investment community) said we were not doing enough to meet demand growing at an expected 40 percent this year. Now people are saying 'Why have you put in place plans for a 40 percent increase in capacity when growth levels are only going to be 25 percent?'," he explained.
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Scotch Whisky Goes "Green"
LONDON - Scotch drinkers who care for the climate will soon relish their tipple in the knowledge it is providing clean renewable power in the home of whisky.
Scottish authorities have given planning permission for a consortium of distillers to build a biomass-fueled combined heat and power plant near the heart of the whisky industry in Speyside.
Helius Energy Plc said on Wednesday it and the Combination of Rothes Distillers Ltd would build the plant, which would use distillery by-products and wood chips to generate 7.2 megawatts of electricity, enough for about 9,000 homes, and heat.
"Not only will it generate renewable heat and power, but it secures additional markets for our distillery co-products," Frank Burns, general manager of the Combination of Rothes, said.
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UA lab to check for emerging contaminants such as Prozac, estrogen
The Arizona Laboratory for Emerging Contaminants, known as ALEC, uses super-sensitive instruments to test water, soil and tissue for minute amounts of substances such as uranium, heavy metals and organic compounds, including pharmaceuticals, said Jon Chorover, co-director of the lab.... Emerging contaminants are substances -- including Viagra, estrogen and Prozac that are raising alarms as potential hazards when found in water or foods containing or grown with contaminated water.
These contaminants are a growing concern in Arizona, where water is a precious resource.
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Peruvian region outlaws biopiracy
LIMA, Peru -- A region of Peru is claiming to be the first in the world to enact a law outlawing biopiracy and protecting indigenous knowledge at a regional level.
Cusco -- in the Peruvian Andes, once the capital of the Inca Empire -- has outlawed the plundering of native species for commercial gain, including patenting resources or the genes they contain.
Corporations or scientists must now seek permission from, and potentially share benefits with, the local people whose traditions have protected the species for centuries.
Indigenous communities can now implement ways to protect local resources, including creating registers of biodiversity and protocols for granting access to it.
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Biofuel from the oceans
Now a group at the Korea Institute of Technology in South Korea has developed a way to use marine algae, or seaweed, to produce bioethanol and avoid taking up land altogether.
The group says seaweed has a number of advantages over land-based biomass. It grows much faster, allowing up to six harvests per year; unlike trees and plants, it does not contain lignin and so requires no pre-treatment before it can be turned into fuel; and it absorbs up to seven times as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as wood.
The group's patent suggests treating all sizes of algae -- from large kelp to single-celled spirulina -- with an enzyme to break them into simple sugars, which can then be fermented into ethanol.
The resulting seaweed biofuel is cheaper and simpler to produce than crop or wood-based fuels, and will have no effect on the price of food, says the group.
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Power Emissions Limits To Save Most Carbon At Least Cost, Study Suggests
The least cost way to reduce power related carbon emissions in Europe would be to supplement the EU's Emissions Trading System (ETS) with the introduction of Emissions Performance Standards for energy, according to a new study.... Such a system, successfully used in some US States where it has helped put renewable energy on a more equal footing with traditional energy sources, could cut the EU power sector's greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 by more than two-thirds – more than 800 million tonnes per year.... "The current EU Emissions Trading Scheme unfortunately does not prevent high polluting coal-fired power stations from being built," said Stephan Singer, Director of WWF's Global Energy Programme.
"We need new emissions limits to ensure Europe invests only in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and CO2 capture and storage facilities for coal-fired power stations. Otherwise, Europe will fail to deliver its contribution to keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius."
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Japan to Launch Satellite to Measure Global Warming
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency plans to launch a satellite in two days to measure greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere as nations seek better data on the evolution of global warming.
The Greenhouse-Gases Observing Satellite, or Gosat, will be lofted from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan shortly after noon local time on Jan. 22, the agency said today in a statement on its Web site... The Japanese project will measure the density of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere at 56,000 points around the globe, Yukiko Kaji, spokeswoman for the agency, said by telephone from Tokyo. Development costs for the satellite, dubbed “Ibuki,” the Japanese word for “breath,” totaled 18.3 billion yen ($202 million), she said.
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Sex smell lures 'vampire' to doom
A synthetic "chemical sex smell" could help rid North America's Great Lakes of a devastating pest, scientists say.
US researchers deployed a laboratory version of a male sea lamprey pheromone to trick ovulating females into swimming upstream into traps.
The sea lamprey, sometimes dubbed the "vampire fish", has parasitised native species of the Great Lakes since its accidental introduction in the 1800s.... This is thought to be the first time that pheromones have been shown to be the basis of a possible way of controlling animal pests other than insects.
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Water Desalination: The Answer to the World's Thirst?
A quick spin through recent headlines reveals just how badly -- and how soon -- we're going to need new supplies of freshwater: Over the past 18 months in the United States alone, the governor of Georgia declared a state of emergency due to water shortages; salmonella contaminated municipal water in Colorado; and eight states ratified the Great Lakes Basin Compact, an agreement designed to ensure that Great Lakes water, nearly 20 percent of the world's freshwater, won't be shipped beyond those basins -- not even to nearby Minneapolis or Pittsburgh.
Worldwide, the picture is far bleaker. Global water consumption has roughly doubled since World War II, and yet, according to the United Nations, 1.1 billion people still have no access to a clean, reliable supply. Eighty percent of disease and deaths in developing countries -- more than 2.2 million people a year, including 3,900 children each day -- are caused by diseases associated with unsanitary water. The cost of waterborne diseases and associated lost productivity drains 2 percent of developing countries' GDP each year.... Saltwater already comprises 97.5 percent of the water resources on the planet, and 60 percent of the world's population lives within 65 miles of a seacoast. Why not desalinate seawater and slake the thirst of nations?
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Cooling The Planet By Growing The Right Crops
By carefully selecting which varieties of food crops to cultivate, much of Europe and North America could be cooled by up to 1°C during the summer growing season, say researchers from the University of Bristol, UK. This is equivalent to an annual global cooling of over 0.1°C, almost 20 percent of the total global temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution. The growing of crops already produces a cooling of the climate because they reflect more sunlight back into space, compared with natural vegetation. Different varieties of the same crop vary significantly in their solar reflectivity (called 'albedo'), so selecting varieties that are more reflective will enhance this cooling effect. Since arable agriculture is a global industry, such cooling could be extensive.
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Paint cities white to tackle global warming, scientist says
Hashem Akbari believes that whitening 100 of the world's largest cities could wipe out the effect of the expected increase in emissions over the next decade.
White buildings and surfaces reflect far more sunlight than dark ones. Reflected sunlight does not contribute to the greenhouse effect, unlike the heat energy emitted by dark surfaces heated by the sun.
Dr Akbari, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, also argues that if built-up areas were made white, less heat would accumulate within them, allowing residents and workers to reduce their use of air-conditioning units, which use a large amount of power.
Dr Akbari has calculated that making 100 of the largest cities white would increase the amount of sunlight reflected by Earth by 0.03 per cent. He believes it would cancel out the warming caused by 44billion tonnes of carbon emissions.
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Farms to take heat out of warming
Farmers could help curb rising global temperatures by selecting crop varieties that reflect solar energy back into space, researchers say. Scientists at Bristol University calculate that switching crops in North America and Europe could reduce global temperatures by about 0.1C.
Temperatures have risen by about 0.7C since the dawn of the industrial age.... "It could help marginally in certain places but it shouldn't cause anybody to think we can slow up our efforts to stop dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."
Another obvious question with the approach is how to persuade farmers to make crop choices that might impact on their income, if they were asked to adopt strains that fetched less at market.
One way would be to allow farmers to gain carbon credits for making a reflective choice, although Professor Caldeira suggested "starting to price albedo could open up a whole can of worms".
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Indonesian officials ride bicycles to fight global warming
JAKARTA -- City officials in South Jakarta must now cycle when performing their duties, in a move to help combat pollution and global warming, an official said Wednesday. They can own a car and drive to work, but they must cycle when travelling to do their work, South Jakarta city spokesman Ahmad Sotar said.
"This is compulsory. Cycling will not only reduce pollution and global warming, but also promote good health," he added.
"The officials can also get to know their residents better since now they can cycle through the narrow alleyways to reach their homes. They can't do so if they drive," Sotar said.
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Yale survey: Americans eager to reduce their energy use
Many Americans have already taken action to reduce their energy use and many others would do the same if they could afford to, according to a national survey conducted by Yale and George Mason universities.
Roughly half of the 2,164 American adults surveyed last September and October said they had already taken important steps to make their homes more energy-efficient, and a substantial number -- between 10 and 20 percent -- said they planned to take action over the next year. Almost two-thirds of the respondents said that they would like to buy a fuel-efficient car, but over a third said they can't afford one.
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Solar house promises greener heating for Tibetans
Chinese engineers have designed a solar house for Tibetans that aims to reduce their dependency on cattle dung for warmth.
A typical Tibetan family living in a remote mountainous village burns 300 sacks of dung -- around 2,000 kilograms -- each year, half of which it must purchase. But burning dung is inefficient and, in winter, temperatures plunge indoors.... Zeng Yan, chief architect of the Institute of Solar Building Technology, part of CNECHS, said that the experimental house, to be built in May, is supported by three core techniques: insulation, energy collection and energy storage.
The 100 square-metre house has an embedded greenhouse that collects the sun's energy, which can be transferred to the surrounding bedrooms and living room by opening connecting windows and doors.... But Xie Yuan, head of the Department of Science and Technology of Qinghai Province said that the houses might be unaffordable for local Tibetans. The annual personal income in a typical village is less than 1,700 Chinese yuan (around US$249), but the new house costs nearly 40,000 yuan (around US$5,850).
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Greenpeace buys Heathrow land earmarked for airport's third runway
Campaigners opposed to a third runway at Heathrow have bought a parcel of the land earmarked for the airport's expansion and are preparing for a fierce legal battle to defend it.
The Government is expected to approve the new runway this week, along with a sixth terminal -- although there was speculation last night that a decision could be delayed after Gordon Brown agreed to meet Labour backbenchers opposed to the project. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats both oppose the plans, as do dozens of environmental groups.
Greenpeace has bought a field the size of a football pitch and plans to invite protesters to dig networks of tunnels across it, similar to those built in the ultimately unsuccessful campaign against the Newbury bypass in 1996. The group also plans to divide the field into thousands of tiny plots, each with a separate owner. BAA, the airport's owner, would be forced to negotiate with each owner, lengthening the compulsory purchase process.
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Forest Soil, Long After Most Acidic Rain, Remains Acidic
Following the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 and 1990 acidic deposition in North America has declined significantly since its peak in 1973. Consequently, research has shifted from studying the effects of acidic deposition to the recovery of these aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.... The researchers believe that the observed trend in soil acidification is likely to continue until acidic inputs decline to the point where soil base cation pools are sufficient to neutralize them. Warby concluded, "Until then we are likely to see the continued sluggish chemical recovery of surface waters and a continuing threat to the health of forests, with additional declines in base status likely to increase the number of sites exhibiting lower forest productivity and or vulnerability to winter injury."
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'Refinery dust' reveals clues about local polluters, UH-led research team says
Cloaked in the clouds of emissions and exhaust that hang over the city are clues that lead back to the polluting culprits, and a research team led by the University of Houston is hot on their trails.... "Fine particulate matter is tiny – about 30 times smaller in diameter than a human hair – but it carries in it a lot of information about where it came from," explains Chellam, a civil and environmental engineering professor at UH's Cullen College of Engineering.... "The fact that we can quantify very minute concentrations of the catalyst material in the ambient air, as well as many other metals, shows the strengths of the analytical procedures developed at UH," Fraser says. "This allows us to track emissions from a source to communities far downwind, where people may be unaware that they are being exposed to emissions from industrial refineries."
Fraser said the team's goal is to advance the understanding of the science of air pollution so that more effective and efficient environmental regulations can be written.
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Patent: Tree-hugging wind turbine
Sridhar Condoor at Saint Louis University in Missouri has designed a hollow, cylindrical wind turbine that has no central hub. Its tube-like form means the device could be placed around a pre-existing feature such as a chimney stack, cellphone mast or even a tree trunk.
The outside of the turbine is a cylinder that is incised with inlets to catch the wind from any direction and toothed on the inside to drive a gear that powers a generator.
A cylindrical frame within allows the main cylinder to rotate freely and can be mounted around another object -- either vertically or horizontally. That makes it possible to install without needing clear space, and could even provide a way to hide ugly features, the patent says.
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20 big green ideas
as Emma Howard Boyd, head of socially responsible investing at Jupiter Asset Management – sponsors of the Big Idea award, makes clear: "The urgency of what is required to combat issues such as climate change has not diminished as a result of the current financial crisis. We need big ideas -- and it is at times like these, when there is widespread disruption, that we see innovation and new thinking."
Big ideas need not necessarily be a whistle-and-bells hi-tech response. At least one of our Big 20 can be described as an "ancient technique" on loan from the Aztecs. The modern genius lies in its rediscovery and deployment because, while it would be foolish to believe blindly in a silver bullet for all environmental problems, now is absolutely the time for faith in contemporary ingenuity.
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Exxon chief backs carbon tax
In a significant shift in stance, Exxon's chief executive, Rex Tillerson, told an audience in Washington that he considered a tax to be a fairer route to curbing emissions than a cap-and-trade system of pollution allocations.
