Category Archives: environmentalism

2013 Is The Time For The Solar Decathlon – If I was in college I would be there

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Most colleges could stand to turn the energy spotlight on themselves. The University of Illinois for instance is still using a coal fired boiler from the 50s. Still this is a step in the right direction.

http://www.livescience.com/20710-solar-decathlon-nsf-bts.html

Planned For Solar Decathlon 2013

Monica Kanojia , National Science Foundation
Date: 01 June 2012 Time: 05:24 PM ET

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Every two years, the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon encourages competing collegiate teams to design energy-efficient homes that use solar energy.

Launched in 2002, the Solar Decathlon is both an educational and workforce-development program. The competition enlists nearly two dozen teams of students, from various academic backgrounds, who design sustainable homes from the ground up, engineering them with materials provided by major corporate sponsors.

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More tomorrow.

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Solar Power In The Mohave Desert – What a great use of a resource

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It doesn’t hurt that they got an environmental award as well. This the way it should be done.

http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/the-ivanpah-solar-project-named-2012-energy-project-of-the-year

The Ivanpah Solar Project Named 2012 Energy Project of the Year

April 24, 2012

Project recognized for its innovative approach, job creation and scale of clean energy production

(LOS ANGELES, Calif.) April 24, 2012 – NRG Energy, Google, BrightSource Energy and EPC partner Bechtel announced that the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (Ivanpah SEGS) received the 2012 Energy Project of the Year Award by the USC CMAA Green Symposium. Ivanpah SEGS in California’s Mojave Desert is currently the world’s largest concentrating solar power (CSP) plant under construction. When completed, it will nearly double the amount of solar thermal electricity produced in the US.

“The sheer magnitude of the Ivanpah project is reinforcing California’s position as the leader of renewable energy in the United States,” said Caroline Fletcher, USC Green Symposium Co-Chair. “The project has demonstrated an innovative approach to partnerships and is significantly contributing to job creation in the region. We’re very pleased to honor this important project with our 2012 Energy Project of the Year Award.”

“Ivanpah is a flagship project, widely recognized for its environmentally-responsible design, and lauded for its role in helping to grow Southern California’s High Desert economy,” said Joe Desmond, SVP of Government Relations and Communications, BrightSource Energy. “We look forward to completing this important solar power facility and help California meet its economic and clean energy goals.”

“We are pleased to be a part of this award-winning project. The innovation applied to the engineering and construction of Ivanpah will help advance the renewable energy industry and make solar energy a viable option for more people,” said Jim Ivany, president of renewable power at Bechtel.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Finally A Plausible Tidal Energy Program – If it is not Scottish it is rubbish

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I skip the light fandango.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-06/15/scottish-undersea-turbines

Technology

Largest tidal arrays in the world to be built in Scotland

15 June 12

Scotland will see the world’s largest tidal arrays constructed off its coast, as the first large-scale rollout of tidal energy generation.

A trial with one 30m turbine, the HS1000, anchored to the ocean floor in a fast-flowing channel near the Orkney Islands, raised one megawatt of electricity — enough to power around 500 homes. Now, Scottish Power is planning on building two farms of turbines off the Scottish coast.

The project at the Sound of Islay should hopefully generate 10MW, and then the later project off Duncansby Head (the most northeasterly point of Scotland) should generate around 95MW. While individual turbines have been trialled across the world, the arrays will be the largest of their kind, with local communities having their power provided by renewable tidal sources.

The turbines — built by Andritz Hydro Hammerfest, a Norwegian firm — represent a tricky engineering challenge. Considerations for wild plants and fish means that the blades can’t move too fast, and the turbines must be located in areas where there is a reliably fast current travelling at at least 2.5m/s (such as the Sound of Islay, a narrow passage between the Scottish mainland and the island of Jura).

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Rocky Mountain Flats Sucked Then – And it still sucks now

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All they did really was put out the fires and bury the remains. It sits there moldering to this day. They cleaned up the first 3 ft. of soil and tore down the buldings. The buildings and other materials were shipped to New Mexico and Nevada for storage. See first, the history of Rocky Flats:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant

The Rocky Flats Plant was a United States nuclear weapons production facility near Denver, Colorado that operated from 1952 to 1992. It was under the control of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) until 1977, when it was replaced by the Department of Energy (DOE).

