fidzu : Environmental blogs

Streetsblog There are no hard data yet, but lots more people are out on bikes this summer, and lots more novice cyclists are ending up in hospital. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Cycling advocates say this could be the Summer of Splat on local roads. Take the area's dearth of bike paths, add aggressive Atlanta motorists, then toss in bikers who haven't been on the roads for decades. Presto - the buns are busting all over town. "We're seeing more peopl...

23 Jul 2008 4:57pm GMT

In the ongoing food versus fuel discussion, using waste products from agriculture or municipal waste is often cited as being the solution as to how to produce liquid biofuels without impacting available agricultural land and increasing food prices. Producing liquid biofuels from wood waste is promising from the standpoint of availability, but is more difficult to turn into usable fuel than other products. However, a new breakthrough from China, reported on in New Scientist, offers a potential solution to this problem.

23 Jul 2008 4:23pm GMT

We often talk about the benefits of local, fresh food, but here is another we have not thought about before: the footprint of refrigeration. So many processed foods move from reefer trailer to refrigerated case in the store to the freezer in your house, what does that use in energy? Over at the Ethicurian, Marc crunched the numbers and found that the entire food industry uses 1.02.10¹⁶ BTUs of energy per year, the equivalent of 1,760,000 barrels of oil. Refrigeration uses up 14.9% of that (the hatched part of the graph above) or 262,000 barrels of oil, or 464,546, MWhr....

23 Jul 2008 4:03pm GMT

Welcome to SustainStyle, a weekly digest from the writers at 1plus1, a blog dedicated to eco-friendly fashion. SustainStyle runs every Wednesday. Organic by John Patrick is named one of the 10 finalist for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. Katharine Hamnett offers new designs on her online shop, including a tank vest we "LOVE". An Interview with Chloe Sevigny tells us why she is always head of her ...

23 Jul 2008 3:26pm GMT

Dutch designer Joost van Bleiswijk designs everything from candelabras to wall units out of stainless steel, all laser cut and interlocking. "A combination of fireplace, altar and cabinet. This piece is as a conclusion of cabinet designs over centuries." It is also extraordinarily heavy and over the top, but there is method in this madness. He describes his method of working in Dezeen: "From archetypical drawings I create the objects as flat components by computer. The method of sliding different elements into one and other, and how t...

23 Jul 2008 3:00pm GMT

photo: Getty Images While it's not quite celebrity-style coverage, in the sense of reporting what the Texan former oil-man had for lunch, TreeHugger certainly gives T. Boone Pickens his due time. And as he's in the middle of spending $58 million promoting his vision of how the U.S. can achieve energy independence through increasing wind power and natural gas, he definitely stays on the radar. Yesterday Pi...

23 Jul 2008 2:39pm GMT

credit: Getty Images/NASA Wildfires in Alaska and Canada Had Net Cooling Effect Proving that climate science can be anything but intuitive, researchers report that large wildfires could have a net cooling effect. Led by Robert Stone, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the team studied the wildfires that ravaged Alaskan and Canadian wilderness in 2004. The work is credited with creating a better understanding of the impact of particles and smoke in the atmosphere, which has been one factor of uncertaint...

23 Jul 2008 2:23pm GMT

"We have to drill offshore. we have to do this. Oil executives say in a couple years we could be seeing results from it. So why not do it? We need to do it." TreeHugger on Offshore Drilling Climate Change? What Climate Change? : TreeHugger Conserving Beats Drilling , and Is F...

23 Jul 2008 2:14pm GMT

If I had a nickel for every prospective parent I know who changed their lifestyle for the better when they knew they were expecting I'd be a wealthy man indeed. But they just may be a bit late to the party. No pun intended. And that's because a controversial idea, called epigenetics, indicates those late nights in smoke filled rooms, that stress filled entry level job, or that apartment you rented next to that major, pollution-spewing roadway when you were young and broke may just be exacting their toll on the DNA of your child today. ...