"As a businessman it is hard to speak favourably about any new tax," said Tillerson. "But a carbon tax strikes me as a more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach."
Until recently, Exxon was reluctant even to concede that greenhouse gas emissions were responsible for global warming. The company has faced mounting pressure over its environmental policies, culminating in a shareholder rebellion at its annual meeting last year led by members of the oil-rich Rockefeller family.... "A carbon tax is also the most efficient means of reflecting the cost of carbon in all economic decisions - from investments made by companies to fuel their requirements to the product choices made by consumers," he said.
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California Scientists Create E.Coli-based Fuel That's Much More Efficient Than Ethanol
U.S. scientists say they can turn E.coli, a strain of bacteria present in the human digestive tract, into a fuel that is twice or three times more efficient than ethanol. The scientists, attached to theUniversity of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) managed to create a strain for the first time that generates alcohol with five carbon atoms per molecule instead of the regular two or three. That's important because the larger, longer chain molecules contain more energy, something of a "holy grail" for the fuel industry.... E.coli, which is mostly found in dangerous quantities on polluted beaches, can be altered so that each cell can generate "long-chain alcohol". The bacteria that result from this process excrete a type of fuel that can be used in the airline industry. Gas and other petroleum products also stand to benefit from the excretion process.
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Global whale 'hot spot' discovered off East Timor
One of the world's highest concentrations of dolphins and whales -- many of them protected species -- has been discovered off the coast of East Timor, local and Australian researchers said on Wednesday.
A "hot spot" of marine cetaceans migrating through deep channels off the Timor coast, including blue and beaked whales, short-finned pilot whales, melon headed whales and six dolphin species was uncovered in a study for the Timor government.... In just one day, more than 1,000 individuals and possibly as many as 2,000 whales in eight separate pods -- each one containing up to 400 mammals -- were spotted over a 50-kilometre (31-mile) stretch of coast, Edyvane said.
Concentrations were similar to those near Antarctica, where Japan's whaling fleet is currently carrying out its yearly five-month research hunt, chased by anti-whaling activists.
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New polluters must give neighbors notice
Is someone planning a 50-megawatt power plant in your backyard? If you live in Meriden or certain parts of Southington or Wallingford, there's a better chance you'll hear about it now that a new law creating Environmental Justice Communities has taken effect.
The regulation, which took effect Jan. 1, designates a number of cities and portions of suburban towns as Environmental Justice Communities. The entire city of Meriden has been so designated, as have neighborhoods in Wallingford and Southington.
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New Park Protects Penguins And Other Marine Life In Argentina
The Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society has just announced that its efforts to protect a wildlife-rich coastal region in South America have paid off in the form of a new coastal marine park recently signed into law by the Government of Argentina. The park, which became official in early December protects half a million penguins along with several species of rare seabirds and the region’s only population of South American fur seals. It is the first protected area in Argentina specifically designed to safeguard not only onshore breeding colonies but also areas of ocean where wildlife feed at sea.
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Biofuel Development Shifting From Soil To Sea, Specifically To Marine Algae
...Today, the most fervent attention in biofuel development has shifted from soil to the sea, and specifically to marine algae. Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, along with researchers at UCSD’s Division of Biological Sciences, are part of an emerging algal biofuel consortium that includes academic collaborators, CleanTECH San Diego, regional industry representatives, and public and private partners.
Scripps scientists see algae as a “green bullet,” science and society’s best hope for a clean bioenergy source that will help loosen broad dependence on fossil fuel, counteract climate warming, and power the vehicles of the future.
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Satellite will show how the earth 'breathes'
The Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) has been created in Japan to monitor emissions from around the planet from space and it is hoped the data it provides will help in the fight against global warming.
The orbiting satellite will track the emission of carbon dioxide and methane, gases that contribute heavily to the greenhouse effect.
Dubbed Ibuki - Japanese for "breath" - the satellite will record greenhouse gas emissions in 56,000 locations across the globe while orbiting the planet once every three days at an altitude of 666km.
While there are currently around 280 observations points around the world monitoring greenhouse gas emissions, the new satellite will offer scientists a non-terrestrial perspective of global emissions for the first time.
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Cape Fear all-release fishing tourney raises striper issues
Already, biologists have curtailing stocking white bass-striped bass hybrids into Jordan Lake. Fish from the upstream lake were passing into the lower Cape Fear River, diluting striped bass spawning effort. In 2008, NCWRC and NCDMF implemented a moratorium to shore up the spawning population. Based on a tournament held in Dec. 6, 2008 the moratorium is already working.
"This is one of the best days I've ever see," said Capt. Jeremiah Hieronymus. "Seven boats caught 77 striped bass and tagged 44 of them." ... "Stripers, sturgeon, shad and herring are like canaries in a coal mine," said Owens. "These anadromous suffer from the dams, which block their access to historic spawning waters. If we can get everyone together to allow those fish to get above the dams to spawn, we could have fishing on the Cape Fear that rivals the fishing on the Roanoke River."
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Rainforest's chewing gum tappers go organic to get out of a sticky situation
The location is remote, the practice old, the tools rudimentary, and the chances to chat with spider monkeys high. But this is no world apart. Men like Banos were at the root of one of the great consumer phenomena of our time: chewing gum.
Produced only in the jungle that straddles the southern part of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, northern Guatemala and Belize, chicle was the basis of chewing gum, from the little balls first sold in New York 140 years ago to the sticks included in GI rations during the second world war. Then in the 1950s came synthetic substitutes that shrank the industry to a shadow of its former self.... Mexico's chicleros may be on the threshold of a comeback: they are about to launch their own brand of certified organic chewing gum, which is expected to go on sale shortly in Waitrose.
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Sprayed Aerosols Could Ease Climate Woes
It won't solve global warming, but a group of scientists are calling for a focused research program to investigate ways to seed the atmosphere with chemicals that would let the heat out -- literally... David Keith, with the University of Calgary's Energy and Environmental Systems Group ... and colleagues want to investigate putting aerosols, such as sulfur, into the atmosphere to chemically unlock the greenhouse effect and allow more of the sun's reflected heat to radiate back into space.
"This brings up the question of who would make that decision," said Alan Robock of Rutgers University. And what temperature the world should be.
"A ski slope operator and someone running a shipping company in the Arctic might have different opinions about what's the ideal temperature for the planet," NASA's administrator Michael Griffin told Discovery News in an interview last year.
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This Machine Might* Save the World
* that's a big, fat "might" ... The source of endless energy for all humankind resides just off Government Street in Burnaby, British Columbia, up the little spit of blacktop on Bonneville Place and across the parking lot from Shade-O-Matic blind manufacturers and wholesalers. The future is there, in that mostly empty office with the vomit-green walls -- and inside the brain of Michel Laberge, 47, bearded and French-Canadian... What Laberge has set out to build in this office park, using $2 million in private funding and a skeletal workforce, is a nuclear-fusion power plant... If (and this is a truly serious if) Laberge and his team succeed, the rewards could be astounding: nearly limitless, inexpensive energy, with no chemical combustion by-products, a minimal amount of extremely short-lived radioactive waste, and no risk of a catastrophic, Chernobyl-level meltdown.
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Inventors Find Inspiration in Natural Phenomena
For some, whale watching is a tourist activity. For Gunter Pauli, it is a source of technological inspiration.
"I see a whale, I see a six-to-12-volt electric generator that is able to pump 1,000 liters per pulse through more than 108 miles of veins and arteries," he said. The intricate wiring of the whale's heart is being studied as a model for a device called a nanoscale atrioventricular bridge, which will undergo animal testing next year and could replace pacemakers for the millions of people whose diseased hearts need help to beat steadily.
Pauli -- who directs the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI) Foundation in Geneva -- is an unabashed promoter of biomimicry, the science of making technological and commercial advances by copying natural processes. At a time when many are looking for a way to protect Earth's biodiversity and reduce the ecological impact of industrial products and processes, a growing number of business leaders and environmental activists alike are looking to biomimicry as a way to achieve both ends.
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No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in "Passive Houses"
...Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann's new "passive house" and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer...The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants' bodies.
And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
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Super Trees Clean up Superfund Sites
Argonne, Illinois -- A legacy of the Argonne National Laboratory�s early foray into atomic energy lies buried here on its campus, about 25 miles southwest of Chicago. Although solid wastes from all sorts of experiments have been sealed in a landfill, certain liquids, mostly chlorinated solvents, still taint the water that runs under the site. The ongoing attempt to remove these contaminants occupies an enormous experimental facility that covers four acres and looks like a forest.
"I like to brag that I have the biggest lab at Argonne," says agronomist Cristina Negri, indicating an expanse of 900 poplars and willows growing in rows. The trees stand about 30 feet high. More important, their roots extend 30 feet down, where they tap the contaminated aquifer and literally pull pollutants out of the ground.
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Will water vortices provide the next renewable energy?
U of M engineer says water currents can solve world's power problems: T. Boone Pickens may well have been right: Oil dependence is almost certainly "one emergency we can't drill our way out of." But if a University of Michigan engineer knows half of what he thinks he knows about water power, the solution to the world's energy needs doesn't have much to do with the billionaire oilman's much-advertised vision of an endless line of windmills stretching from Texas to Canada.
The real answer may be a cylinder continuously moving up and down in an 8,000-gallon water tank in the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Building on the University of Michigan's North Campus in Ann Arbor. As Professor Michael M. Bernitsas sees it, the cylinder-based device he invented is a short step away from a commercially viable version that might be the key to a cheap, inexhaustible supply of clean energy to power the entire world, even regions far removed from sources of water.
The device is nicknamed VIVACE, short for Vortex Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy. It's pronounced "Vee-VAH-chay," after the term for music played in a lively, spirited manner.
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Measure your nitrogen footprint
Environmentalists often stress that each of the 17 million people living in the Chesapeake Bay watershed contributes to the bay's decline.
Now they have a nifty tool to drive home their point: an online calculator that adds up how much nitrogen pollution each household generates.
The project has been two years in the making for Dr. Beth McGee and the staff at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. It's posted at www.cbf.org/yourbayfootprint.
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Fix For Global Warming? Scientists Propose Covering Deserts With Reflective Sheeting
A radical plan to curb global warming and so reverse the climate change caused by our rampant burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution would involve covering parts of the world's deserts with reflective sheeting, according to researchers writing in the International Journal of Global Environmental Issues... The team's calculations suggest that covering an area of a little more than 60,000 square kilometres with reflective sheet, at a cost of some $280 billion, would be adequate to offset the heat balance and lead to a net cooling without any need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide.
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Earth Not Center Of The Universe, Surrounded By 'Dark Energy'
Earth's location in the Universe is utterly unremarkable, despite recent theories that propose toppling a foundation of modern cosmology, according to a team of University of British Columbia researchers....The team's calculations instead solidify the conventional view that an enigmatic dark energy fills the cosmos and is responsible for the acceleration of the Universe...."Since we can only observe the Universe from Earth, it's really hard to determine if we're in a 'special place,'" says [UBC post-doctoral fellow Jim] Zibin. "But we've now learned that our location is much more ordinary than the strange dark energy that fills the Universe."
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A Japanese Town That Kicked the Oil Habit
...In resource-poor Japan, which imports 90 percent of its fuel, Kuzumaki is a marvel of energy self-sufficiency. Signs of the town's comprehensive focus on environmental sustainability are visible from its mountaintops to the pens of the dairy cows that once were the bedrock of local commerce. Atop Mt. Kamisodegawa, the 12 wind turbines, each 305 feet (93 m) tall, have the capacity to convert mountain gusts into 21,000 KW of electricity — more than enough to meet the needs of the town's residents. The excess is sold to neighboring communities.
Of course, the wind doesn't always blow. At Kuzumaki Highland Farm, 200 dairy cows share the power load. Their manure is processed into fertilizer and methane gas, the latter used as fuel for an electrical generator at the town's biomass facility. Nearby, a three-year project sponsored by Japan's Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry's New Energy Development Organization (NEDO) uses wood chips from larch trees to create gas that powers the farm's milk and cheese operations. The bark of other trees is also made into pellets for heating stoves used throughout the community. A local winery, for instance, has two such stoves, and Kuzumaki pays residents up to 50,000 yen ($490) toward the cost of installing one. All told, clean energy generated 161 percent of Kuzumaki's electricity last year.
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Selflessness -- Core Of All Major World Religions -- Has Neuropsychological Connection
All spiritual experiences are based in the brain. That statement is truer than ever before, according to a University of Missouri neuropsychologist. An MU study has data to support a neuropsychological model that proposes spiritual experiences associated with selflessness are related to decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain....This study, along with other recent neuroradiological studies of Buddhist meditators and Francescan nuns, suggests that all individuals, regardless of cultural background or religion, experience the same neuropsychological functions during spiritual experiences, such as transcendence.
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Inland researchers say storm runoff, once just a threat, is a resource to be managed
Two Inland researchers think they have come up with a way to help replenish depleted aquifers and reduce ocean pollution using some unlikely partners: big-box stores.
When it rains, much of parking-lot runoff flows across impervious surfaces into large detention basins, culverts or concrete waterways that carry the water to lakes and into the ocean.
