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5 Cool Clean & Green Ideas You Don’t Hear Much About

admin — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 05:49:27 +0000

I was surprised a couple of years ago when the idea to transform America’s highways into a huge solar grid (we touched on it here) didn’t get a lot more buzz. Regardless of the short-term costs and technical obstacles, repaving America with solar collectors is the stuff of forward-thinking infrastructure rebuilding dreams that could re-shape the global economy. Maybe that’s part of the problem. If you were someone who had hundreds of billions invested in the allegedly limitless oil reserves around the globe, why would you want to change the revenue model? But there’s probably no huge conspiracy to suppress technology, we’re probably just not paying attention. Which is why you may not have heard in the last year about cool ideas like the project at Ohio State where they figured out a way to harness the energy of coal without burning it, capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction. Or how MIT created a light source that cools its surrounding environment rather than heating it. Or the technology that may soon make spray on solar panels commercially viable. Or kinetic sidewalks that capture the energy from our footsteps and convert it to electricity. I guess it’s no surprise that we don’t hear more about all this cool stuff; we are indeed pretty addicted to our fossil fuels. Even though it was Norway that came up with the clever idea of the poop-powered buses we talked about a couple of years ago, they’re still pretty passionate about the more old-fashioned sort of logs. In fact they’ll watch 12-hour shows about them.

Things Are Gettin’ Greener On The Server Farm

admin — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:06:02 +0000

A couple of years ago, we talked about your Facebook Footprint, pointing out that two Google searches produce the same amount of CO2 as boiling water on your stovetop, and that Facebook has a carbon footprint equal to half of New York City. So have things changed much? You’d like to think that the brightest minds at innovative companies like Google would have a solid forward vision as they build the massive data centers that power the things that you do every day on the web, but do they? Well, it’s hard to tell. In spite of the fact that large tech companies like Google and Facebook don’t think YOU deserve much privacy, they treat information about their data centers like state secrets. None of the major tech firms in a Greenpeace roundup fared especially well, primarily because of a lack of transparency on the part of the companies in question. But it appears big tech firms are finally making SOME kind of effort. AMD and HP are partnering to explore the potential of solar-only distributed data centers. After considerable pressure, Facebook installed solar panels at their Oregon operation earlier this year, and suggesting maybe there’s some kind of financial sense to the idea (although this is a common argument against green energy) even Standard & Poors is getting in on the action. And Apple – in spite of being such an innovative company when it comes to devices and the revenue streams attached to them, is one of the late joiners in the game. For more comprehensive roundups if you’re interested, check out this special report from DataCenterKnowledge.com or this one from EcoFriend .

P-Harmony Pairs Lonely Politicians & Lovelorn Lobbyists

admin — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 04:20:39 +0000

Are you a love-starved DC lobbyist, looking for some hot freshman action? Or maybe a stimulation junky politician, who already has a hot trophy wife and portrait-perfect kids, but would love to get in bed and talk dirt with a well-oiled energy lobbyist who wants to “drill baby drill”? Well, thanks to the internet and sophisticated tools refined through decades of computerized dating, you no longer need spend all that extra time wining and dining the politician who will take any position you like, or the lobbyist to lubricate your dreams of power. Because now there’s P-Harmony. To be honest, I’m not sure I always care for Greenpeace’s methods or agendas, and I’ve seen so many virals that I think I’ve contracted a permanent infection, but I still enjoyed the recent Greenpeace parody dating service campaign “Polluter Harmony”. Especially when they took a particularly witty swipe at a congressman from my home state. When the lobbyist in the video below asks P-Harmony’s Chief Harmonologist if he has an in with the “Kŏchs”, he says “It’s Kōch, and yes, I swing with them all the time”. See more P-Harmony member profiles here . Video below.