23 Jul 2008 2:13pm GMT

In 1921 Edmund Rumpler wowed the Berlin Auto Show with the Teardrop. The engine components were enclosed in a tub underneath, and from the top it had a teardrop shape. The public thought it was ugly, it was hard to steer, there was no trunk space and it evidently was "outrageously expensive." Thinking it looked futuristic, Fritz Lang bought then at deep discount and blew them all up in his movie Metropolis. In 1979, Volkswagen took one of the two remaining cars and put it in its wind tunnel. They found that it had a drag coefficent (CD value) of only 0.28, bette...

23 Jul 2008 2:09pm GMT

Online Community for Hypermiling With hypermiling getting ever-more popular as gas prices increase, it seems strange that TreeHugger has yet to feature a post purely about CleanMPG. Billed as an online community for learning to "raise fuel economy and lower emissions in whatever you drive", CleanMPG features timely posts on the latest in green...

23 Jul 2008 1:34pm GMT

In Canada, tapping the tar sands has been called the most environmentally destructive project on the planet. In the United States, some equally not-so-eco-friendly technologies have been developed to extract oil from shale in Colorado. If the Interior Department has its way, exploiting U.S. oil shale is going to become less financially burdensome for oil companies. Don't worry, the environmental impact will probably remain high. ...

23 Jul 2008 1:30pm GMT

It may well be that towing a trailer behind a station wagon is not the most fuel efficient way to travel, but squeezing all the air out of it and making it fold up as small as possible certainly is going to help. While pop-up trailers have been around forever, Dutch designer Niels Caris has designed a very clever pop-out unit that expands to many times its folded size, in a manner not dissimilar to one we have shown from 1936. While the trailer and motor home businesses are in the tank because of gas prices, many clever solutions for dealing with small spaces start with boats ...

23 Jul 2008 1:19pm GMT

Green roofs are all the rage now, but back in 1995 it was pretty unusual when Emilio Ambasz and Associates extended Fukuoka's Tenjin Central Park with a terraced building covered in gardens. Builder Takenaka calls "a step-shaped rooftop garden in order also to create the image of a mountain as the view from the park." ...

23 Jul 2008 12:46pm GMT

photo by Ricky via flickr You may have read about how Texas governor Rick Perry filed a request with the Environmental Protection Agency to waive the Renewable Fuel Standard requirement for ethanol, so as to ease pressure on rising corn prices. The EPA has just announced that it needs more time to decide whether to grant the waiver. While the EPA originally said it would make a decision by this coming Thursday, it now says it will need until early August to review the more than 15,000 public comments on the request. ...

23 Jul 2008 12:30pm GMT

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been lambasting the nation for wasting food--apparently the British throw out 4.1 million tons of good food each year--spending an average of £420 (US$832) per household. This has struck a note with newspapers as disparate as the Times ("How to cook without wasting food") to the Daily Express (a popular tabloid) musing on the effects of the credit crunch and the soaring price of food. Here is a succinct reflection from the

23 Jul 2008 10:08am GMT

Driving less is the best way to prevent having a car accident. When you're on the road less, you're just less likely to crash your car (or have someone crash into you.) So your insurance company has a vested interest in making you pay more if you drive a lot.

Unfortunately, this one factor, the most important in determining the likelihood of having an accident, is very difficult for insurance companies to gauge. They can't come by and check everyone's odometer. So, as it stands, insurance companies don't vary their premiums very much because they can't trust people to tell them how much they do or don't drive.

But that may now change. GM drivers can now opt-in to a program that sends their mileage statistics to GMAC. And if the yearly mileage is under 15,000, GMAC will reduce their rates up to 54%.

It's part of GM's OnStar program. And, if it sounds like a possible violation of privacy to you, it kinda is. That's why you have to choose to join the program. Still, it's a little creepy...basically paying you for personal information about your driving habits. Not that insurance companies haven't been delving deep into our privacy since the beginning of time. We'll see how long it is before they start keeping track of where you drive, and whether you speed.

