https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/opinion/article_5dcee9d2-ceab-11eb-a5d2-4b7bfb73d950.html

Michael Hecht: Wind power generation has a great future in the Gulf of Mexico

This week, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), federal lead agency for offshore wind, is holding the inaugural meeting of the Gulf of Mexico Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Task Force. Although the task force is composed of elected officials from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, it was Louisiana, under the leadership of Gov. John Bel Edwards, who launched the process for the establishment of this regional Task Force — thereby paving the way for the exploration of offshore wind

This is because we can capitalize on wind energy in two related but distinct ways: first, from the manufacturing and servicing of offshore wind structures along the Atlantic coast; and then, from the eventual deployment of offshore wind structures in the Gulf of Mexico.

Many of the assets and skills from Louisiana’s decades as a hub for offshore oil and gas exploration and production translate directly into offshore wind. These include our large port infrastructure; structural manufacturing expertise; world-class engineering; world-class vessel building; extensive offshore marine services; and an unbeatable workforce.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The post Wind Turbines In The Gulf Is A Great Idea – But appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://digg.com/video/heres-a-comprehensive-breakdown-of-why-nuclear-reactions-at-chernobyl-are-spiking

It’s only 12 minutes long so it is not a large portion of you life.

Here is a bonus link for you gardeners out there:

https://backyard54.com/p/square-foot-gardening/231

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Go there and listen. sigh. More next week.

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The post Chernobyl Awakes – What is going on at mankind’s biggest screw up appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://digg.com/video/heres-why-the-united-states-drained-its-ninth-largest-lake

If you want to read about it. You can go here:

http://www.tularebasinwildlifepartners.org/history.html

Hydrologic History of the Tulare Basin

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The post How We Drained The Largest Lake West Of The Mississippi – OH My appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

As automakers promise to get rid of internal combustion engines, Heidelberg is trying to get rid of autos.

By Jack Ewing

• Published Feb. 28, 2021Updated March 3, 2021

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Go the read – once you catch your breath. More next week.

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The post Ban Cars! Ban Cars! Ban Cars! – We will try anyway appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/climate-change-after-pandemic.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In the American Southwest, birds fell dead from the sky by the tens of thousands, succumbing mid-flight to starvation, emaciated by climate change.

Across the horn of Africa swarmed 200 billion locusts, 25 for every human on earth, darkening the sky in clouds as big as whole cities, descending on cropland and chewing through as much food as tens of millions of people eat in a day, eventually dying in such agglomerating mounds they stopped trains in their tracks — all told, 8,000 times as many locusts as could be expected in the absence of warming.

The fires, you know. Or do you? In California in 2020, twice as much land burned as had ever burned before in any year in the modern history of the state — five of the six biggest fires ever recorded. In Siberia, “zombie fires” smoldered anomalously all through the Arctic winter; in Brazil, a quarter of the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, was incinerated; in Australia, flames took the lives of 3?billion animals.

All year, a planet transformed by the burning of carbon discharged what would have once been called portents of apocalypse. The people of that planet, as a whole, didn’t take much notice — distracted by the pandemic and trained, both by the accumulating toll of recent disasters and the ever-rising volume of climate alarm, to see what might once have looked like brutal ruptures in lived reality instead as logical developments in a known pattern. Our time has been so stuffed with disasters that it was hard to see the arrival of perhaps the unlikeliest prophecy of all: that the plague year may have marked, for climate change, a turning point, and for the better.

When trying to share good news about climate, it pays to be cautious, since so many have looked foolish playing Pollyanna. A turning point isn’t an endgame, or a victory, or a cessation of the need to struggle — for speedier decarbonization, for a sturdier future, for climate justice. Already, a future without profound climate suffering has been almost certainly foreclosed by decades of inaction, which means the burden of managing those impacts equitably will be handed down, generation to generation, into an indefinite and contested climate future.

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Go there and read (hurrah). More next week.

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The post Joe Biden Will Save The World – Well maybe not but he has a Climate Czar appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

40 Differences Between Commercial and Residential Air Conditioning

…

Then there is this:

NO NEED TO BE A HERO TO SAVE ENERGY

…

Then there is this:

By the way, I am not sure I think running is good for you but it does save transportation costs. Run Forrest Fun.

How to Develop a Lasting Running Habit

…

Or this, which is more on topic:

How to stop climate change from the comfort of your home

Finally for today:

https://www.buildingmaterials.co.uk/nuts-and-bolts/resources/how-to-make-your-home-more-energy-efficient/

How to make your home more energy efficient in the UK

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Go there and enjoy. More next week.