Is It Hot In Here? Or Is It Just 97% Of Scientists?

admin — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:50:33 +0000

Recently, I made a big mistake in how I framed some thoughts on the politics and terminology of “global warming”. I suggested there was some wiggle room regarding what the exact cause of ALL climate change over the last century might be. It seemed reasonable to accept the idea that we can’t know with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY how important the impact of industry has been on climate change, and perhaps more importantly, that maybe we needed to stop calling it “global warming”, simply as a political strategy. There are, after all, a bunch of scientists who question man’s influence on climate change. But after a lot of dialogue (mostly with some otherwise intelligent friends who work in energy) and a little more light research, I now realize that there’s some truth to the old adage “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile”, and in this case, it’s more like “give them 3% and they’ll destroy all organic life on Earth”. There’s just no being reasonable with climate change deniers any more; virtually all of them need a good bitchslappin’ with the facts, and some duct tape applied to the mouths of those who won’t just shut up about it and face the unavoidable facts. And here’s where you can find them. The facts, I mean. Not the deniers. How about NASA? They don’t call them “rocket scientists” for nothing, you know. If you want to deny global warming, I’ll be glad to listen to you. As soon as you send a man to the Moon and back. Until then, please shut the fuck up. And how about the Union of Concerned Scientists? Their board is comprised of top scientists from academia, government, AND the private sector, many of them educated at schools like Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia University. So after you send that man to the moon and back, I wanna see at least three PhD’s too. Oh, and for those of you who are tired of listening to these weathertards, and need some simple retorts to their ignorant claims, try How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic or Skeptic Arguments and What the Science Says, which between them list over 200 arguments, in language simple enough for even the most persistently ignorant to understand. And if that’s not enough, even Prince Charles is calling shenanigans, and he’s next in line for the bloody throne of England, for cryin’ out loud. Hardly what you’d call liberal treehugger material. We need to keep this idiotic tide at bay. I’d like to visit Tuvalu some day.

Unlimited Oil Supply From A Bacterium?

admin — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:10:36 +0000

A friend once told me that he used to work in a warehouse, and one day all the guys he worked with were sitting around talking about what they would do if they won the lotto. They started making jabs at each other, joking about really expensive things they would do to mess up each others’ work day. Eventually, with no sense of irony or humor whatsoever, one of the guys said “Yeah? Well I’d buy my OWN damn hi-lo so I wouldn’t have to share it with you jerks anymore”. This story sprang to mind the other day when I read that a biotech firm called Joule Unlimited received a patent last fall for genetically modified E. coli bacteria that needs only sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to enable it to excrete ethanol or hydrocarbon fuel. You read that right. A germ that lives on CO², water and sunlight, and craps gasoline. Of course, it’s not that simple; there’s still a need to refine the compounds it excretes into usable fuels, but the company claims that once production is established, it will be able to produce 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year, at a price that is competitive with conventional fossil fuels. To frame this in way that one can more easily visualize, they claim that they would be able to provide for all of the United States’ fuel needs annually in an area the size of the Texas panhandle. Okay. Who knows if this is actually true; we hear about some kind of miracle solution to the world’s energy problems about every year or so. But assuming it is true, WHY ON EARTH would you focus this kind of engineering genius and the resources required to create AN ENDLESS SUPPLY OF FOSSIL FUEL? To me it sounds a lot like that guy at the warehouse. The idea that using just sunlight, CO² and water, we can create usable energy is kind of miraculous, isn’t it? I mean, except for the part where that energy eventually comes from petroleum again, which could create the pollution that blocks the sun that….oh, never mind. I’m no engineer, but it seems to me that the road to a cleaner, more efficient future wouldn’t be paved with a limitless supply of oil. Feel free to enlighten me if I’m spewing a geyser of ignorance here.