The researchers propose tapping big-box stores, shopping malls and warehouses -- properties that generate much of the runoff -- to help capture some of it before it flows into storm drains.
They recommend building porous-pavement parking lots on the properties or channeling the storm water into infiltration trenches that allow the water to percolate into the ground.
Not only would these devices help reduce the amount of polluted water or "urban sludge" that ends up in lakes and in the ocean, it also would help recharge depleted groundwater basins, the researchers say.
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Making Hospitals Greener -- and Patients Healthier
A doctor's principle code is, "First, do no harm." The irony is that your doctor's office or hospital may be making you sicker. Indeed, many hospitals are built with materials, like particleboard, PVC flooring and even conventional paint, that can leach poisonous substances. What's more, the chemicals used to clean hospitals -- chlorine, laundry detergents and softeners, ammonia -- contain toxic ingredients and can cause respiratory disease. In fact, studies suggest that nurses, who spend long hours at the hospital, have among the highest rates of environmentally induced asthma of any profession....Enter "green medicine" -- the effort to detoxify the healing environment and enhance patients' and employees' health, while reducing costs all around.
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20 reasons the Earth will be glad to see Bush go
...We've selected 20 specific environmental transgressions of the Bush administration for scrutiny here, drawn primarily from conversations with and reports issued by the nation's leading environmental-advocacy groups. Were we to have written about all the ecological crimes committed by the Bush team -- the damage already done, the policies that have since been reversed, the individuals who have moved on to do their damage elsewhere -- we'd only be wringing our hands and wasting more paper. Thus, we've limited our Top 20 list to the horrific environmental scenarios still ongoing � these are the assaults on the planet that Bush and his cronies are continuing to this day, and surely would go on doing were their time not coming to a merciful end....
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Narrative entertainment programming can lead to persuasive outcomes
Persuasive communication is often perceived as a threat to one's freedom, even if the message recommendation is in one's best interest. This results in message rejection as a way to reassert independence. Moyer-Gusé contends that different types of involvement in the narrative, such as engagement with the plot or identification with characters, may help to overcome resistance, thus resulting in persuasive effects.
The narrative format can allow viewers to become "sucked in" to the world in which the drama takes place, reducing viewers' perception that the message is persuasive in nature. The enjoyment associated with transportation into a narrative may allow individuals to process messages they would otherwise find too threatening.
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Energy secretary nominee sees coal as 'nightmare'
... Carbon capture and storage research is still in its early stages, said Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist announced by Obama this week as his nominee to run the U.S. Department of Energy. Real-world projects to pump millions of tons of carbon dioxide might also be rejected unless scientists show it can be done safely, Chu said during an April speech.
"Coal is my worst nightmare," said Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Stanford University professor.
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Cooperation helped Louisville clean up air
LOUISVILLE — For years, Louisville has been known for fast horses, fine bourbon, a love of college basketball — and lousy air.
People who lived near a complex of chemical plants, called Rubbertown, put up with odors, burning eyes and fears that their every breath might contribute to asthma, cancer or other illnesses.
But that began to change about a decade ago, after a minister from the predominantly African-American neighborhoods around Rubbertown organized protests, demanding aggressive government action to clean up the toxic air and reduce the chemical emissions from factories.
The campaign soon ranged beyond those neighborhoods, attracting the help of university scientists, industry representatives and government officials. It has led to an ambitious and successful anti-pollution effort that has gained national attention.
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Ethiopia: Authority Urges Paradigm Shift in Agriculture Law On Genetically Modified Organisms Proposed
Amid the price of chemical fertilizer showing little sign of decreasing, Federal Environmental Protection Authority urged on Tuesday for a paradigm shift to ecological agriculture.... While expressing his support to using chemical fertilizers to attain food security in the country, the Director said the country has as much as much as possible stick to ecological agriculture, adding the country's high capacity to produce compost could support the shift.... "If genetically modified remained unregulated in the country, they could suffer the general set up of our society as well as the environment," Dr.Tewolde said [in an obviously rough translation].
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Ramping down the toxins we eat
Some of the signs of an emerging crisis include: the presence of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and disease-causing bacteria in a host of foods; a rise in obesity and diet-related diseases; and air and water pollution from factory farms. Our current system isn't healthy and it's not sustainable.... Here are nine ideas for ways to improve health and send a strong signal to farmers, grocery stores and policymakers about the kinds of food we want to eat.
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Waste Coffee Grounds Offer New Source Of Biodiesel Fuel
Researchers in Nevada are reporting that waste coffee grounds can provide a cheap, abundant, and environmentally friendly source of biodiesel fuel for powering cars and trucks.... The used or "spent" grounds remaining from production of espresso, cappuccino, and plain old-fashioned cups of java, often wind up in the trash or find use as soil conditioner. The scientists estimated, however, that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply.
To verify it, the scientists collected spent coffee grounds from a multinational coffeehouse chain and separated the oil. They then used an inexpensive process to convert 100 percent of the oil into biodiesel.
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Hey, Senator, check out the 43 mpg Ford Fusion hybrid
... When the [Ford] Fusion hybrid arrives next spring, it will become the first two-mode hybrid car created by an American-based company. Congress should note that it had no hand with the development of this vehicle -- it takes years of hard work, actual thinking and wrenching to produce a new model and this particular vehicle is the result of planning that took place in President Bush's first term.
Since then, Ford has continued to improve its hybrid system, and the Fusion will offer more advanced technology than even the 2009 Ford Escape hybrid.
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Toxin-Gobbling Bugs Could Clean Ocean Dead Zones
Bacteria that break down toxic compounds may have tricked scientists into underestimating the threat posed by spreading oceanic dead zones. But there's a silver lining: the bacteria might help bring them back to life.
In a 4,200-square-mile Atlantic ocean swath off the coast of Namibia, bacteria converted lethal sulphide into foul-smelling but otherwise harmless sulphur and sulphate.
"This is the first time that large-scale detoxification of sulphidic waters by chemolithotrophs has been observed in an ocean-open system," write European microbiologists and geochemists in a paper published Wednesday in Nature.
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Al Gore: World cares more about Paris Hilton than saving the planet
In a rousing speech to hundreds of delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan, the former US Presidential candidate echoed President-elect Barack Obama in calling for change.
"It is wrong for this generation to destroy the habitability of the planet and ruin the prospects of every future generation. That realisation must carry us forward. Our children have a right to hold us to a high standard when the future of all human kind is hanging in the balance."... "The political systems of the developed world have become sclerotic. We have to overcome the paralysis that has prevented us from acting and focus clearly and unblinkingly on this crisis rather than spending so much time on OJ Simpson, Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith."
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Cleaning the air helps cool planet
Local and state regulators have new ammunition in the fight to justify expensive air pollution rules: Cutting smog and soot has an immediate impact on climate change.
A study published this week bolsters the link between air quality and climate, finding that across-the-board cuts in air pollution can spur "substantial, simultaneous" improvement in local air quality and near-term mitigation of climate change.
Trimming smog and soot also represents an alternate and far more immediate global warming solution for regulators stymied by the complexities of other greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences and the lead author of the study.
Tackling air pollution can buy 20 to 30 years worth of mitigation, he said – time that will be needed, if ongoing debates in Poznan, Brussells and Washington D.C. offer any indication – to cut the political and economic knots associated with carbon dioxide.
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Out of Thin Air
Remember those sweltering summer days when the air was so muggy you could practically drink it? A new home appliance is promising to make that possible by converting outdoor air into nearly 13 quarts of fresh water every day.
Originally envisioned as an antidote to the shortage of clean drinking water in the world, the WaterMill has the look of a futuristic air conditioner and the ability to condense, filter and sterilize water for about 3 cents per quart.
At $1,299, the 45-pound device doesn't come cheap, and it is neither the first nor the biggest machine to enter the fast-growing field of atmospheric water generators. But by targeting individual households with a self-cleaning, environmentally friendly alternative to bottled water, Kelowna, British Columbia-based Element Four is hoping its WaterMill will become the new must-have appliance of 2009.
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Europe pledges strict emissions cut to tempt China and India into climate deal
European officials have offered to make the continent virtually zero-carbon in an attempt to lure China and other developing countries into a new global climate deal to replace the Kyoto protocol.
Stavros Dimas, European commissioner for the environment, told the Guardian that the EU could aim for a 80-95 percent reduction in greenhouse gas pollution by 2050 in exchange for greater efforts by developing nations to limit their emissions.
Dimas said the pledge has "already been put on the table" and that he was awaiting responses. In return, Europe would ask developing countries to reduce their forecasted carbon pollution growth by 15-30 percent over the next decade. "We haven't got any reaction, so they're floating somewhere," he said.
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Crystals turn roads into power stations
AN ENVIRONMENTALLY friendly road that positively welcomes heavy traffic may sound odd, but by placing piezoelectric crystals under the asphalt that convert vibration into electricity, Israeli engineers hope to harvest energy from passing vehicles.
Developer Haim Abramovich at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa says the crystals can produce up to 400 kilowatts from a 1-kilometre stretch of four-lane highway. His spin-out company, Innowattech, also based in Haifa, will begin testing the system on a 100-metre stretch of road in northern Israel in January.
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EPA to Curb Medical Emissions
The Environmental Protection Agency moved yesterday to curb pollution released by medical waste incinerators, ending an 11-year battle over how to best regulate the emissions.
Environmentalists hailed the move as an important precedent for controlling toxic releases into the air, saying EPA based its calculations on the availability of technologies to significantly clean up incinerator pollution. The facilities can install fabric filters to trap toxic particles or scrubbers to capture gaseous releases.
"This is the first time I've ever seen them do an air toxic rule right," said Jim Pew, a lawyer at Earthjustice...
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How changes in daily routine may become second nature
Before going out you turn off the master switch for all your appliances. Then you climb into your electric car for the drive to work. The roads are noticeably quieter, and there have been studies showing asthma admissions are falling as petrol and diesel cars are replaced.... David Kennedy, the climate change committee's chief executive, said: "Let's not underestimate the energy efficiency that gives you more [savings] than lifestyle change, but there are things that can really make a difference, such as simply switching lights off when you leave the room and turning the thermostat down."
There would likely be visible and audible changes: quieter streets, more wind turbines on the horizon, but also, as farmers use less fertiliser, more trout and salmon in rivers, while countryside bird populations should flourish.
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Scientists say they've found bacteria that will fight invasive mussels
Researchers seeking to slow the spread of invasive zebra and quagga mussels in American lakes and rivers have found a bacterium that appears to be fatal to the problematic species without affecting native mussels or freshwater fish.
The bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens, offers some hope for controlling the troublesome bivalves that are wreaking ecological and economic havoc in North American waters from the Colorado River to Vermont, and especially in the Great Lakes.
But more testing remains to be done, and the bacteria could be used effectively only on a limited scale, said Daniel Molloy, the New York State Museum researcher who discovered the possible new use for P. fluorescens.
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Carbon market could pay poor farmers to adopt sustainable cultivation techniques
... [P]roceeds from the carbon market could be used to reward farmers who adopt cultivation techniques that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Such methods include growing crops under a canopy of fruit or timber trees, planting fodder trees for livestock, and curtailing the use of slash-and-burn agriculture.
"If we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly and effectively as possible, we need to do everything we can to encourage the people living in and around the world's tropical forests to adopt carbon-saving and carbon-enhancing approaches to development," said Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Center, one of 15 centers supported by the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). "One crucial way to do that is to give them the same opportunities to sell their carbon as a commodity in the global market as is encouraged in other sectors."
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Stern urges switch to low carbon economy during downturn
The author of the Government's 2006 report on climate change said that while demand is low, it is a good time to switch to "a more sustainable pattern of growth" by replacing fossil fuels with more renewables and clean energy, designing new technologies and improving energy efficiency.
The former economist at the Treasury warned that previous growth on the back of the housing market boom or dot.com bubble have been unsustainable.
However investment in renewables and low carbon energy could improve the economy in the long term.
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Inspiring people to grow their own food
... That's why I really like the idea of the WHO Farm Project in the US. It's an attempt to convince Barack Obama to also reach for the spade when he takes the keys to the White House in January and symbolically dig up the famous front lawn in order to toss in some vegetable seeds. It's exactly what the Roosevelts did during the second world war and it helped to inspire over 20m so-called "Victory Gardens" across the US.
The garden at 10 Downing St isn't blessed with quite as many rods of prime growing land, but Buckingham Palace, and other world-famous sites across the UK, certainly are. It's not as if a decent veg patch needs to take up that much room. And just think of all those other wasted spaces where veg could easily be grown -- parks, verges, roundabouts (OK, that might be a little dangerous) and all those monoculture corporate HQ landscaped gardens.
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'Fish technology' draws renewable energy from slow water currents
Slow-moving ocean and river currents could be a new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source. A University of Michigan engineer has made a machine that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power.... Here's how VIVACE works: The very presence of the cylinder in the current causes alternating vortices to form above and below the cylinder. The vortices push and pull the passive cylinder up and down on its springs, creating mechanical energy. Then, the machine converts the mechanical energy into electricity.
Just a few cylinders might be enough to power an anchored ship, or a lighthouse, Bernitsas says. These cylinders could be stacked in a short ladder. The professor estimates that array of VIVACE converters the size of a running track and about two stories high could power about 100,000 houses. Such an array could rest on a river bed or it could dangle, suspended in the water. But it would all be under the surface.
