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Researcher Pushes Enormous Floating Solar Islands

May 20, 2008 / Klint Finley

solar islands

Creating cheap, clean energy is a huge problem.

So, how’s this for a big solution: Swiss researcher Thomas Hinderling wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power.

He’s the CEO of the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique, a privately held R&D company, and he’s already received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility in that country.

full Story: Wired

Endarkment Manifesto and Green Hermeticism

May 16, 2008 / TiamatsVision

Peter Lamborn Wilson’s (Hakim Bey) half-serious proposal for a political movement to uphold and propagate the ideals of Green Hermeticism:

“At least half the year belongs to Endarkenment. Enlightenment is only a special case of Endarkenment-and it has nights of its own.

During the day democracy waxes, indiscriminately illuminating all and sundry. But shadowless noon belongs to Pan. And night imposes a ‘radical aristocracy’ in which things shine solely by their own luminescence, or not at all.

Obfuscatory, reactionary and superstitious, Endarkenment offers jobs for trolls and sylphs, witches and warlocks. Perhaps only superstition can re-enchant Nature. People who fear and desire nymphs and fauns will think twice before polluting streams or clear-cutting forests.

Electricity banished shadows-but shadows are ‘shades,’ souls, the souls of light itself. Even divine light, when it loses its organic and secret darkness, becomes a form of pollution. In prison cells electric lights are never doused; light becomes oppression and source of disease.

Superstitions may be untrue but based on deeper truth-that earth is a living being. Science may be true, i.e. effective, while based on a deeper untruth-that matter is dead.”

(via Arthur Magazine)

(Excerpt from “Green Hermeticism” and “Endarkment Manifesto” via Arthur pdf: pt 1-pg 11)

Climate Scientists Agree on Warming, Disagree on Dangers, and Don?t Trust the Media?s Coverage of Climate Change

May 15, 2008 / Klint Finley

A slight majority (54%) believe the warming measured over the last 100 years is not ‘within the range of natural temperature fluctuation.’

A slight majority (56%) see at least a 50-50 chance that global temperatures will rise two degrees Celsius or more during the next 50 to 100 years. (The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cites this increase as the point beyond which additional warming would produce major environmental disruptions.)

Based on current trends, 41% of scientists believe global climate change will pose a very great danger to the earth in the next 50 to 100 years, compared to 13% who see relatively little danger. Another 44% rate climate change as moderately dangerous.
Seventy percent see climate change as very difficult to manage over the next 50 to 100 years, compared to only 5% who see it as not very difficult to manage. Another 23% see moderate difficulty in managing these changes.

Full Story: STATS

Like Ronald Bailey says “Science is not done by voting, but these results are pretty interesting. ” This helps put to rest the idea that anthropogenic theory of global warming is believed by only a minority of activist scientists who bully others into signing off on papers saying they support it. Looking at the statistics, it’s slightly more common for scientists to be pressured to deny or downplay warming than to overplay it (though neither is very common).

Masdar City: walled zero-waste, zero-carbon city

May 12, 2008 / Klint Finley

masdar city

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture has won an international competition to design the Masdar Headquarters, the first building in the zero waste, zero carbon emission Masdar City outside of Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates. The Masdar Headquarters will be the first mixed-use positive energy building in the world. AS+GG worked with MEP engineers Environmental Systems Design and structural engineers Thornton Tomasetti on the design.

More pics and info: Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture

How much carbon will go into manufacturing the city?

London’s biofuel blackmarket

May 12, 2008 / Klint Finley

“There are wars going on in London to get the oil,” said Tom Lasica, who runs Pure Fuels, London’s largest refiner of vegetable oil. “Spanish and German companies are moving in to buy up British used vegetable oil. People are stealing it from each other and selling it abroad. We heard that one fish and chip shop in Southend was broken into just to steal the waste oil.”

Full Story: Guardian

Enivornmentally friendly mortuary science: dissolving bodies with lye

May 9, 2008 / Klint Finley

The process is called alkaline hydrolysis and was developed in this country 16 years ago to get rid of animal carcasses. It uses lye, 300-degree heat and 60 pounds of pressure per square inch to destroy bodies in big stainless-steel cylinders that are similar to pressure cookers.

No funeral homes in the U.S. – or anywhere else in the world, as far as the equipment manufacturer knows – offer it. In fact, only two U.S. medical centers use it on human bodies, and only on cadavers donated for research.

But because of its environmental advantages, some in the funeral industry say it could someday rival burial and cremation.

Full Story: Yahoo! News

Scientists Flesh Out Plans to Grow (and Sell) Test Tube Meat

April 28, 2008 / Klint Finley

In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.

According to a new economic analysis (.pdf) presented at this week’s In Vitro Meat Symposium in As, Norway, meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors would cost between $5,200-$5,500 a ton (3,300 to 3,500 euros), which the analysis claims is cost competitive with European beef prices.

Full Story: Wired

(via Grinding)

Running the Numbers

April 24, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”

(via Chris Jordan)

New study shows way to fourth-generation biofuels

April 20, 2008 / Klint Finley

Crucial to make this transition more efficient is the development of crops that sequester more CO2 than normal plants. Such high-carbon plants withdraw the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and use it to grow more lignocellulose. When during their conversion into biohydrogen (or bio-electricity) more CO2 is captured and stored, it means they become more carbon-negative. The first crops with a higher CO2 storing capacity have meanwhile been developed: an eucalyptus tree that stores more CO2 and grows less ligning but more cellulose (previous post), and a hybrid larch that sequesters up to 30% more CO2 (earlier post).

Full Story: Biopact.

US school book: “Global warming will avoid high heating bills”

April 19, 2008 / Fell

Friends of the Earth is calling via an email campaign on one of the US largest textbook publishers to correct a school book containing a discussion of global warming "so biased and misleading it would humble a tobacco industry PR man."

"American Government", 11th edition is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and approved for use in high school Advanced Placement courses in the United States. On page 559, the textbook’s authors write that "it is a foolish politician who today opposes environmentalism. And that creates a problem, because not all environmental issues are equally deserving of support. Take the case of global warming. (..) On the one hand, a warmer globe will cause sea levels to rise, threatening coastal communities; on the other hand, greater warmth will make it easier and cheaper to grow crops and avoid high heating bills." (Full)

Whether or not global warming is a proven scientific fact (see this post), I can not imagine what a simplistic mind would even think of putting this in a student’s text book.

via The Road to the Horizon

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