Nonetheless, I like the program, if only because it's a more fair way to insure vehicles. Oh, and because it uses some pretty cool technology to give people one more reason to drive less.

22 Jul 2008 9:42pm GMT

EcoGeek believes in the power of technology. We're optimists...full of hope in a field that was once hopeless. I honestly think we have a chance of feeding 10 billion people in 2050 without completely destroying the planet. It's not going to be easy, but it is possible.

But there are some technological solutions that simply scare my pants off. Geoengineering, the idea that we are smart enough to put the natural systems of the earth under human control, is one of those ideas.

With the possible exception of the human mind, the Earth is the most complex system in the universe. Life ads so many variables to equations that a computer the size of our planet (run by the mice, of course) wouldn't be able to calculate the outcome of a butterfly beating its wings in Mongolia.

It's no secret that we've already begun geoengineering...though, accidentally. Generally, we call this "climate change." And attempting to restore a natural balance is probably one of the most intelligent things we can do as a race.

But to start pouring many tons of calcium hydroxide into the oceans in an attempt to decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is akin to shoving a rod into your brain and hoping you come out the other side a happier person.

You can identify the region of your brain responsible for depression. And you can carefully measure the length of the rod. But once you shove it in there and start wiggling...no one has any idea what's going to happen. And while lobotomizing a patient is bad, irreparably damaging the Earth is what we call the apocalypse.

The local affects on ocean chemistry would certainly be deadly as the pH shot up. But on a large scale, the acidity of the ocean would likely not decrease at all. To change the pH of the entire ocean is not so simple.

In the end, the solar energy needed to create the lime would probably reduce CO2 far more if it were just fed into the grid. Plus, we wouldn't have to worry about accidentally breaking our planet.

22 Jul 2008 8:13pm GMT

Sure, it's fine to have electric cars replace the old gas guzzlers, but what do you do about the space problems of parking? English industrial designer Daniel Bailey has come up with a fold-up car that resembles a Dyson upright vaccuum cleaner after folding to take up half the space of its original size.

Bailey, who is studying at Montclair State University came up with the concept of the BRB Evolution because he figures the two main problems in the future for big cities would be pollution and over-population. The car will run on electricity or hydrogen fuel cell while the foldable part will hopefully help deal with limited parking spaces.

Two rollers from the bottom of the car will roll the car up and turn the vehicle so the car can slide into spots at a sideway angle. Needless to say, drivers would have to exit the vehicle before folding up the car.

"The car was designed similar to the bike, aerodynamic, with my intentions to conserve energy wasted propelling the car forward," says Bailey.

Bailey is entering the BRB Evolution in a Peugeot competition and was inspired by the design of his own speed racing bike, the Peugeot 908 and the Lamborghini Murcielago, with a bit of Dyson thrown in for good measure. Now if only it could pick up dog hair as well…

Via: Bailey's Portfolio and http://Marks Technology News and Tuvie.com and Nerds with Swag

22 Jul 2008 7:37pm GMT

Worth a watch.

21 Jul 2008 11:18pm GMT

Dear friends and colleagues, Here's my video offering called "Hands of God." I am busy taking a course in Communication Theology -- and I'm reading about how 21st century students learn differently and may even have brains structured differently than...

21 Jul 2008 10:56pm GMT

There's a little section in the most recent issue of WIRED on "how to apologize." After Intel stole my logo, and got caught doing it, I think maybe they should have probably have read it. As WIRED says, "the unapologetic apology marks you as a pathetic weeny." You can read the full letter at the bottom of this article.

WIRED's steps for apologizing properly:

1. Come Clean Quickly: Intel did a fairly good job of this, sending me an email within 48 hours.
2. Avoid weasel words (I'm sorry if you...") that shift blame: Yeah, Intel used the weasel words. They were sorry if I was angry. As if the whole thing is my fault.
3. Make Good: They didn't give me anything...not even a proper apology.