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Rescued whales reunite in Bass Strait
Five pilot whales tagged with satellite tracking devices after surviving a mass stranding have successfully joined a larger pod in deeper waters off Tasmania.
It's the first time whales rescued from stranding have been tagged to track their progress.
Wildlife officers were celebrating on Monday after launching a huge rescue operation, which followed Saturday's mass beaching by more than 60 whales at Anthonys Beach near Stanley on Tasmania's north-west coast.
Despite the efforts of 60 volunteers and 15 government wildlife officers, 53 whales died, but 11 were saved after being transported on trucks 17km along the Bass Highway and released in deep water at Godfreys Beach on Sunday.
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Research Finds Way To Double Rice Crops In Drought-stricken Areas
University of Alberta research has yielded a way to double the output of rice crops in some of the world's poorest, most distressed areas. Jerome Bernier, a PhD student in the U of A Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science, has found a group of genes in rice that enables a yield of up to 100 per cent more in severe drought conditions.
The discovery marks the first time this group of genes in rice has been identified, and could potentially bring relief to farmers in countries like India and Thailand, where rice crops are regularly faced with drought. Rice is the number one crop consumed by humans annually.
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Green Hospitals
Critics say hospital buildings and food are enough to make you sick. Today there's a growing movement in health care to get hospitals to green their facilities and, as host Bruce Gellerman reports, it's transforming the medical community... "From bedpans and surgical gloves to operating rooms and MRI machines, hospitals are enormously expensive to build, equip and operate. And when it comes to making life saving decisions, administrators aren't about to worry about buying energy-saving devices. Still, medicine is starting to use the power of the purse to go green."
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Supercritical CO2 boosts super optimism in sequestering greenhouse gas
Scientists appear to have the rock-solid evidence that suggests carbon dioxide can be safely and permanently sequestered in deep, underground basalt rock formations, without risk of it eventually escaping to the atmosphere. The findings have potential implications for sequestering carbon in other reservoir systems as well. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered key factors that show water-saturated liquid CO2, under conditions mimicking deep geologic settings, will plug cracks within the rock that otherwise might allow the hazardous greenhouse gas to escape.
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Poll: World wants green action, despite costs
A wide majority of the world's citizens are unhappy with the slow pace of their governments' moves toward renewable energy and want their leaders to do more, even if that raises their utility bills, according to a global opinion poll released today. The finding sends a clear signal to officials at next month’s climate change meeting in Poznan, Poland, scheduled to lay the groundwork for a 2009 international treaty to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.
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Better Wind Turbines
ExRo Technologies, a startup based in Vancouver, BC, has developed a new kind of generator that's well suited to harvesting energy from wind. It could lower the cost of wind turbines while increasing their power output by 50 percent.
The new generator runs efficiently over a wider range of conditions than conventional generators do.... ExRo's new design replaces a mechanical transmission with what amounts to an electronic one. That increases the range of wind speeds at which it can operate efficiently and makes it more responsive to sudden gusts and lulls.
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Pitt researchers use fluorescence to develop method for detecting mercury in fish
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a simple and quick method for detecting mercury in fish and dental samples, two substances at the center of public concern about mercury contamination. The technique involves a fluorescent substance that glows bright green when it comes into contact with oxidized mercury.... The intensity of the glow indicates the amount of mercury present.
Developed in the laboratory of Kazunori Koide, a chemistry professor in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences, the new method can be used onsite and can detect mercury in 30 to 60 minutes for dental fillings (or amalgams) or 10 to 30 minutes for fish, Koide explained. "Our method could be used in the fish market or the dentist office," he said. "We have developed a reliable indicator for mercury that a person could easily and safely use at home."
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Japan's Trash Technology Helps Deodorize Dumps in Tokyo
TOKYO -- It doesn't smell like a dump.
If it did, there are a quarter-million neighbors to complain about Tokyo's Toshima Incineration Plant, which devours 300 tons of garbage a day, turning it into electricity, hot water and a kind of recyclable sand. ... Remarkably, this does not create a big stink, literally or politically.
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Amazon to scrap plastic packaging for recyclable cardboard boxes
It has pledged to stop sending toys, computers and other goods out in difficult-to-open plastic boxes.
The shopping website has joined leading manufacturers, including toy company Mattel and software giant Microsoft, to come up with a solution it says is both eco and customer-friendly.
Called "frustration free packaging", the company aims to replace plastic wrapping with a simple, recyclable cardboard box.... "Every Christmas we produce an extra three million tonnes of waste, and this could impact significantly on that. But we need manufacturers to think about this too -- it really comes back to the product design stage, and that needs to be re-thought."
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Discovery may lead to organic acrylic glass made from sugar
A new discovery make it possible in the future to manufacture acrylic glass from organic materials including sugars, alcohols or fatty acids.... The researchers say that the biotechnological process is "far more environmentally friendly" than the conventional chemical production process for PMMA.
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Going green - all the way to the grave
...Each year, along with their dearly departed, Americans bury 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid and 30-plus million board feet of timber, according to the Green Burial Council, an advocacy and certification organization in New Mexico.
Its founder, Joe Sehee, says we bury enough steel to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge, and enough concrete vaults - to keep the ground over graves from sinking, which makes maintenance easier - to pave a highway halfway across the United States...
Now people are being buried in coffins made of wicker or bamboo. In Ecopods of recycled paper. Even in simple shrouds. A San Francisco company offers them in linen, silk and ethnic textiles.
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Nasa fights global warming with bathtime favourite
After years of research -- and with the fate of planet Earth hanging in the balance -- the Nasa scientist who helped to put a robot on Mars has finally completed work on a device that can measure how fast Greenland's ice-cap is melting.... When glaciers surge, they move at up to 100 times their usual speed. Scientists believe that surging could be caused by water from melting ice on the top of a glacier flowing into tubular holes and eventually reaching the base, where it acts as a lubricant, speeding the movement of the glacier towards the coast.
Cue the rubber ducks. In August, Dr Behar flew to the Jakobshavn Glacier and landed near one of the tubular holes, known as "moulins". Into one of the moulins he dropped 90 ducks, each labelled with the words "Science Experiment" and "Reward" in three languages along with an e-mail address.
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Mysterious microbe plays important role in ocean ecology
An unusual microorganism discovered in the open ocean may force scientists to rethink their understanding of how carbon and nitrogen cycle through ocean ecosystems.... Unlike all other known free-living cyanobacteria, this one lacks some of the genes needed to carry out photosynthesis, the process by which plants use light energy to make sugars out of carbon dioxide and water.
The mysterious microbe can do something very important, though: It provides natural fertilizer to the oceans by "fixing" nitrogen from the atmosphere into a form useable by other organisms.
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Dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask
If I switch the light on and off every time I enter and leave a room, does this use more energy than leaving it on all evening?... How clean does the pizza box have to be for it to be recyclable? Likewise cans and bottles... What's the most fuel-efficient way to drive?
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Demand for organic products driving growth of local farms
The exact number of farms in the region focusing on organic products isn't known. The N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services doesn't count organic farms.
But Daryl Bowman, director of the N.C. Crop Improvement Association -- a membership-based organization that certifies farms, ranches and other things as organic -- says about 500 N.C. farms are using natural methods.
"That number is growing by 25 percent a year," he says.
The growers have few problems finding buyers.
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Giant, Prehistoric Fish Rebounding in Canada
Once plentiful in the river, the sturgeon population had dropped below 40,000, and scientists were unable to explain the die-offs of mostly female fish.
That's when an alliance of government agencies, environmentalists, aboriginal groups, and commercial and recreational fishers came together to save the sturgeon, spurring a robust recovery of the lower Fraser River population.
Recent estimates show the population has increased to about 50,000 fish.
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Park life: Why living in a green area improves your health
Living near parks and forests improves your health and lengthens your life, according to new research published today.
Scientists also found the health gap between rich and poor was narrower in greener areas.
Lead author Richard Mitchell from Glasgow University said their findings showed the impact of green spaces was bigger than once thought.
'The size of the difference in the health gap is surprising and represented a much bigger effect than I had been expecting,' he said.
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Recycling waste piles up as prices collapse
Thousands of tonnes of rubbish collected from household recycling bins may have to be stored in warehouses and former military bases to save them from being dumped after a collapse in prices.
Collection companies and councils are running out of space to store paper, plastic bottles and steel cans because prices are so low that the materials cannot be shifted. Collections of mixed plastics, mixed paper and steel reached record levels in the summer but the "bottom fell out of the market" and they are now worthless. The plunge in prices was caused by a sudden fall in demand for recycled materials, especially from China, as manufacturers reduced their output in line with the global economc downturn.
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Rocks Could Be Harnessed To Sponge Vast Amounts Of Carbon Dioxide From Air
Scientists say that a type of rock found at or near the surface in the Mideast nation of Oman and other areas around the world could be harnessed to soak up huge quantities of globe-warming carbon dioxide. Their studies show that the rock, known as peridotite, reacts naturally at surprisingly high rates with CO2 to form solid minerals -- and that the process could be speeded a million times or more with simple drilling and injection methods.
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Under Obama, Dark Days Seen Ahead For Fossil Fuels
Under President-elect Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the fossil fuels industry may face "dark days ahead," while alternative energy sectors are likely to flourish.
Although it will take years to engineer and implement, an Obama administration energy and environment policy marks a tectonic shift for the nation. He would move the U.S. away from petroleum as its primary energy source and towards renewable energy, advanced biofuels, efficiency and low greenhouse-gas-emitting technologies.
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Palm oil agreement could lead to logging moratorium
The view that the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is merely a way of making companies appear politically correct without making difference to de-forestation could be about to change if agreement on an important new resolution is reached.... Each year the burning and degradation of Indonesian peat swamp forests releases a staggering 2 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. This accounts for nearly 4 per cent of global emissions from less than 0.1 per cent of the world's land surface.... There is a possibility that they could be awarded funds through carbon credits under the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) scheme that is currently under discussion.
Under the terms of this new resolution the RSPO will also start a programme to support the responsible development of suitable land. These would include land swaps where forest concessions could be exchanged for waste land concessions and the establishment of soft loan funds.
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Solar power game-changer: 'Near perfect' absorption of sunlight, from all angles
An untreated silicon solar cell only absorbs 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it -- meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable. From an economic and efficiency perspective, this unharvested light is wasted potential and a major barrier hampering the proliferation and widespread adoption of solar power.
After a silicon surface was treated with Lin's new nanoengineered reflective coating, however, the material absorbed 96.21 percent of sunlight shone upon it -- meaning that only 3.79 percent of the sunlight was reflected and unharvested. This huge gain in absorption was consistent across the entire spectrum of sunlight, from UV to visible light and infrared, and moves solar power a significant step forward toward economic viability.
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New type of fuel found in Patagonia fungus
A team led by a Montana State University professor has found a fungus that produces a new type of diesel fuel, which they say holds great promise.
Calling the fungus' output "myco-diesel," Gary Strobel and his collaborators describe their initial observations in the November issue of Microbiology.... Strobel, who travels the world looking for exotic plants that may contain beneficial microbes, found the diesel-producing fungus in a Patagonia rainforest. Strobel visited the rainforest in 2002 and collected a variety of specimens, including the branches from an ancient family of trees known as "ulmo." When he and his collaborators examined the branches, they found fungus growing inside. They continued to investigate and discovered that the fungus, called "Gliocladium roseum," was producing gases. Further testing showed that the fungus -- under limited oxygen -- was producing a number of compounds normally associated with diesel fuel, which is obtained from crude oil.
"These are the first organisms that have been found that make many of the ingredients of diesel," Strobel said. "This is a major discovery."
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Coca-Cola agrees to cut water use and stabilize emissions
SAN FRANCISCO - Coca-Cola Co., the world's largest soft-drink maker, vowed to more efficiently use water and stabilize its carbon-dioxide emissions linked to global warming under an agreement released last week with the World Wildlife Fund.
Coca-Cola pledged to improve efficiency at bottling plants 20 percent by 2012 though overall water use will increase as business grows. The manufacturing changes will save about 50 billion litres (13 billion gallons) of water during the next four years, the Atlanta-based company said. Coca-Cola also will hold emissions at current levels, said spokeswoman Lisa Manley.
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Neil Young on gas guzzlers: Long may you run
Leave it to Neil Young to make green technology cool.
The rock legend has created a company called Linc Volt Technology to promote the conversion of existing gas-guzzling cars into vehicles that run on alternative energy. But we're not talking about boxy little e-cars here. Young, who likes his cars old and big, is launching his effort by converting a 1959 Lincoln Continental to run on electricity and natural gas.... "All we're doing is showing that you can run a car like this at 100 miles per gallon or more," said Young...
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A bounty sprouts in the city with MyFarm enterprise
Some might look across this city's rolling hills with its waves of roofs and see some of America's priciest real estate.
Trevor Paque saw virgin farmland.
He calls his enterprise, MyFarm, a "decentralized urban farm." His aim is to turn San Francisco's under-used, overgrown backyards into verdant plots of green that will provide organically grown food for the city's residents.
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Cleaning Heavily Polluted Water At A Fraction Of The Cost
A European research project has succeeded in developing a water treatment system for industrial oil polluted water at a tenth of the cost of other commercially available tertiary treatments, leaving water so clean it can be pumped safely back out to sea without endangering flora or fauna.