Global Warming And Ebola Economics

admin — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 02:15:13 +0000

Some of my views on environmental issues tend to vex my liberal treehugger friends, and cause my more conservative friends to chuckle, thinking that I’m somehow “on their side”. At the heart of this occasional confusion between me and my friends is the issue of the nearly-useless term “global warming”. I say “nearly-useless” because the term has become so politicized as to be rendered devoid of any clear meaning. This little rift became apparent recently when a liberal friend shared the startling image at left, which shows the arctic sea ice at the north pole over nearly thirty years, from September 1979 to September 2007. As you can see, there’s been a rather shocking loss of arctic sea ice! Things like this are the most obvious irrefutable evidence that the Earth is getting warmer, and one can only conclude that someone who claims otherwise has either not done their research, or is an utter moron. Or of course, a liar with vested interests. What got my friends going recently was the fact that I said I wouldn’t mind some global warming if it ended winters in Michigan, because then I would not only not have to move, but Michigan’s sputtering economy could enjoy explosive revenue growth from its hundreds of miles of suddenly-warm-enough beaches. Adding that the Earth is going to warm up someday anyway, so it might as well be now. This little bit of semi-serious humor started a debate that went on for some time, mostly because someone used the term “global warming”. Someone whom I must hasten to remind you was not me. You see, I’m not convinced that the industrial revolution and the last century’s air pollution are the only cause of the Earth warming up. We had an ice age without man-made pollution, and the planet has gone through plenty of other dramatic changes without the help of the combustion engine and coal-generated electricity. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think that the energy or motor industries shouldn’t be heavily regulated to control emissions. In my opinion the big mistake on this topic was a political one, when Democrats made this a key issue, and branded it as “global warming”. Which then gave industry a handy language mechanism to fight being regulated. As in this New American piece that references a lot of honest science but then crumbles through logical fallacy to conclude with the bizarre statement that the “intent of global-warming alarmists is to set up an energy-regulating global government and an international carbon-trading market worth billions”. Absolute facts on the broader topic of what’s causing the recent rise in temperature are not likely to be obtainable; even many scientists will admit this. In spite of the Union of Concerned Scientists solid stance that man is directly responsible for current global climate trends, the fact is that when you ask a larger group of scientists, their answers – although in agreement that man has some influence – will depend on whether they’re meteorologists, climatologists, or geologists, and so on. But when you say “greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming so we should regulate them”, you’re sunk. Because then the argument is no longer about whether industry should stop dumping pollutants into our air because it’s just plain stupid, and bad for our air, it becomes about whether or not it causes “global warming”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the “survival of the fittest” underpinnings of capitalism, until “the fittest” becomes an absolute monopoly, as in the case of energy companies and oil cartels. Because organisms as large as BP – or even Microsoft, Google, or NewsCorp – become less like a healthy part of an economic ecosystem and more like an Ebola virus that doesn’t care if it kills its host. And in this case, the host is you and me, and the air we breathe. Maybe we should stop trying to regulate greenhouse gas emissions because they cause global warming and start regulating them simply because cleaner industry simply makes sense.

Source of both images: EPA.Gov Slideshow

Celling Your Soul – The Staggering Global Impact Of Cell Phones

admin — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 04:42:13 +0000

The other day a friend was rather pridefully showing off the Prius they had just bought. I thought it was pretty cool that this person (who travels quite a bit) was actually excited about getting greener. We started joking about their carbon footprint, because they fly regularly, and obviously it’s hard to offset that by simply buying a car, which we acknowledged with a little humor. But then I said “what about your karmic footprint?”, which drew a perplexed look. I explained that as cool as a Prius is regarding energy consumption, it’s loaded with electronics and rare earth metals, and its parts must be made in at least a half-dozen countries. What about the labor conditions? The fuel used for transport? The environmental impact where the rare-earth metals were mined in China? My friend is a shamelessly ruthless capitalist, and although the biggest part of my carbon footprint is probably my cigarette smoking, I’m more of a hopeful realist than a teary-eyed treehugger, so the conversation got pretty interesting after that. We shifted the focus to other products, especially electronics, and agreed at the end that there was one product that packed more evil per pound than anything else in the world of consumerism: The Cell Phone. From the beginning to the end (and perhaps especially in the middle) of its life cycle (which is far too short) the cell phone does more human harm than any product ever imagined, with the exception, of course, of those produced for the military, which are intentionally designed to cause death, destruction, and suffering. This all sounds like hyperbole, but although the hard facts about environmental impacts aren’t in – and may never be unless China stops selling us rare earth minerals and we start making the things here – some basic numbers about volume of production and consumption are available, and they’re staggering. Just look at the figures below. If there’s someone you want to kill but you find the thought of ending a human life abhorrent, get over it. The impact of your lifetime cell-phone usage will probably accomplish the same thing, but at the expense of a total stranger.