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The post New Improved Better Outstanding Sites – Or at least that’s what they say appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/scientists-made-an-alarmingly-easy-trip-to-the-north-po-1844858358?utm_source=digg

 

Dharna Noor

8/27/20 3:10PM

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Filed to:ice ice maybe

 

At Earther, we’ve been following the historic extent of ice melt in the Arctic this summer pretty closely. But not as closely as Gunnar Spreen and his research team, who are literally following the ice.

“We’re attached to an ice floe now,” he said on the phone from a research vessel called the Polarstern, which is currently at the latitude 88 degrees north, just under 150 miles (230 kilometers) from the North Pole. “We’re drifting with the ice. Wherever it goes, we go.”

Spreen, a sea ice and remote sensing scientist at the University of Bremen, is taking part in a research expedition known as the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, or MOSAiC. It’s the largest Arctic research campaign in history, with some 500 scientists and staffers rotating on and off of the research vessel for months at a time.

The current cohort boarded the Polarstern on August 12, and in just a week’s time, they made it to the North Pole. To get there, they took an unexpected route, north of Greenland.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The post Attached To An Ice Floe In The Arctic – What a brave way to study Global Warming appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives—and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that.

But we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.

“If we don’t mandate recycling, many of the modules will go to landfill,” said Arizona State University solar researcher Meng Tao, who recently authored a review paper on recycling silicon solar panels, which comprise 95 percent of the solar market.

Solar panels are composed of photovoltaic (PV) cells that convert sunlight to electricity. When these panels enter landfills, valuable resources go to waste. And because solar panels contain toxic materials like lead that can leach out as they break down, landfilling also creates new environmental hazards.

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Go there and read. Demand that your municipality pass a law that solar panels do not go in the land fill. More next week.

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The post Solar Waste, What Shall We Do – I never dodge a bullet appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

The idea that small is better has always seemed to be suspect to me. Anyway, here is one take on the down side of a Tiny House. And yes, I still believe Small is Beautiful.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/tiny-houses-look-marvellous-but-have-a-dark-side-three-things-they-don-t-tell-you-on-marketing-blurb?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Tiny houses are everywhere. They’ve received heavy coverage in the media and there are millions of followers on dozens of pages on social media. While there is no census for these homes, they have seen a surge in popularity in the decade since the Great Recession – witness the prolific growth of tiny house manufacturers, for instance. Originating in the US, tiny homes have also been popping up across Canada, Australia and the UK.

Tiny houses are promoted as an answer to the affordable housing crisis; a desirable alternative to traditional homes and mortgages. Yet there are many complexities and contradictions that surround these tiny spaces, as I discovered when I began investigating them.

I have toured homes, attended tiny house festivals, stayed in a tiny house community and interviewed several dozen people who live inside them. My research took me throughout the US, from a converted accessory unit squeezed between two average size homes on Staten Island to a community in Florida full of cute and brightly coloured tiny structures – appropriately located just down the road from Disney World. Here are three things I unexpectedly discovered along the way.

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I am sure there are thousands of people that are happy with their Tiny Houses. Go there and read. More next week.

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The post Tiny Houses Do Not Equal Happiness – It takes a change of MIND to be HAPPY appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/8-facts-about-the-animals-of-chernobyl?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Three decades after the Chernobyl disaster—the world’s worst nuclear accident—signs of life are returning to the exclusion zone. Wild animals in Chernobyl are flourishing within the contaminated region; puppies roaming the area are capturing the hearts of thousands. Tourists who have watched the critically acclaimed HBO series Chernobyl are taking selfies with the ruins. Once thought to be forever uninhabitable, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has become a haven for flora and fauna that prove that life, as they say in Jurassic Park, finds a way.

1. The Animals of Chernobyl Survived Against All Odds

The effects of the radioactive explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 devastated the environment. Around the plant and in the nearby city of Pripyat in Ukraine, the Chernobyl disaster’s radiation caused the leaves of thousands of trees to turn a rust color, giving a new name to the surrounding woods—the Red Forest. Workers eventually bulldozed and buried the radioactive trees. Squads of Soviet conscripts also were ordered to shoot any stray animals within the 1000-square-mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Though experts today believe parts of the zone will remain unsafe for humans for another 20,000 years, numerous animal and plant species not only survived, but thrived.

2. Bears and Wolves Outnumber Humans Around the Chernobyl Disaster Site

While humans are strictly prohibited from living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, many other species have settled there. Brown bears, wolves, lynx, bison, deer, moose, beavers, foxes, badgers, wild boar, raccoon dogs, and more than 200 species of birds have formed their own ecosystem within the Chernobyl disaster area. Along with the larger animals, a variety of amphibians, fish, worms, and bacteria makes the unpopulated environment their home.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The post I Never Believed In Godzilla – You know radioactive monsters appeared first on Community Energy Systems.