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Useful things rise from ashes
At Santee Cooper's Winyah generating station, powerful generators make enough electricity to light 577,000 homes. In the process, the plant creates vast amounts of ash, and for years, hundreds of thousands of tons ended up in nearby retention ponds. No more.
Today, nearly all of this ash ends up being reused. In the shadow of the Winyah plant's smokestacks, American Gypsum recently opened a $150 million factory that uses Santee Cooper's gypsum to crank out as much as 136 miles of wallboard per day. Nearby, crews mine bottom ash from a pond to make lighter concrete building blocks; fly ash is sent to concrete-makers.
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Carbon footprint standard for all products drawn up by Government
The world's first standard to measure the carbon footprint of every product in our shops will be launched tomorrow by the Government in an effort to end the continuing confusion over "eco-labels".... The document, known as a Publicly Available Specification or PAS 2050, will tell producers how to calculate a product's carbon output, from the raw materials, through manufacturing and consumption, to the waste produced.
It will enable companies to estimate the amount of CO2 in grams used in the life of a product and therefore its potential impact on global warming.
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Europe cracks down on fishing for deep-sea species
Europe's exotic deepwater fish, some of which can live up to 150 years, won more protection from the European Union on Monday as fisheries ministers agreed to hefty quota cuts for the next two years.
Bearing names like forkbeard, black scabbardfish, greater silver smelt and roundnose grenadier, Europe's deep-sea fish grow and reproduce far more slowly than fish in shallower waters and are far more vulnerable to overfishing.... With the depletion of mainstay commercial fish such as cod and hake in recent years, they have become an attractive catch as trawlers switch from their regular fishing grounds.
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Biogas converters -- making fuel and fertiliser from biodegradable waste
Most of the food we throw away in this country ends up in landfill sites, where methane emissions are a real problem.
Not so long ago all these gases were allowed to waft up into the atmosphere or were simply burnt off with flares to stop explosions.... The digestors are really silos designed to speed up the rotting process and collect the methane that's released. The brilliant thing about it is that all the gas can than be used for electricity generation -- or even for vehicle fuel.
And what's left behind is a great fertiliser -- so almost nothing is actually wasted.
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Plug points in street will boost battery car revolution
Charging points for electric cars are to be installed in thousands of car parks and on streets as part of a government plan to convert drivers from petrol and diesel to electricity.
Under the scheme, motorists will be able to plug in and recharge their batteries while shopping or at work. In the longer term, those who are unable to wait will be able to exchange their empty battery and drive on with minimal delay.... They intend to borrow ideas pioneered in Israel, where half a million recharging points are being installed in a scheme known as Project Better Place.
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Corals gain climate-change shield
Rare species of staghorn corals may bear some good news for reef conservation: It appears that some rare types of staghorns can readily breed with related species, creating hybrids that may be far more resilient to climate change or other stresses than anyone thought.... "This is good news, to the extent that it suggests that corals may have evolved genetic strategies for survival in unusual niches," notes Zoe Richards, who led the effort.
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Green Practices: When Do Corporations Respond To Stakeholders' Pressure?
The authors find that firms with powerful marketing departments were more responsive to pressures from customers and competitors... In contrast, they find that firms with powerful legal departments were more responsive to pressures from regulators and environmental NGOs, and were especially likely to adopt government-initiated voluntary programs.
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UK announces world's largest algal biofuel project
The world's biggest publicly funded project to make transport fuels from algae will be launched today by a government agency which develops low-carbon technologies.
The Carbon Trust will today announce a project to make algal biofuels a commercial reality by 2020. The plan could see up to 26m pounds spent on developing the technology and infrastructure to ensure that algal biofuels replace a signficant proportion of the fossil fuels used by UK drivers.
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Magic solar milestone reached
UNSW's ARC Photovoltaic Centre of Excellence has again asserted its leadership in solar cell technology by reporting the first silicon solar cell to achieve the milestone of 25 per cent effiency.... "Our main efforts now are focussed on getting these efficiency improvements into commercial production," he said. "Production compatible versions of our high efficiency technology are being introduced into production as we speak."
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Organic farming 'could feed Africa'
Organic farming offers Africa the best chance of breaking the cycle of poverty and malnutrition it has been locked in for decades, according to a major study from the United Nations to be presented today.
New evidence suggests that organic practices -- derided by some as a Western lifestyle fad -- are delivering sharp increases in yields, improvements in the soil and a boost in the income of Africa's small farmers who remain among the poorest people on earth.
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Some Nuclear Energy Backers Say Uranium Alternative Could be a Magic Bullet
In the midst of renewed global interest in nuclear energy, a long-overlooked nuclear fuel, thorium, is being re-examined as a potential solution to some of the industry's most daunting problems, including disposal of waste. Widely available in the sandy beaches of India, Australia, and the United States, among other places, thorium is a naturally occurring, slightly radioactive element that is being heralded by advocates as a safer alternative to uranium that could help limit the production of nuclear waste and prevent nuclear technology from being used for weapons rather than energy.
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Wood heat rises again
But as people polish their stoves and admire their woodpiles, environmentalists and health officials are expressing concern that burning wood in old or poorly designed stoves could add significantly to air pollution. And although wood represents a local and renewable fuel source, its credentials as a "carbon neutral" fuel -- not adding to global warming -- are hazy at best.... "I like to call it '75 percent carbon neutral,'" Mr. Gulland says. While wood burning does release carbon dioxide and methane, advocates argue that the trees would do that anyway in the forest as they die, fall over, and decompose.... "On a scale of carbon neutrality, it's better than burning a fossil fuel, but it's not the same as wind or solar," Rector says. "It's a very complicated question," she says. "We still need to let the scientists figure it out."
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California Maps a Plan to Slow Down Global Warming
...This week, the California Air Resources Board, the state agency tasked with implementing the law, released the first details of exactly what the state must do to achieve its global warming goals. In a 142-page report many experts believe could serve as a policy template for other states—and even the federal government—the board provides specific estimates of exactly how and where the state could have an impact on climate change. To return to 1990 carbon emissions levels, the plan says, the state will need to reduce its annual emissions by about 4 tons per person—from 14 tons currently to about 10 tons in 2020. The report calls this goal "ambitious but achievable."
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Pesticide Concentrations Decreasing
Over the years, frequent research has detected pesticides in ground water around the country, including in aquifers used for drinking-water supply. Over the past few decades, the use of some pesticides has been restricted or banned, while new pesticides have been introduced. One goal of the study was to track the retention of various types of contaminants that would be found in the different pesticides used over the years.... The results of this study are encouraging for the future state of the nation’s ground-water quality with respect to pesticides," said Laura Bexfield, who conducted the data analysis. "Despite sustained use of many popular pesticides and the introduction of new ones, results as a whole did not indicate increasing detection rates or concentrations in shallow or drinking-water resources over the 10 years studied."
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E.P.A. Toughens Standard on Lead Emissions; Change Is the First in 3 Decades
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday set stringent new standards for airborne lead particles, following the recommendations of its science advisers and cutting the maximum allowable concentrations to a tenth of the previous standard. It was the first change in federal lead standards in three decades.
But the cleanup of areas with excessive lead levels is not required for more than eight years, and the system of monitors that detect the toxic contaminant is frayed. Currently, 133 monitors are in operation nationwide, down from about 800 in 1980, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, Cathy Milbourn, said. The agency is working on rebuilding this network, to include more than 300 monitors, Ms. Milbourn said.
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Ban on BPA begins today
Canada will be the first country to limit the use of bisphenol A today when it formally declares the chemical a hazardous substance.
The federal government published its decision to place BPA on its list of toxic substances in the Canada Gazette. The decision comes six months after Health Minister Tony Clement announced plans to limit use of the chemical.
The Conservatives said they will now move to ban the importation and sale of baby bottles containing BPA.
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Microbes Useful For For Environmental Cleanup And Oil Recovery
BioTiger™ resulted from over eight years of extensive work that began at a century-old Polish waste lagoon. "DOE had originally funded us to work with our Polish counterparts to develop a microbe-based method for cleaning up oil-contaminated soils," explains Dr. Robin Brigmon, SRNL Fellow Engineer. From that lagoon, they identified microbes that could break down the oil to carbon dioxide and other non-hazardous products. "The project was a great success," Dr. Brigmon says. "The lagoon now has been cleaned up, and deer now can be seen grazing on it."
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New solar energy material captures every color of the rainbow
Researchers have created a new material that overcomes two of the major obstacles to solar power: it absorbs all the energy contained in sunlight, and generates electrons in a way that makes them easier to capture.... At this point, the material is years from commercial development, but he added that this experiment provides a proof of concept -- that hybrid solar cell materials such as this one can offer unusual properties.
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Obama to Declare Carbon Dioxide Dangerous Pollutant
Barack Obama will classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant that can be regulated should he win the presidential election on Nov. 4, opening the way for new rules on greenhouse gas emissions.
The Democratic senator from Illinois will tell the Environmental Protection Agency that it may use the 1990 Clean Air Act to set emissions limits on power plants and manufacturers, his energy adviser, Jason Grumet, said in an interview. President George W. Bush declined to curb CO2 emissions under the law even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the government may do so.
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Coal and clear skies: Obama's balancing act
When Barack Obama arrived in Washington as a newly elected senator in early 2005, he landed in the middle of an environmental firestorm. Obama had been assigned a seat on the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee - and the first order of business was the Clear Skies Act. The brainchild of the Bush administration, the CSA was presented as an initiative to reduce air pollution and boost the economy; it was applauded by industry groups, but drew sharp criticism from environmentalists and many Democrats, who said the move would weaken existing clean-air regulations, loosen caps on a range of air pollutants, delay the enforcement of smog and soot standards, and exempt power plants from rules requiring them to comply with modern emission standards... In the end, of course, Obama voted against Clear Skies, deadlocking the Environment committee and effectively killing the legislation.
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Send an invitation to the next U.S. President
Dear Sen. Obama/Sen. McCain: I'm writing with a simple request: attend the UN Climate Meetings this December and rejoin the world's fight against the climate crisis.
The need for an international deal has never been greater. NASA's top climate scientists have said that to avoid disaster the planet needs a plan both to cut carbon emissions sharply and immediately, and to steer a long term path back below 350 parts per million Carbon Dioxide.
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'Black Silicon' increases efficiency
Black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light. It is now on the verge of commercialization, most likely first in night vision systems.
"We have seen a 100 to 500 times increase in sensitivity to light compared to conventional silicon detectors," said James Carey, a co-founder of SiOnyx who worked on the original experiments as a Harvard graduate student.... As a result of his research, a number of academic and corporate research groups are still exploring the material, which absorbs about twice as much visible light as normal silicon...
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Using electrons to treat organic seeds
Sales of organic products are booming: Consumers want their food to be untainted. To avoid the use of fungicides yet nevertheless protect plants from disease, researchers have developed a method that involves bombarding seeds with electrons to kill fungal spores and viruses.... So what happens when the electrons hit the seeds? "It's not unlike cooking. For instance, when you make strawberry jam, the germs are killed by the high temperature -- and your jam will keep for years. The electrons destroy the chemical bonds that hold together the molecules in the fungal spores and other pathogens, but without generating heat. You might say that they cause the molecules to explode," explains Roder.
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Copper catalyst recycles carbon dioxide
RIKEN chemists have developed a catalyst that should allow carbon dioxide to be used as a versatile synthetic chemical.... Zhaomin Hou... along with colleagues Takeshi Ohishi and Masayoshi Nishiura, has now developed a copper catalyst that helps the boron compounds to react with carbon dioxide without destroying sensitive chemical groups.... "One of our goals is to find a catalyst that can transform CO2 in exhaust gasses of automobile vehicles or chemical plants into useful materials."
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A 'Green New Deal' can save the world's economy, says UN
Top economists and United Nations leaders are working on a "Green New Deal" to create millions of jobs, revive the world economy, slash poverty and avert environmental disaster, as the financial markets plunge into their deepest crisis since the Great Depression.
The ambitious plan – the start of which will be formally launched in London next week - will call on world leaders, including the new US President, to promote a massive redirection of investment away from the speculation that has caused the bursting “financial and housing bubbles” and into job-creating programmes to restore the natural systems that underpin the world economy.
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Virgin shark got pregnant in Virginia aquarium
Scientists using DNA testing have confirmed the second-known instance of "virgin birth" in a shark -- a female Atlantic blacktip shark named Tidbit that produced a baby without a male shark.
The shark came to the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach not long after being born in the wild and lived there for eight years with no males of the same species, said Beth Firchau, the aquarium's curator of fishes.
The 5-foot (1.5-meter) shark died after being removed from the tank for a veterinary examination, and a subsequent necropsy revealed that Tidbit was carrying a fully developed shark pup nearly ready to be born, Firchau said.
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Heavy Metal-Eating "Superworms" Unearthed in U.K.
Newly evolved "superworms" that feast on toxic waste could help cleanse polluted industrial land, a new study says.
These hardcore heavy metal fans, unearthed at disused mining sites in England and Wales, devour lead, zinc, arsenic, and copper. The earthworms excrete a slightly different version of the metals, making them easier for plants to suck up. Harvesting the plants would leave cleaner soil behind.
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New Climate Change Bill Unveiled in House
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Energy and Air Quality subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (D-Va.) have released a new 461-page climate change bill that they are calling a "discussion draft."