If they'd have offered me an interview with a midlevel executive or given me a scoop on some green technology, I would've been more than satisfied. But they stole my logo...and then they didn't even say they were sorry.

I do want to make one thing clear. I like Intel. I think they do lots of great things and work hard for the environment. I have friends who work at environmental orgs that are funded almost solely by Intel. I know that this has nothing to do with the company as a whole, but we were surprised by their lack of courtesy through this entire process.

Honestly, the biggest surprise of the whole thing was the response from the Internet. Over a hundred thousand people came by to show their support, there were fake Intel logos and stories all across the internet. So thanks for that, I think Intel got the message...they'll certainly be more careful in the future.

Thanks everyone for your hard work on behalf of EcoGeek. And if you've never been here before, welcome. We write about all the various and powerful ways in which our brains are saving our planet.

If that sounds interesting to you, take a look around. Or just sign up for our RSS feed.

21 Jul 2008 6:39pm GMT

When I saw the first pictures for this Italian two-seater electric car, all I could think of was Tron. At this point, the Eco-Fun is just as virtual as anything that appeared in the movie, but I wish the car from Italian designer Simone Cistulli was the real thing.

The concept car is a two-person vehicle and because it's electric, it's zero-emission. (yeah, yeah, as zero-emission as electric power, which doesn't come free, can be).

When you look at the first picture, you may think the car can only fit two weirdly shaped occupants. But if you look at the second picture, you can see that the car was designed like a two-seater tricycle, one person behind the driver. It might become a more popular configuration. VW Has promised that it will produce a car with seats in this configuration in the next couple years.

There is a spherical front wheel and support in the back with two large covered rear wheels. The design is all about making the Eco-Fun as aerodynamic as possible and there are some real innovations here. The rear wheels are hub-less which means there's no axle going through the car. That makes it possible to put a porthole within each of the large diameter rear wheel.

Who knows if Eco-Fun will ever be the real deal? But it's fun to look at and imagine that one day we'll all be zipping around in electric cars as cool looking as these ones.

Via: Car Design News

21 Jul 2008 6:01pm GMT

That's right, they're giving away their first 500 lights. And it's not a competition either. They don't put your name in a hat or make you sit through a timeshare lecture.

They will, however, pay pretty close attention to who you are. If you're a blogger, work with FEMA or humanitarian organizations, or (and I quote) are "in charge of the US Senate's oversight committee on incredibly large sums of money for foreign aid and really huge contracts for small businesses" then your chances go up pretty quickly.

These lights, you see, aren't generally meant for home use. A solar flashlight, in general, seems kinda oxymoronic. But there are tens of millions of people who have no electricity in this world. Either because of extreme poverty or because of a crisis. Those people are forced to burn kerosene or, worse, wood for light.

Bringing a solar lamp into a situation like that not only improves the quality of life for those people, it has the potential to reduce pollution and deforestation as well.

Which is why I love them. And it's why SunLight solar flashlights will be "buy one give one" products. People who want one in the developed world will be, in effect, forced to pay for two. One of the lights gets delivered to your house, and one gets delivered to someone who doesn't have an electric light source at all.

A strange but powerful way of making change, I think. Of course, I have no idea how well these lamps work, so I couldn't recommend them to anyone yet. Which is why I just sent my email to info@sunnightsolar.com, asking them to send a free one my way.

Ahh, the perks of being a blogger.

21 Jul 2008 5:43pm GMT

This might not seem like the most glamorous bit of the energy revolution, but cables are a big frikkin' deal. And though superconductors are pretty sexy, regular old conducting cables can get pretty fancy too. Particularly when they're under 300 to 1000 feet of salt water.

In this video Gavin Harper takes us on a little tour of how complex a wire really can be. First you have two layers of thin bundled steal cables to protect the cable from stresses. Obviously, the ocean can exert a massive amount of mechanical energy, otherwise we wouldn't be building wave power plants at all.