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Then see her book:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/books/book-review-full-body-burden-by-kristen-iversen.html?_r=0

Publication Date: June 5, 2012

Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated “the most contaminated site in America.” It’s the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and–unknown to those who lived there–tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.

It’s also a book about the destructive power of secrets–both family and government. Her father’s hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats (cleaning supplies, her mother guessed)–best not to inquire too deeply into any of it.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Climate Change Forces Us To Move Animals – Noah’s ark comes to life

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Already a group of scientists and volunteers moved a butterfly north because of the warming climate. Our zoos are being referred to as “lifeboats” for extinct “in the wild” animals. This is no longer funny. People should be going to jail for this but it turns out that jails are only for poor people and white collar criminals not the uber wealthy who control the literal power structure that is causing this.

http://www.livescience.com/17719-species-extinctions-climate-change.html

Extinctions from Climate Change Underestimated

Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 04 January 2012 Time: 09:31 AM ET

As climate change progresses, the planet may lose more plant and animal species than predicted, a new modeling study suggests.

This is because current predictions overlook two important factors: the differences in how quickly species relocate and competition among species, according to the researchers, led by Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut.

Already evidence suggests that species have begun to migrate out of ranges made inhospitable by climate change and into newly hospitable territory.

“We have really sophisticated meteorological models for predicting climate change,” Urban said in a statement. “But in real life, animals move around, they compete, they parasitize each other and they eat each other. The majority of our predictions don’t include these important interactions.”

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Hot Fun In The Summertime – Acting eco friendly is important

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This is just a fun little site for kids. We are on summer vacation after all.

http://green.thefuntimesguide.com/2012/03/living-green.php

Americans Are Becoming More Environmentally Aware & Conscious Of Their Behaviors

A new national survey of more than 1,000 Americans found that ‘being green’ is becoming more mainstream and has less of a stigma tied to it than it once did.

According to the survey, getting caught littering is more embarrassing to Americans than getting caught cheating on taxes.

Other behaviors that people admit to being socially aware that they’re doing include:

  • not recycling plastic bottles
  • driving a vehicles that gets only a few miles per gallon
  • letting the water run while brushing teeth

It’s clear that it is no longer just a highly motivated ‘few’ who are conscious about their own environmentally friendly actions these days.

It’s The Little Things

For most, it’s important to start small in order to stay committed to living green.

In  my case, I set a few simple actions as my New Year’s Resolutions a few years ago.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Milwaukee Has A Pretty Phenomenal Transition Movement – Maybe this post will stay

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I tried to post about the Transition Movement in Milwaukee last year or the year before and got slammed for it by some editor/publisher woman there for using “too much” copyrighted text. She also dissed my unorthodox style. So I took the post down and replaced it with one about transition groups in Boston or Los Angeles. Maybe even the mothership in England. Let us see how this goes this time around.

http://onmilwaukee.com/living/articles/transitionmilwaukee.html?viewall=1

Transition Milwaukee: “we’re all in this together”

By Royal Brevväxling RSS Feed
Special to OnMilwaukee.com

E-mail author | Author bio
More articles by Royal Brevväxlin

Published May 30, 2012 at 5:31 a.m.

Transition Milwaukee (TM) is part of an international movement formed, in part, in response to the peak oil crisis and more generally around issues of climate change, economic security and permaculture principles.

Peak oil is a non-controversial acknowledgement from government, academic and industry experts that fossil fuels, a finite resource, reach a peak moment of production and necessarily begin to decline.

Any controversy that peak oil generates is from determining when this peak production will occur, from a few decades into the future to it already peaking in 2007. Bigger questions about what a society that can’t rely on fossil fuels looks like also stir up debate – and emotions.

Permaculture principles are those that inform design and systems theories about how to develop not only sustainable but self-maintained and regenerative ecological systems. Modern agriculture and societies based on oil consumption are not regarded as sustainable.

TM’s goals involve a “whole-systems” approach toward making our economies sustainable and regenerative for seven generations into the future.

“Right now, Transition Milwaukee acts as a network of concerned activists who are working toward reducing the radius in which we get our goods and services, food, water and shelter,” says Jessica Cohodes, TM steering committee leader, press contact and “big-picture synthesizer.”

Members of TM don’t really have official titles. Although it has a steering committee, TM is organized non-hierarchically.