Environmental groups are praising the release of a new bill, but point out that the numbers are off, particularly on short-term targets.... [A Greenpeace spokesman says] "Faced with a four-fold increase in the rate of carbon dioxide pollution since 2000 and emerging evidence of methane emissions from the melting arctic that may accelerate global warming we simply don’t have time anymore for the half-measures and loopholes that riddle this bill."
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New Material Could Speed Development Of Hydrogen Powered Vehicles
Researchers in Greece report design of a new material that almost meets the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) 2010 goals for hydrogen storage and could help eliminate a key roadblock to practical hydrogen-powered vehicles.... In the new study, the researchers used computer modeling to design a unique hydrogen-storage structure consisting of parallel graphene sheets — layers of carbon just one atom thick —stabilized by vertical columns of [carbon nanotubes]. They also added lithium ions to the material's design to enhance its storage capacity.
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Brazil's climate change plan 'ready for public scrutiny'
The recommendations are organised into four lines of action: mitigation; vulnerability, impact and adaptation; research and development; and empowerment and divulgation.
Goals include getting 7,000 megawatts of power from renewable energy between 2008 and 2010, increasing production of ethanol from 25.6 billion litres in 2008 to 53.2 billion litres by 2017, and preventing the release 570 million tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2008 and 2017 by using biofuels.
Targets will be met by promoting sustainable development in the industrial and agricultural sectors, maintaining a high proportion of renewable energy in the electricity production, encouraging the use of biofuels in the transportation sector, and reducing deforestation.
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Dutch city kept warm by hot-water mines
Heerlen, in the southern province of Limburg, has created the first geothermal power station in the world using water heated naturally in the deep shafts of old coalmines -- which once provided the southern Netherlands with thousands of jobs but have been dormant since the 1970s.
Tapping "free energy" marks a breakthrough in green technology by exploiting the legacy of the coalmines that emitted so much pollution and helped to create the climate change emergency faced by the planet.
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Cylindrical Solar Cells Give a Whole New Meaning to Sunroof
There are approximately 30 billion square feet (2.8 billion square meters) of expansive, flat roofs in the U.S., an area large enough to collect the sunlight needed to power 16 million American homes, or replace 38 conventional coal-fired power plants. By covering these roofs with large, flat arrays of cylindrical thin-film solar cells (think massive installations of fluorescent tubes, only absorbing light rather than emitting it), Fremont, Calif.–based Solyndra, Inc., hopes to harness that energy....the newly shaped cells have the potential of harnessing solar power at around the same price as electricity from coal-fired power plants, currently the cheapest generation option at around six cents per kilowatt hour.
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Ecosystem Renovation -- Bring Them On Back
A 'lost' lake in Mali and a Kenyan forest that is the water tower for key rivers and lakes in East Africa are among two country projects aimed at bringing significant degraded and denuded ecosystems back from the brink.
The projects are among several being drawn up and spearheaded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), in cooperation with governments, to demonstrate that re-investing in damaged ecosystems can generate significant economic, environmental and social returns.
A further project proposal is being drawn up and staff being hired to restore soils, wetlands, forests and other key ecosystem on the hurricane-vulnerable island of Haiti where environmental degradation has been linked to social unrest.
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End use of fossil fuels in 20 years, UK warned
Britain must abandon using almost all fossil fuels to produce power in 20 years' time, the government's climate change watchdog will warn today.
The independent Climate Change Committee will publish its advice to the government that the UK should set a 2050 target of cutting all greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent -- including the emissions from aviation and transport, which were previously excluded.... "We have to almost totally decarbonise the power sector by 2030, well before 2050," he said.
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Atlantic Wolffish: Fearsome Fish That Deserve Protection?
... seeking endangered species protection for the Atlantic wolffish, a fish threatened with extinction due to years of overharvesting and habitat loss due to modern fishing gear. If the petition is successful, this will be the first listing of a marine fish as an endangered in New England.... According to federal statistics, the number of wolffish landed by commercial fishermen has dropped 95 percent from over 1,200 metric tons in 1983 to just 64.7 metric tons in 2007. More critically, wolffish have virtually disappeared from the annual scientific research trawls that take place twice a year in the state and federal waters of the Atlantic Ocean off the New England coast. In addition to fishing, habitat alterations are also suspected as a major threat to the wolffish. One scientist has estimated that virtually every inch of the seafloor in New England's ocean waters was impacted by commercial trawling (in which football field-sized nets are dragged through the ocean) between 1984 and 1990.
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Ecuador votes to grant rights to nature
...On Sunday, two thirds of Ecuador's citizens voted to approve a new Constitution, which notably includes a set of unprecedented articles that guarantee 'inalienable rights to nature'. The articles appear to be the first of their kind, and have sparked a global conversation...
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Scientists explore putting electric cars on a two-way power street
Think of it as the end of cars’ slacker days: No more sitting idle for hours in parking lots or garages racking up payments, but instead earning their keep by providing power to the electricity grid.
Scientists at the University of Michigan, using a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), are exploring plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) that not only use grid electricity to meet their power needs, but return it to the grid, earning money for the owner.... The concept, called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) integration, is part of a larger effort to embrace large-scale changes that are needed to improve the sustainability and resilience of the transportation and electric power infrastructures. If V2G integration succeeds, it will enable the grid to utilize PHEV batteries for storing excess renewable energy from wind and the sun, releasing this energy to grid customers when needed, such as during peak hours.
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California launches broad effort to control hazardous chemicals
California today launched the most comprehensive program of any state to evaluate, label and, in some cases, ban industrial chemicals that are linked to cancer, hormone disruption and other deadly effects on human health.... Instead of a product-by-product approach, two new laws are designed to encompass 80,000 chemicals now in circulation, focus on the most dangerous, widespread substances first and control them at the manufacturing stage, before they leach into the air, water or human skin.
The legislation, Schwarzenegger said, propels California to "the forefront of the nation and the world. . . . With these two bills, we will stop looking at toxics as an inevitable byproduct of industrial production."
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Experiment Demonstrates 110 Years of Sustainable Agriculture
A plot of land on the campus of Auburn University shows that 110 years of sustainable farming practices can produce similar cotton crops to those using other methods.
In 1896, Professor J.F. Duggar at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama (now Auburn University) started an experiment to test his theories that sustainable cotton production was possible on Alabama soils if growers would use crop rotation and include winter legumes (clovers and/or vetch) to protect the soil from winter erosion.
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NZ firm to microwave forest waste into charcoal
A New Zealand company which says it has patented world-first industrial technology to microwave forest waste is planning to offer charcoal to farmers and horticulturists who want to boost the quality of their soils.
The technology can capture significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and hold it for 10,000 years by putting the charcoal into topsoils, and at the same time improve plant growth.
The company, Carbonscape, has begun initial batch scale production of the "biochar" at its Marlborough plant.
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Nation's first greenhouse gas auction nets $38.5M
ALBANY, N.Y.—The nation's first cap-and-trade greenhouse gas auction raised nearly $40 million that will be spent by Northeast states on renewable and energy efficient technologies.
Under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, all fossil fuel-burning power plants in a 10-state region are required to buy credits to cover the carbon they emit. The results of the first of a series of quarterly auctions were released Monday.
The initiative is viewed as a possible model for a national program to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas blamed for global warming.
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No driveway carwashes, Wash. state says
Along with wild salmon and steelhead trout, the Pacific Northwest soon may have another endangered species -- the driveway carwash.
Washing your car or boat in the driveway or street is a residential ritual as American as backyard barbecues. But the state of Washington is telling its local governments they must prohibit home car washing unless residents divert the wash water away from storm drains, where they say it causes water pollution.
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Freecycle: the big green giveaway
If you haven't already come across Freecycle, the online recycling network - one of the biggest green initiatives of the past decade - it is a global network of message boards, with more than 450 groups in the UK. The beauty of it is that it transforms one person's trash into another's treasure.
You sign up to your local group, where you can post messages to say what you're offering, or looking for. No money changes hands and it's up to the person who wants an item to collect it, so you don't have to stress about how you're going to heave an unwanted futon out of your home.
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Scientists think algae may be the fuel of the future
Borculo, Netherlands -- Set amid cornfields and cow pastures in eastern Holland is a shallow pool that is rapidly turning green with algae, harvested for animal feed, skin treatments, biodegradable plastics -- and with increasing interest, biofuel... Experts say it will be years, maybe a decade, before this simplest of all plants efficiently can be processed for fuel. But when that day comes, it could go a long way toward easing the world's energy needs and responding to global warming.
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New More Efficient Ways To Use Biomass
Alternatives to fossil fuels and natural gas as carbon sources and fuel are in demand. Biomass could play a more significant part in the future. Researchers in the USA and China have now developed a new catalyst that directly converts cellulose, the most common form of biomass, into ethylene glycol, an important intermediate product for chemical industry.
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U.S. Congress passes legislation to boost solar, wind, and geothermal energy
Tuesday the U.S. Senate passed a bill that will extend tax credits on solar power installations through 2016. The House approved the measure Wednesday.
The $17 billion package will allow businesses and homeowners to deduct part of the cost of new solar installation from their income tax. The legislation would also extend incentives for wind power for one year and geothermal and biomass for two years. The tax credits would have otherwise expired at the end of the year.
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Simple device which uses electrical field could boost gas efficiency
According to Rongjia Tao, Chair of Temple's Physics Department, the small device consists of an electrically charged tube that can be attached to the fuel line of a car's engine near the fuel injector. With the use of a power supply from the vehicle's battery, the device creates an electric field that thins fuel, or reduces its viscosity, so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine. That leads to more efficient and cleaner combustion than a standard fuel injector, he says.... The results of the laboratory and road tests verifying that this simple device can boost gas mileage [up to 20 percent] was published in Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly journal published by the American Chemical Society.
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Wildlife Expert Backs Seabed Sewage Pipe
A wildlife expert yesterday applauded Scottish Water for spending £3.8m to lay a sewage pipe on the seabed near Inverness to protect dolphins, seals and porpoises.... Previously, sewage from North Kessock was simply discharged into the waters under Kessock Bridge. Now pumping stations transfer the waste through a seabed pipeline to South Kessock where it enters the Inverness system. Like the rest of the city's waste water, it is pumped to the treatment works at Allanfearn to be cleaned up, protecting the sensitive environment of the Moray Firth.
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A new law of nature
The South American republic of Ecuador will next week consider what many countries in the world would say is unthinkable. People will be asked to vote on Sunday on a new constitution that would give Ecuador's tropical forests, islands, rivers and air similar legal rights to those normally granted to humans. If they vote yes - and polls show that 56 percent are for and only 23 percent are against - then an already approved bill of rights for nature will be introduced, and new laws will change the legal status of nature from being simply property to being a right-bearing entity.
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Western states' plan aims to cut greenhouse gas
A coalition of Western states and four Canadian provinces released on Tuesday the most far-reaching plan yet for cutting emissions of the greenhouse gases that are warming the globe. The Western Climate Initiative will create a market-based system that limits carbon dioxide releases and allows polluters to trade for the right to emit the gases.
The "cap-and-trade" plan is touted by elected officials and environmentalists as a means of reducing the country's dependence on fossil fuels and gives Washington state a running start in the development of clean, green energy.
It also will help reduce the harm caused by global warming, including rising sea levels, droughts and more ferocious and frequent storms and wildfires, the officials said.
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Solution To Global Fisheries Collapse? 'Catch Shares' Could Rescue Failing Fisheries, Protect The Ocean
A study published in the September 19 issue of Science shows that an innovative yet contentious fisheries management strategy called "catch shares" can reverse fisheries collapse. Where traditional "open access" fisheries have converted to catch shares, both fishermen and the oceans have benefited... The results of the study are striking: while nearly a third of open-access fisheries have collapsed, the number is only half that for fisheries managed under catch share systems. Furthermore, the authors show that catch shares reverse the overall downward trajectory for fisheries worldwide, and that this beneficial effect strengthens over time.
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Abu Dhabi tries to save the dumpy 'lady of the sea'
The city's expansion along the coastal belt has encroached on the dugongs' habitat, and dredging has disturbed the seagrass beds, the mammal's only source of food, explained Thabit Zahran al Abdessalaam, the director of the marine biodiversity management sector at the EAD.
"Abu Dubai is attractive for dugongs as almost all the sea grass beds in the entire UAE are here," he said, adding that dugongs are protected under UAE law and anyone found to be harming them can be prosecuted.
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Xerox Invents Reusable Paper that Uses UV Light for "Ink"
Xerox subsidiary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has developed a type of paper that, combined with a special printer, can print documents that erase themselves after a day so that the paper can be reused.
Xerox says that 25 percent of all documents get recycled the same day they are printed, and that 44.5 percent are intended only for a single viewing. Using the new printer and paper for one-shot documents like daily menus, work summaries and office memos could vastly reduce paper and energy use, the company said.
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Twelve-Year-Old May Hold Key to Solar Energy
One significant problem with existing solar technology is that it's not terribly efficient at harvesting solar energy and turning it into electricity. Solar technology is improving all the time, but one 12-year-old boy may have the key to making solar panels that can harness 500 times the light of a traditional solar cell. William Yuan is a seventh grader in Oregon whose project, titled "A Highly-Efficient 3-Dimensional Nanotube Solar Cell for Visible and UV Light," may change the energy industry and make solar energy far easier to harness and distribute.