The materials used to house and insulate the wires have to be changed as well. Since weight isn't a problem, but water-proofing is, heavy rubber is used to insulate the three copper conductors. Also included in the cable are fiber optic wires for communicating with the power-generating structures, be they tidal turbines, wave generators, or offshore wind turbines.

All-together, what once seemed like a pretty simple idea gets massively complicated. But it's just one more little step we've got to take toward a renewable future.

Filmed at EMEC - the European Marine Energy Centre, Orkney, UK,

21 Jul 2008 7:46am GMT

I'm not swallowing this whole yet. But The Register is reporting that one of their readers just received 32 documents from HP in a box that could have held around four million sheets of paper.

It's hard to imagine how this kind of stupidity might occur, and I doubt we've heard the whole story here. But, really? According to the email the Register received the box contained sixteen boxes that each contained two sheets of paper. There were SEVENTEEN total boxes in the package.

Apparently the two sheets of paper, each licenses for software that the business had purchased, were very fragile, and could not be mixed. Each license (two pages long) was not only in it's own box...but wrapped in foam. The onlyr eason this isn't worse than those book-length iPhone bills is because they only did it to one person (that we know of)

I mean...really, really? The really ridiculous thing is...couldn't they have just emailed PDFs?

Via The Regsiter

18 Jul 2008 7:47pm GMT

Despite the fact that we spend a great deal of time talking about solar power here at EcoGeek, it's a very very young industry. It's extremely volatile. No one has any idea which technology is going to win out, or whether photovoltaic cells will ever be competitive with grid power.

Right now the solar industry is able to attract funding for research and development because a lot of countries have an interest in it being developed on their soil. They want to have clean energy and prevent the need for more coal plants. But they also want to get the tax money from these companies if they ever go ultra-profitable.

Unfortunately, a couple of changes in the policy have hit the solar industry hard in the last few months.

First, the U.S. has continued to refuse to fund the (relatively tiny) solar investment tax credit. This simply lets companies write-off money spent on solar projects. It's considerably smaller than our oil and gas subsidies. But congress has not been able to find a way to fund the tax credit (except by decreasing oil and gas subsidies, and Bush has promised to veto any such legislation.) The result is that the current tax credit is set to expire at the end of the year, and companies all over the country are considering pulling the plug on planned solar projects.

A similar situation in sunny Spain is exacerbating the problem. Their previous substantial solar subsidies are on the chopping block, and the uncertainty is making global waves.

The result has been a substantial drop accross the board for all solar stocks. The result of that is that solar companies have less money for research and expansion. And so, if these tax credits aren't extended, we should expect more than just a decrease in the growth of solar power, but also a delay of grid parity for solar power.

And that's something that I'm sure we can all agree is just foolish.

18 Jul 2008 7:09pm GMT

China needs a lot of energy to power its economy and the country's reliance on coal has led to major problems with unsafe work conditions and pollution. By 2006, China's energy requirements had become the second highest in the world, doubling its needs from the past decade.

The greater the need for energy, the greater the urgency to find a renewable solution and China appears to be (at least in part) heading in the right direction. A new report has found that China will likely achieve its target of getting 15 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 and perhaps 30 per cent by 2050. The U.S., by comparison, is working towards achieving 7.5 per cent renewables by 2013. Though, Al Gore says we can make it to 100% by 2018.

Wind energy plays a big part in China's plans to go renewable. Industry analysts at China Strategies LLC says the country's pace of wind development is two years ahead of schedule, doubling the current target of 10 gigawatts to 20 GW by 2010. A decade from then, China Strategies predicts that China will produce 100 GW by 2020, an increase in wind energy by 1,667%.

At present China produces just 6 gigawatts of wind energy.The government is making policies that encourage wind power development, even though it remains costlier than coal power. More than 50 domestic manufacturers of wind turbines are already in the market and foreign producers are also in the country hoping to transform more wind into power.

In a report released by by Washington (D.C.)-based Worldwatch Institute, Eric Martinot, one of the authors says in an interview with Buisness Week that China will easily exceed its wind power plan.