Some Basic Numbers

There are over 5 billion cell phones in use worldwide.

1 trillion dollars in revenue was generated by the global mobile telecom industry in 2008.

80%: percentage of teens carry a wireless device, a 40% increase since 2004.

20% of consumers have cell phones which aren’t being used.

40% of consumers replaced their cell phones last year.

Cell phones in landfills leach more than 17 times the federal guidelines for hazardous waste.

Cell phone life span: 1.5 to 2.5 years, compared with 3-8 years for LCD monitors, or 3-4 years for computers.

130 million cell phones are retired in the U.S. per year, over 40 times more than in 1990.

65,000 tons of electronic garbage is created by cellphones per year.

An average phone contains about $1 in precious metals, mostly gold.

In 2007 the reclaiming giant Umicore estimated it received less than 1% of the world’s discarded phones.

An estimated 342,000 auto accident injuries are attributed to cellphone usage

An estimated 2,600 auto accident deaths are attributed to cellphone usage

Mining Rare Earths

The first step in securing rare earth minerals is obviously mining. Unfortunately, you have to do quite a bit of damage just to get at the ore you want. The image below is from the Daily Mail piece Inside China’s Secret Toxic Unobtainium Mine.

Extraction & Processing

The ores that contain the rare earth metals are mostly Iron, and only about 2% of the ore is the elements being sought. Extracting the elements is an elaborate process that combines mechanical, magnetic and chemical processes. The solvents and acids involved create a tremendous amount of toxic water waste. The image below is from the NYT piece After China’s Rare Earth Embargo, a New Calculus. It’s a resevoir outside the city of Baotou, China. It’s four square miles in area, surrounded by an earthen embankment four stories high, and holds a dark gray, slightly radioactive sludge laced with toxic chemical compounds.

Why the satellite view? This is in China. If you question these activities, you get beaten.

Manufacturing

The entire manufacturing process for electronics involves the use of highly toxic chemicals, poor working conditions, and appalling waste management, especially when it comes to the sludge often dumped back into the local water supply. This is poorly documented, because sites are aggressively protected by both government and corporate officials. One of the best resources I found was Cutting Edge Contamination from Greenpeace, which is a detailed 80 page report examining the specific chemicals used, and the environmental consequences of their release in waste streams.

Usage & Consumption

The numbers here are astounding, and suggest that there’s no way we could possibly have an accurate assessment of how cell phones are affecting us in a broad sense. There are estimated to be over 5 billion cell phones in use right now. Although the jury is still out, Scientific American says the concern about brain cancer is legitimate. They also cause a considerable safety hazard when used while driving, and we’re all anecdotally familiar with the poor etiquette and often disruptive over-connectedness they bring to our lives. At the core of it all, companies like Verizon and AT&T have built their business model around absurd service charges, poor customer service, and rapid obsolescence, so we change phones almost yearly in spite of increasing monthly bills, binding contracts, and ridiculous dropped-call frequency. This topic could fill a book. But this is the internet, so here’s a pretty infographic instead, complete with bad grammar:

Well At Least You Recycle, Right?

Wrong. The recycling of electronic components is one of the most corrupt industries in the world. If you’re not up to speed on this, check out the 60 Minutes piece The Electronic Wasteland from 2008. Preview below.