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From Sugar to Gasoline
Following independent paths of investigation, two research teams are announcing this month that they have successfully converted sugar -- potentially derived from agricultural waste and non-food plants -- into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and a range of other valuable chemicals.... While several years of further development will be needed to refine the process and scale it for production, the promise of gasoline and other petrochemicals from renewable plants has led to broad industrial interest.
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Chicago outlines plan to slash greenhouse gases
CHICAGO -- Mayor Richard M. Daley has announced a plan to dramatically slash emissions of heat-trapping gases, part of an effort to fight global warming and become one of the greenest cities in the nation.
The plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to three-fourths of 1990 levels by 2020 through more energy-efficient buildings, using clean and renewable energy sources, improving transportation and reducing industrial pollution.
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Discovery waters down fears of fast-melting ice
A team of Canadian researchers has unearthed the most ancient ice ever found in North America - 700,000-year-old wedges that didn't melt when the Earth was much balmier than it is today.
The scientists say their discovery means the permafrost that covers a quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere may not release its vast stores of carbon as quickly as some experts fear.
That's not to say one of the most catastrophic global-warming scenarios isn't going to happen, said Duane Froese.... It will just happen more slowly, he said.
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Tar sands -- the new toxic investment
Shell and BP have been warned by investors that their involvement in unconventional energy production such as Canada's oil sands could turn out to be the industry's equivalent of the sub-prime lending that poisoned the banking sector and triggered the current financial crisis.... The Canadian tar sands are estimated to contain as much as 180bn barrels of oil but the environmental groups warn that extracting bitumen and upgrading it to synthetic crude oil is three to five times more greenhouse gas intensive than conventional oil extraction.
Upgrading a single barrel of tar sand bitumen for use in a conventional refinery also requires 14 cubic metres of natural gas, leading to huge demand for gas and supply infrastructure in remote regions of Canada. Enormous amounts of water are also needed in the process.
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Wal-Mart Abandons Milk From Hormone-Treated Cows
Wal-Mart said that its decision came in response to rising consumer demand for hormone-free milk.
"We've listened to customers and are pleased that our suppliers are helping us offer Great Value milk from cows that are not treated with rBST," said Wal-Mart general merchandise manager Pam Kohn.
Wal-Mart is the largest grocery retailer in the United States, with more than 4,000 stores, and the country's largest retail seller of organic milk.
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Fuel-Efficiency Ratings for Tires Proposed
Congress has ordered the implementation by the end of 2009 of a national consumer information program whose goal will be to produce ratings on passenger tire fuel-efficiency, although regulations will not require tires to be labeled with the ratings.
Tires affect vehicle fuel economy through their rolling resistance. As a tire rolls under the weight of a vehicle, its shape changes repeatedly, causing loss of energy in the form of heat, which in turn causes the vehicle to use more fuel to maintain speed. Some of the key variables in a tire's rolling resistance are its tread design and composition, inflation pressure, and level of maintenance.
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U.S. Judge Reverses Plan to Expand Snowmobile Access in National Parks
Handing environmentalists a major victory, a federal judge yesterday overturned the Bush administration's plan to allow hundreds more snowmobiles to traverse Yellowstone and other iconic national parks each winter. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan threw out the National Park Service's 2007 plan, calling it "arbitrary and capricious, unsupported by the record, and contrary to law."
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China to become world's largest investor in green energy
Last year, China spent 6 billion pounds on renewable energy projects, just slightly short of Germany, the world leader. This year, the Communist Party has vowed to redouble its efforts. Li Junfeng, an energy expert at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said that in terms of the "overall scale of renewable energy development", China already leads the way.
Greenpeace believes China can shortly produce half of its energy from renewable sources.
"The task is tough and our time is limited," said Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, earlier this year.
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Waste: Oil price fuels expansion of plastic recycling
Plastics recycling in the UK is booming. The number of bottles collected by local authorities has shot up nearly 70 percent in the past year giving processing businesses increased security of supply.
The industry has also been boosted by high oil prices, which have pushed up the value of plastic recyclate and virgin resin by about 10 percent in the past year. Virgin resin is now worth about £950 a tonne and recyclate only 5 percent less.
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Small 'urban poultry' movement has residents raising chickens from scratch
Eating from the home garden is typically limited to fruits and vegetables.
But a small and determined flock of city and suburban residents is adding another food group to their homegrown bounty: eggs laid by chickens they are raising in their own backyards.
"I really want to be living on a farm, but I have to live in the city for my husband. This is a way to bring myself a little closer to food security and sustainability," says Kate Mendenhall, a projects coordinator for Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York and founder of the Rochester City Chicken Club.
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Sustainability Starts in Your Own Back Yard
But we now know that native plants can endure without synthetic chemicals or fertilizer, or much watering or labor, once established. And that insects that depend on native plants are important food for birds.
Knowing this, gardeners can take steps to promote sustainability in their landscapes. It involves how you use your property -- everything you own. Here are some key steps that will help you to create a sustainable gardening culture and promote renewable energy:
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Earthworms to aid soil clean-up
Researchers at Reading University found that subtle changes occurred in metals as worms ingested and excreted soil.
These changes make it easier for plants to take up potentially toxic metals from contaminated land.
Earthworms could be the future "21st Century eco-warriors", scientists suggested at the British Association Science Festival in Liverpool.
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Australian researchers discover elusive frog
The 1.5 inch-long Armoured Mistfrog had not been seen since 1991, and many experts assumed it had been wiped out by a devastating fungus that struck northern Queensland state.
But two months ago, a doctoral student at James Cook University in Townsville conducting research on another frog species in Queensland stumbled across what appeared to be several Armoured Mistfrogs in a creek, said professor Ross Alford, head of a research team on threatened frogs at the university.
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Cleared: Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law
The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.
Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change.
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Old growth forests are valuable carbon sinks
Contrary to 40 years of conventional wisdom, a new analysis to be published Friday in the journal Nature suggests that old growth forests are usually "carbon sinks" -- they continue to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and mitigate climate change for centuries.... "Carbon accounting rules for forests should give credit for leaving old growth forest intact," researchers from Oregon State University and several other institutions concluded... "Much of this carbon, even soil carbon, will move back to the atmosphere if these forests are disturbed."
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Climate scientist aims to get 1million students to vote on presidential candidates' green energy records
Renowned climate scientist James Hansen today lent his voice to a US voter organising drive with an ambitious goal: enlisting 1m students who will cast their vote for the presidential candidate with the greenest energy record.
The organising push, dubbed Power Vote, aims to harness young people's unprecedented engagement in the US elections and keep enthusiasm high for stronger action against climate change.
Power Vote plans to dispatch organisers to college campuses across America, educating students about climate policy and capturing their information for mobilisation to the polls in November.
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Scientists point to forests for carbon storage solutions
The researchers' calculations suggest that carbon storage in Midwestern forests could offset the greenhouse gas emissions of almost two-thirds of nearby populations, and that proper management of forests could sustain or increase their storage capacity for future generations.
Based on measurements taken between 1999 and 2005 at a forest study site in northern Michigan, the scientists have determined that similar upper Midwest forests covering an estimated 40,000 square miles store an average of 1,300 pounds of carbon per acre per year.
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Ebay launches WorldOfGood.com
The site's mission: to preserve "People Positive and Eco Positive" principles that make a positive impact on the people that make them, as well as the environment. In essence, it's similar to The Body Shop: buy ecologically sound products, while allowing the seller to charge a fair price.
All products, producers and sellers are verified by various third parties called Trust Providers -- like TransFair USA (Fair Trade Certified), Co-op America and Aid to Artisans -- to meet a core set of ethical and environmental standards, according to the site. Some example items: an artisan-crafted plate from Chile, banana-fiber animal napkin rings from Kenya, and a stuffed llama from Peru.
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Canadians more willing to ride the bus, but transit systems are letting them down
A survey commissioned by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Canadian Urban Transit Association found that consumers want to take public transit, but lack of buses and trains plus long waiting times are acting as a deterrent.
More than 40 per cent of those questioned said they would seriously consider taking local transit if gas prices continue to rise. The responses suggest that transit ridership could triple as a result of higher gas prices, a joint news release from the FCM and CUTA said.
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B.C. anglers catch a 70-year-old fish, 3.2 metres long, then release it
Rod Toth was on the river near Chilliwack, B.C., Aug. 27 when he hooked the massive sturgeon. For nearly three hours the five men wrestled to bring the sturgeon to the surface, taking turns cranking the reel, slowly hauling the fish through the murky water.
"We didn't see it until the very end," Mr. Toth said. And when Mr. Toth's four clients finally laid eyes on the sturgeon, well, some language is best left on the river, the guide said.... On shore they tagged the fish, held onto its rough skin for the mother of all fish photos and released the sturgeon.
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Public Involvement Usually Leads To Better Environmental Decision Making
"When done correctly, public participation improves the quality of federal agencies' decisions about the environment, says a new report from the National Research Council. Well-managed public involvement also increases the legitimacy of decisions in the eyes of those affected by them, which makes it more likely that the decisions will be implemented effectively."
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VIDEO: Sun Used to Purify Water
"Just 48 hours of sunlight can kill germs that cause cholera, typhoid, and other diseases�a discovery that's already helping Kenya's poor."
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US Treasury launches Environment and Energy Office
The new Office for Environment and Energy is to be headed up by William A Pizer, a former director at research body Resources for the Future and white house economic adviser on energy issues, and will be tasked with developing, co-ordinating and executing the Treasury's role in both domestic and international energy and green policy.
In particular, the office will be tasked with managing the multi-billion dollar Clean Technology Fund announced earlier this year by President Bush and intended to accelerate the development of low carbon technologies in developing economies.
It will also be responsible for the US Tropical Forest Conservation Act and the Global Environmental Facility, as well as the development of new financial mechanisms and initiatives for tackling climate change.
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Unexpected large monkey population discovered
A WCS report reveals surprisingly large populations of two globally threatened primates in a protected area in Cambodia.
The report counted 42,000 black-shanked douc langurs along with 2,500 yellow-cheeked crested gibbons in Cambodia's Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area, an estimate that represents the largest known populations for both species in the world.... The scientists believe total populations within the wider landscape may be considerably greater.
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Bittern numbers up almost 50 per cent
Bittern numbers are up almost 50 per cent on last year after the best nesting season for 130 years, according to the RSPB. This year 75 male bitterns were recorded in English reed beds, a 47 per cent increase on 2007 and a huge 581 per cent increase in the numbers recorded in 1997 when the UK population plummeted to a low of just 11 booming males, all in England.
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Loggerhead nesters have banner year
Rare loggerhead sea turtles are having a terrific nesting season on the Grand Strand and have been laying eggs on local beaches in higher and higher numbers.
Still, biologists warn that the population of the mammoth turtles, which can weigh up to 300 pounds, remains fragile. And the federal government is considering a proposal to classify loggerheads as endangered after 30 years of listing them as a threatened species.... This year, a rare Kemp's ridley turtle has laid 84 eggs in a nest on Pawleys Island, McClary said. It is only the second nest in South Carolina for a Kemp's ridley, the most endangered turtle in the world.
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Half of Australia untouched by humans, says study by Pew Environment Group
Nearly half of Australia is largely untouched by Man, making it one of the biggest wildernesses in the world, ranking alongside the Amazon rainforest and Antarctica, a new study has found.... The other two great remaining wilderness areas in the world are the Sahara and the northern Boreal forest in Canada.
"As the world's last great wilderness areas disappear under pressure from human impact, to have a continent with this much remaining wilderness intact is unusual and globally significant," Dr Traill added.
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Go green and stay out of the red
Environmental measures could be the answer to combating the downturn with new research launched today showing that waste prevention, using less raw material and energy recovery will be crucial to saving UK companies money in the face of economic recession.... The research, says Envirowise, shows growing recognition that waste minimisation and resource efficiency have become business imperatives in the current economic climate if companies are going to reduce costs and keep up their green credentials.
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Slow Food movement could finally be picking up speed in the United States
Slow Food USA is about to make its first major foray into the U.S. cultural and political scenes. Tens of thousands of people are expected to attend Slow Food Nation over Labour Day weekend in San Francisco, a Woodstock-like festival and symposium meant to underscore the connection between planet and plate.
It's the first serious test of whether Slow Food - a philosophy born in Europe and often hobbled by a snob factor - can evolve into a movement capable of altering the appetite of the average American....
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PANIQuiz for August 18-25 now available
What is Ecojel? Why has the Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit against the EPA? What does Carbonfootprint.com have to say about Madonna's world tour carbon footprint? According to the Institute of Polar Environment, how is arsenic getting into Antarctic soil? These questions and more, for your entertainment and dismay.
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Future for clean energy lies in 'big bang' of evolution
Dramatic progress has been made over the last decade understanding the fundamental reaction of photosynthesis that evolved in cyanobacteria 3.7 billion years ago, which for the first time used water molecules as a source of electrons to transport energy derived from sunlight, while converting carbon dioxide into oxygen.... For humans now there is the tantalising possibility of tweaking the photosynthetic reactions of cyanobacteria to produce fuels we want such as hydrogen, alcohols or even hydrocarbons, rather than carbohydrates.