"Wind power in China historically has been driven by a desire for industrial development," says Martinot, senior visiting scholar at the Tsinghua-BP Clean Energy Research& Education Center in Beijing . "But it is now being eclipsed by a desire for energy security. Beijing wants anything that can substitute for energy imports and anything that can stretch out China's coal reserves."

Via: Ecoworldly and Word Watch and Sustainablog and Buisness Week

18 Jul 2008 6:36pm GMT

17 Jul 2008 9:46pm GMT

Given the supplies of coal available to the US and China, it is critical that effective carbon capture and sequestration technologies be developed and that effective environmental protections be put in place to regulate those technologies. While some have suggested...

16 Jul 2008 7:54pm GMT

Crude oil jumped to record highs above $ 147 on July 11 driven by political and economic concerns after Iran fired intercontinental ballistic missiles to signal its willingness to use military force to resolve regional geopolitical conflicts. Crude prices, of...

15 Jul 2008 9:23pm GMT

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14 Jul 2008 11:43pm GMT

Here are Findlaw's environmental case summaries: Table of Contents ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CASES • City of Bangor v. Citizens CommunicationsCo. • Morrison Knudsen Corp. v. Ground Improvement Techniques, Inc. (continuation page) • Wilderness Workshop v. US Bureau of Land Mgmt. •...

14 Jul 2008 10:35pm GMT

One-third of coral reef-building species are in danger of extinction -- according to a recent study by Kent Carpenter. He reviewed 704 reef-building coral species and rated them according to International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) standards of extinction...

14 Jul 2008 9:35pm GMT

Global warming will extinguish dozens of marine fish species that cannot migrate to colder waters, according to a study by University of British Columbia researchers Pauly and Cheung. Science synopsis of research Replacing the lost biodiversity with new species will...

14 Jul 2008 7:31pm GMT

ScienceDaily (July 9, 2008) - A new mathematical model indicates that dust devils, water spouts, tornadoes, hurricanes and cyclones are all born of the same mechanism and will intensify as climate change warms the Earth's surface. HT Eric, Climate Change...

14 Jul 2008 4:06pm GMT

NYC's Congestion Pricing and the Dormant Commerce Clause Had Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to impose a charge on drivers entering southern Manhattan during peak hours managed to survive Albany politics, its next stop would almost certainly have been the courts. See,...

08 Jul 2008 8:11pm GMT

The D.C. Circuit denied Sierra Club's petition for mandamus (PDF Mandamus Petition) in Massachusetts v. EPA with a per curiam decision. (Mandamus Denial PDF) Judge Tatel wrote a thoughtful opinion concurring that mandamus was not warranted, but dissenting in the...

08 Jul 2008 7:32am GMT

Coeur Alaska Inc. v. Southeast Alaska Conservation, No. 07-984, consolidated with Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation, No. 07-990. Are process wastewater discharges from mining operations governed by the drege-and-fill permit scheme operated by the Army Corps of Engineers under Section...

28 Jun 2008 10:10pm GMT

The American economy is melting down more rapidly than anyone could have predicted. The Dow Jones Industrials plunged almost 400 points today -- driven by skyrocketing crude prices that reached a record $139.01 and predictions of crude prices rising to...

06 Jun 2008 9:34pm GMT

An AP report yesterday by Noaki Schwartz disclosed that a development company has bought the silence of 3 of the 6 or so condor specialists, evaluating the habitat conservation plan for a major housing development proposed in critical habitat of...

27 May 2008 9:58pm GMT

Last night the overnight crude oil prices exceeded $135/barrel. Marketwatch Yesterday premium gas prices over $ 4 .20, up 70 cents from last year, were reported. BizJournal So what does it mean? Inconvenience for most of us; true hardship for...

22 May 2008 7:56pm GMT

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) released a substitute global warming bill (PDF) today with significant changes from the version approved last December in the Environment and Public Works Committee. It includes an $800 billion tax break to help Americans cope with...

21 May 2008 10:21pm GMT