“Transition Milwaukee has always been a group, grass-roots endeavor about the community, from the ground up. Part of its founding philosophy is that it isn’t someone else’s job to get us off oil, but our job,” says Erik Lindberg, a former TM steering committee member who regularly gives presentations on energy and the environment.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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Car Gets Over 2000 MPG – Well it is not really street legal but it is still amazing

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If we could all get this kinda performance out of a 50cc engine we would be…well geniuses like the ones at Cal Poly. It is a little cramped and probablely hot but 2000 miles is a long trip at 30 miles per hour. So while the headline is deceptive, this is an amazing accomplishment.

http://inhabitat.com/students-build-black-widow-supercar-that-gets-2752-3-mpg/

Students Build Black Widow Supercar that Gets 2752.3 MPG

by Ariel Schwartz, 02/19/10
Think claims of electric vehicles that get over 200 MPG are impressive? Try this on for size: a group of mechanical engineering students at Cal Poly have developed a vehicle that can get up to 2752.3 MPG — and it doesn’t even use batteries.
The Cal Poly Supermileage Team‘s wondercar, dubbed the Black Widow, has been under construction since 2005. The 96 pound car has three wheels, a drag coefficient of 0.12, a top speed of 30 MPH, and a modified 3 horsepower Honda 50cc four-stroke engine. It originally clocked in at 861 MPG and has been continuously tweaked to achieve the mileage we see today.Want to see the Black Widow in action? The car is being entered for a fourth time in the Shell Eco-marathon along with a new three-wheeled Urban Concept vehicle. Who knows? Maybe this one will break the 3,000 MPG barrier.

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Go there and read. Especially look at the pretty pictures. More tomorrow.

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Fine Kettle Of Fish They Have Got Us IN – or actually out of I guess

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Whatever. It is real rare that I do a Purely environmental post. Yes it is true if there is no food to eat, then there is no private housing market, thus no residential energy market. But man that is a stretch. Still fishing vessels use huge amounts of energy, at least the large commercial ones do, so they pollute the water as well as strip it bare.

The end of fish, in one chart

Posted by at 08:00 AM ET, 05/20/2012

Want to see how severely we humans are scouring the oceans for fish? Check out this striking map from the World Wildlife Fund’s 2012 “Living Planet Report.” The red areas are the most intensively fished (and, in many cases, overfished) parts of the ocean — and they’ve expanded dramatically since 1950:

Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted.

Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, has dubbed this situation “The End of Fish.” He points out that in the past 50 years, the populations of many large commercial fish such as bluefin tuna and cod have utterly collapsed, in some cases shrinking more than 90 percent (see the chart to the right).

Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich.

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Go there to see the graphs and maps and read. More tomorrow.

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Culture Wars – The geezers and the cranks against the future

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It is clear that we have to prepare for a future with only clean energy sources in it. Well we used to think everyone agreed with that. But now comes the rich billionaires who have taken over the Republican Party and sucked in all the people who can’t or won’t tolerate change. They want their incandescent lights back.

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/05/16/is-clean-energy-yet-another-culture-war/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IM-cleantechnica+%28CleanTechnica%29

Is Clean Energy Yet Another Culture War?

May 16, 2012 By

Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/1c0hi)

David Roberts of Grist had a great post the other day portraying clean energy as a culture war. I think it’s highly worth a read, so I’m reposting it in full from Grist to make it easy as pie to not pass up (note: there’s also a Part II linked at the bottom of the post that is worth a read):

by David Roberts

Not that long ago, some folks were arguing that clean energy — unlike climate change, which had been irredeemably stained by partisanship (eww!) — would bring people together across ideological lines. Persuaded by the irrefutable wisdom of wonks, we would join hands across the aisle to promote common-sense solutions. It wouldn’t be partisan, it would be … post-partisan.

Some day, I will stop mocking the people who said that. But not today. The error is an important one and it is still made regularly, especially by hyper-educated U.S. elites. They think clean energy is different from climate change, that it won’t get sucked into the same culture war. They are wrong.

On clean energy, the material/financial aspects of the conflict are the easiest to understand. Wind, solar, and the rest threaten the financial dominance and political influence of dirty energy. Last week, the Guardian broke the story of a confidential memo laying out a plan to demonize and discredit clean energy, meant to coordinate the plans/messages of several big right-wing super PACs funded by dirty-energy money.

At the bottom of that same piece, though, is one of the best expressions I’ve ever seen of the cultural and psychological aspects of the conflict

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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