The Nissan iV Replaces Production Lines With Production Vines

admin — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 02:46:32 +0000

I think I’ve found the perfect car to drive on that solar highway that I reference whenever I can because I can’t believe it doesn’t get more press. Even if you’re into auto design, your eyes eventually grow immune to the dazzling swoopy contours of the concept cars like the ones presented at this year’s LA Auto Show . Although one assumes the designs are driven by aerodynamics, you eventually begin to feel that they’re just seeing how many swoops they can include in a design and still have it look like a car. At first glance, the Nissan iV gives the same impression, but if you look into the reasons behind the iV’s design, you find a mind-blowing futuristic functionality. Even the most sophisticated cars in production right now are still based on the basic idea of wheels on rods, with a box sitting on top. One of the most unusual design elements of the iV – the ribbon of material weaving through the wheels – is in fact brilliant functionality. You see, there’s no “hood” on this car, because there’s no engine compartment. The motors are in the wheels, freeing the design of all the additional structures necessary to hold an engine in a box and link it with a transmission, driveshaft, and gearing. But that’s just the beginning. The “biopolymer” chassis material is synthetically grown and formed from fast-growing ivy, and re-enforced with spider silk composite. Because of the lightweight yet rugged material used in the chassis, the interior (which seats four) provides a panoramic passenger experience, because it’s constructed from photovoltaic material that weighs 99% less than traditional glass. The car’s incredible range is because most of the body is a solar collector, and regenerative “super-capacitor” technology recoups 60% of the kinetic energy spent while the car is in motion. If this is the future, I’m sticking around. More images below.

The Glass Just Might Be Greener On The Other Side

admin — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 04:51:03 +0000

We recently touched on a brilliant idea involving turning the world’s highways into solar collectors, but what if you could turn virtually anything into a solar collector, just by covering it with a thin transparent film? That’s just one crazy idea that may soon be possible because of recent research at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Working with a semiconducting polymer spiked with Fullerenes, the scientists were able to create a thin film that is effectively transparent, could efficiently generate charge and charge separation, and is scalable to industrial production levels. Existing transparent photovoltaic materials are either slightly tinted like PVGlaze architectural glass, or only partially transparent like Taiyo See-through Solar. In the latter case because the material is created with laser etching that alternates the photovoltaic material with a truly transparent material. The real innovation with the Los Alamos project lies in the fact that the material is fabricated by creating a micron-sized flow of water droplets across a thin layer of the polymer-fullerene solution, which then evaporates, leaving a nano-scale honeycomb pattern that could efficiently absorb light and facilitate electrical conductivity. A material like this could greatly enhance ideas like this Italian greenhouse project that both grows food and collects solar power. Or imagine if the material evolved to a point where it could be applied to existing buildings without significantly changing their appearance. Although there are already a lot of strategies out there for building-integrated photovoltaics , including the possibility of photovoltaic “paint”, this new technology may make even more crazy ideas possible. Imagine if you could solarize your house just buy spraying it with a transparent film…

The Impending Global Shortage Surplus

admin — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 20:19:21 +0000

America even seems to be
experiencing a “fitness shortage”

There are times in big business when the marketing and product people should talk more with the engineers and scientists. I think this was true recently when companies like Apple and Research In Motion started pumping their mobile devices. As you may know, as a result of the explosive growth of this market, we’re now rapidly running out of the materials used in their manufacture, with China kind of cornering the market on them. The shortage of these materials should come as no surprise though; they are after all called (ahem) rare earth minerals. But since we also seem to have a shortage of common sense in America, this allows crafty neo-cons to point out that we’re now plagued with what could be called a “shortage deficit”. Meaning if those dirty liberals hadn’t put so many restrictions on mining these materials, WE could be running out of them instead of the Chinese. What these incessantly politicizing wingnuts fail to mention is that China is running out of water too. This will make it hard for the Chinese to capitalize on this shortage deficit for very long; it is after all harder to put the squeeze on anybody if you’re DYING OF THIRST. Besides, if you take a larger view, it quickly becomes apparent we’re running out of just about everything. We’re running out of oil, gold and silver, we’re running out of farm laborers (which is weird, because we’re not running out of people looking for jobs), we’re running out of drugs (at least the legal ones, the illegal ones are thriving), we’re running out of food…why, we’re even running out of internet addresses. Speaking of running out of food, the fact that we’re running out of tuna and red snapper (bet you didn’t know oil rigs were such a crucial part of the ecosystem, did you!) is probably a blessing since – as we mentioned – we’re running out of water to keep them in. Given the continued bailing out of the failed banking industry and the floundering global economy, I imagine that after years of being on the road to recovery, we’ll be running out of trees again to print all the cash needed to keep the party going. Ultimately though, I think what we’re shortest on is common sense, compassion, and patience.