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New rays of hope for solar power's future
"From five miles away, the Nevada Solar One power plant seems a mirage, a silver lake amid waves of 110 degree F. desert heat. Driving nearer, the rippling image morphs into a sea of mirrors angled to the sun.
As the first commercial "concentrating solar power" or CSP plant built in 17 years, Nevada Solar One marks the reemergence and updating of a decades-old technology that could play a large new role in US power production, many observers say...
Spread in military rows across 300 acres of sun-baked earth, Nevada Solar One’s trough-shaped parabolic mirrors are the core of this CSP plant – also called a "solar thermal" plant. The mirrors focus sunlight onto receiver tubes, heating a fluid that, at 735 degrees F., flows through a heat exchanger to a steam generator that supplies 64 megawatts of electricity to 14,000 Las Vegas homes."
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Biodiesel Byproduct Converted Into Omega-3 Fatty Acids
The typical American diet often lacks omega-3 fatty acids despite clinical research that shows their potential human health benefits. Zhiyou Wen, assistant professor of biological systems engineering in Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, found a way to grow these compounds using a byproduct of the emerging biodiesel industry.
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A new biopesticide for the organic food boom
With the boom in consumption of organic foods creating a pressing need for natural insecticides and herbicides that can be used on crops certified as "organic," biopesticide pioneer Pam G. Marrone, Ph.D., is reporting development of a new "green" pesticide obtained from an extract of the giant knotweed.... "The product is safe to humans, animals, and the environment," says Marrone... The new biopesticide has active compounds that alert plant defenses to combat a range of diseases, including powdery mildew, gray mold and bacterial blight that affect fruits, vegetables, and ornamentals.
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Japan to launch carbon footprint labelling scheme
Japan is to carry carbon footprint labels on food packaging and other products in an ambitious scheme to persuade companies and consumers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
The labels, to appear on dozens of items including food and drink, detergents and electrical appliances from next spring, will go further than similar labels already in use elsewhere.
They will provide detailed breakdowns of each product's carbon footprint under a government-approved calculation and labeling system now being discussed by the trade ministry and around 30 firms.
The labels will show how much carbon dioxide is emitted during the manufacture, distribution and disposal of each product, the ministry said.
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A better way to make hydrogen from biofuels
Researchers here have found a way to convert ethanol and other biofuels into hydrogen very efficiently.
A new catalyst makes hydrogen from ethanol with 90 percent yield, at a workable temperature, and using inexpensive ingredients.
Umit Ozkan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State University, said that the new catalyst is much less expensive than others being developed around the world, because it does not contain precious metals, such as platinum or rhodium. "Rhodium is used most often for this kind of catalyst, and it costs around $9,000 an ounce," Ozkan said. "Our catalyst costs around $9 a kilogram."
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Green catalysts provide promise for cleaning toxins and pollutants
Tetra-Amido Macrocyclic Ligands (TAMLs) are environmentally friendly catalysts with a host of applications for reducing and cleaning up pollutants, and a prime example of "green chemistry".... The oxidation catalysts are the first highly effective mimics of peroxidase enzymes. When partnered with hydrogen peroxide, they are able to convert harmful pollutants into less toxic substances.
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Green burials cost less and are earth-friendly
"...Though burials come in many shades, the greenest involve cemeteries that look less like golf courses and more like nature preserves, caskets made of cardboard and bodies that aren't juiced up with embalming fluids -- all at a fraction of the cost of a traditional burial... Not confined to the tree huggers of the Pacific Northwest, green cemeteries have opened in places such as the South Carolina foothills and northeastern Ohio."
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In the face of environmental disaster, more Chinese are going green
"While Olympic visitors from around the world get a firsthand glimpse this month at China's pollution problems, a homegrown movement is racing to ward off what many here predict could be epic environmental meltdown.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese are taking the first steps to turn the tide, fueled by growing unhappiness with the plunging quality of life caused by out-of-control environmental degradation."
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National Trust cuts plastic bags by 95 per cent with 5p charge
Its clampdown on the "plastic poison", blamed for harming wildlife and blighting the environment, follows similar successes at High Street stores and supermarkets across the country.... Thousands of customers have opted to either recycle old bags or invest in hessian and canvas, and the Government has warned of a mandatory charge for those retailers who do not get onboard the anti-waste bandwagon.
The National Trust as part of a wider campaign to become more environmentally-friendly.
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High gas prices cut driving for 8th month: government
Americans scaled back their driving during June by almost 5 percent in response to soaring fuel costs, the government said on Wednesday -- a day after announcing the biggest six-month drop in U.S. petroleum demand in 26 years...."Changes in consumer behavior have essentially erased five years of growth in gasoline demand," the American Petroleum Institute said on Wednesday in a separate report that showed gasoline use during the first seven months of 2008 fell by 2.1 percent to the lowest level for the period in five years.
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First Ever National Initiative to Establish Sustainable Agriculture Standard (SCS-001) Enters Next Important Phase
Sustainability is widely understood to encompass environmental, social, and economic parameters, dating back to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. For agricultural products, safety and quality parameters are also a key part of the sustainability discussion. SCS-001, the draft standard that will serve as the starting point for discussions, also addresses the impacts of product packaging, the responsibilities of the supply chain, and agricultural practices that can minimize greenhouse gases.
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Victory gardens popular again
In the days of my childhood, during World War II, Victory Gardens were the height of popularity and patriotism. Now Americans' thinking has come full circle, and I see and hear the term "victory garden" frequently.
Victory gardens, where Americans raised their own fruit and vegetables, often the first time for many, were commonplace during those war years. Some also planted flowers for cheer in an uncertain world of black-outs and food shortages and rationing.... Today, with gas and food, not necessarily rationed, but definitely at higher prices, more people have been thinking about raising and preserving their own food this summer. The term of 65 years ago came to someone's mind, so they're referred to these as Victory Gardens again, when people, who have never done so or rarely, begin planting gardens.
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Humpback whales make a comeback
Humpback whales are making a comeback more than 40 years after a ban on commercial hunting was brought in to save them from extinction.
Marine biologists estimate that the number of humpbacks worldwide may have grown to more than 40,000 adults and about 15,000 juveniles, following the ban that began in the 1960s. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has revised its classification of the whales as "vulnerable" to "of least concern" on its latest annual list of endangered animals.
The southern right whale population has also begun to recover -- the number of these is believed to have doubled from 7,500 in 1997.
Randall Reeves of the IUCN said: "This is a great conservation success and shows what needs to be done to ensure these ocean giants survive."
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"Anti-noise" silences wind turbines
IWU researchers have developed an active damping system for wind turbines.... "These systems react autonomously to any change in frequency and damp the noise -- regardless of how fast the wind generator is turning," says Illgen. The key components of this system are piezo actuators. These devices convert electric current into mechanical motion and generate "negative vibrations," or a kind of anti-noise that precisely counteracts the vibrations of the wind turbine and cancels them out.
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Landmark Ruling Requires Aggressive Action to Protect Puget Sound from Stormwater
In a landmark decision, the Washington Pollution Control Hearings Board today issued a ruling requiring that cities and counties around Puget Sound take more aggressive steps to reduce stormwater runoff. The board struck down provisions in two regionwide permits as inadequate, and concluded that greater use of "low impact development" techniques is required to meet the governing legal standards. The permits are issued by the state Department of Ecology, which must now reissue them.
"This is a great day for Puget Sound," said Kathy Fletcher, Executive Director of People for Puget Sound. "This ruling gets us one big step closer to the Puget Sound Partnership's goal of recovering Puget Sound by 2020."
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Recyclers are cashing in on the fortune in your bin
... Many are locked into 20 to 30-year contracts with recycling companies and are unable to cash in on the higher cost of plastic and copper.
As the cost of commodities rises it increasingly makes sense for manufacturers to retrieve materials from rubbish instead of buying them new. Town hall leaders have told The Times that the sector is missing out on millions of pounds that would come from trading commodities themselves or negotiating better contracts. They said that such profits could go to improving local services and even cutting bills... Westminster council, which has a seven-year contract to share profits as prices rise, believes that town halls are sitting on a fortune. "Where there's muck there's brass," Mark Banks, Westminster's waste strategy manager, said. Any profit made will be ploughed back into services or to lower council tax rises, he said.
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Military wants to lead U.S. into the green
"The U.S. military has a history of fostering change, from racial integration to development of the Internet. Now, Pentagon officials say their green energy efforts will help America fight global warming. By size alone, the Defence Department can make waves. It accounts for 1.5 percent of U.S. energy consumption."
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Massive Numbers Of Critically Endangered Western Lowland Gorillas Discovered In Republic Of Congo
"The world's population of critically endangered western lowland gorillas recently received a huge boost when the Wildlife Conservation Society released a census showing massive numbers of these secretive great apes alive and well in the Republic of Congo."
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Polluted Ganges must be cleaned, gurus demand
"A coalition of gurus has issued an ultimatum to India's fragile Government: purify the chronically polluted Ganges, the river revered by Hindus, or face protests and political ruin.
Ganga Raksha Manch, a newly formed alliance of celebrity holy men, is demanding urgent action to cleanse the holy waterway, which has become a noxious cocktail of human and industrial waste, before a general election that must be held before May."
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Newsom signs strict green building codes into law
"San Francisco took a major step Monday to cement its reputation as the most environmentally progressive city in the United States, as Mayor Gavin Newsom signed into law stringent green building codes for new construction and renovations of existing structures in the city. The new codes focus on water and energy conservation, recycling and reduction of carbon emissions."
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Genetically Modified Root Systems Result In Plants That Survive With Little Water
"A part of the global food crisis is the inefficiency of current irrigation methods. More irrigated water evaporates than reaches the roots of crops, amounting to an enormous waste of water and energy. Tel Aviv University researchers, however, are investigating a new solution that turns the problem upside-down, getting to the root of the issue. They are genetically modifying plants' root systems to improve their ability to find the water essential to their survival."
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Pickens, Gore Sidestep Differences in Alternative-Energy Quest
"The most unlikely alliance in this election year hasn't come out of any political campaign. It's in the convergence of interests between billionaire oilman and Republican Party backer T. Boone Pickens and former vice president turned environmentalist Al Gore.
Gore, the Democratic Party's 2000 standard-bearer, and Pickens, who helped bankroll the group that questioned Democrat John Kerry's war record in the 2004 presidential race, are pursuing separate paths toward a shared goal: cutting U.S. dependence on oil."
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Senate Passes Bill That Would Protect Great Lakes
Efforts to protect the Great Lakes from those who may covet their vast quantities of water for an increasingly thirsty world took a major step forward Friday as the Senate passed legislation endorsing the Great Lakes Basin Compact.
The broad multi-state agreement would ban most diversion of Great Lakes water to any place outside the basin and would mandate conservation efforts inside it. Despite what some criticized as significant loopholes in the measure, House leaders said the bill would be a priority after the five-week congressional recess, and President Bush has said he would sign it.
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The emerging scientific discipline of aeroecology
Organisms that use the aerosphere, specifically arthropods, birds and bats, are also influenced by an increasing number of anthropogenic or man-made conditions and structures, notably lighted towns and cities, air pollution, skyscrapers, aircraft, radio and television towers, plus a recent proliferation of communication towers and wind turbines that dot the Earth's landscape.
In addition, human-altered landscapes increasing are characterized by deforestation, intensive agriculture, urbanization, and assorted industrial activities that are rapidly and irreversibly transforming the quantity and quality of available terrestrial and aquatic habitats which airborne organisms rely upon. These conditions are known to influence navigational cues, sources of food, water, nesting and roosting habitats--factors that can, in turn, alter the structure and function of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and the assemblages of organisms.
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Host of new pylons to carry wind farm power
A report due this autumn will warn that if Britain is serious about a low-carbon economy then it must string potentially thousands of miles of new high-voltage power cables across the country. The infrastructure is vital, experts say, because most renewable energy will be generated in remote areas such as northern Scotland or the North Sea – whereas most consumers live in southern Britain.... "We are moving from a system dominated by a small number of large power stations to something far more diverse. Our network needs to adapt rapidly to those changes."
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Building a Greener America
"Forget the common icons of global warming. Fuming tailpipes and industrial smokestacks, it turns out, are less culpable for climate change than a set of offenders hidden in plain sight: buildings. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, buildings are responsible for almost half of all annual greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., consuming more than three-quarters of all the electricity produced by American power plants."
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Major Discovery From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution
"In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine."
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Online Hitchhiking
"If you're really trying to save on gas you might like to know that there's a new way to hitchhike... ZimRide allows people to find rides online."
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Northern Wildfire Smoke May Delay Arctic Warming
The Arctic may get some temporary relief from global warming if the annual North American wildfire season intensifies, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Colorado and NOAA. Smoke transported to the Arctic from northern forest fires may cool the surface for several weeks to months at a time, according to the most detailed analysis yet of how smoke influences the Arctic climate relative to the amount of snow and ice cover.
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Green, Greener, Greenest
"...Green is good for the planet, but also for a college's public image. In a Princeton Review survey this year of 10,300 college applicants, 63 percent said that a college's commitment to the environment could affect their decision to go there."
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New Material May Help Autos Turn Heat Into Electricity
"Researchers have invented a new material that will make cars even more efficient, by converting heat wasted through engine exhaust into electricity. In the current issue of the journal Science, they describe a material with twice the efficiency of anything currently on the market."
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