Environment Archive

New Wind Turbine Produces Electricity and Water in the Desert

via RechargeNews

Eole Water's WMS1000 turbine. Photograph: Eole WaterFrench technology start-up Eole Water is on track to erect a wind turbine in the United Arab Emirates that can produce hundreds of litres of drinking water a day from the dry desert air.

Tests on a ground-mounted prototype of its water maker system (WMS), which began in October in Mussafah, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, have shown it to be capable of flowing 500-800 litres daily. But Eole Water believes this volume can be tuned up to levels of well over 1,000 litres with a tower-top system, and the company has hopes of scaling up the technology for use by industry and off-grid communities.

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Fighting Fossil Fuel’s Government Finance Freebies

by Bill McKibben, via Yes! Magazine

The worship of big oil. Photo by John CurleyAlong with “fivedollaragallongas,” the energy watchword for the next few months is: “subsidies.” Last week, for instance, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez proposed ending some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry with a “Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act.” It was, in truth, nothing to write home about—a curiously skimpy bill that only targeted oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas, and you won’t be surprised to learn that even then it didn’t pass.

Still, President Obama is now calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz—even at those stops where he’s also promising to “drill everywhere.” And later this month Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a much more comprehensive bill that tackles all fossil fuels and their purveyors (and has no chance whatsoever of passing this Congress).

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New Science Tracks Industrial Agriculture’s True Climate Impact

by Tom Laskaway, vai Grist.org

Industrial agricultureWhen I examined the reasons agriculture often gets a pass in climate negotiations recently, I pointed to the fact that precise measurement of the climate impact of many industrial farming practices remains difficult and controversial. This is especially true when it comes to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

The effect of excess fertilizer on our waterways gets much more attention than it does when it enters the air. And for good reason. It’s toxic to consume nitrates in your drinking water. We’re learning that agricultural overuse of fertilizer has contaminated the drinking water of whole regions of California. Meanwhile, nitrogen that runs into the ocean causes oxygen-depleted “dead zones” around the world. The dead zone in our own Gulf Of Mexico (measured every summer) keeps getting larger — last year’s was the size of New Jersey.

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Is BPA the FDA’s Latest Gift to the Chemical Industry?

Guest post by Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit

BPA can leach out of plastics into foods and liquidsIn a long-awaited decision, last week the Food and Drug Administration disappointed health advocates once again by allowing Bisphenol A or BPA, a known endocrine disruptor, to remain approved as a chemical additive in food containers such as plastic bottles and metal cans.

While the agency says it’s still studying the matter, a number of groups say the science is clear enough. Indeed, in the four years since the filing of a legal petition asking for a ban (a court order was needed to force FDA to respond), evidence of potential harm from BPA exposure has only increased. Of particular concern are young children, as the chemical often lines infant formula containers and baby bottles.

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California Fracking—Ungregulated For the Past 60 Years?

by Scott Thill, via AlterNet.org

A natural gas drill stands at a hydraulic fracturing site on January 18, 2012 in South Montrose, Pennsylvania. | Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThanks to the smoking gun of Josh Fox's sobering documentary Gasland, hydraulic fracturing has finally entered our renewable news cycle. Yet despite poisoning groundwater, freeing methane and literally creating earthquakes back east, fracking has a visibility problem in California.

The situation became less clear after a recent investigative report from DC-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group explained that California has experienced 60 unregulated years of widespread fracking, whose technical methods and geographical locations in the seismically active state exist outside of the public purview. It got darker after Governor Jerry Brown's administration wiped the state government's Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) Web site of fracking fact-sheets and documents. Good luck finding anything about fracking on the governor's official site either.

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Pesticide Isolated as Cause of Bee Colony Collapse

Honey beeThe likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies since 2006 is imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).

The authors, led by Chensheng (Alex) Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology in the Department of Environmental Health, write that the new research provides “convincing evidence” of the link between imidacloprid and the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which adult bees abandon their hives.

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Stopping Climate Change Is MUCH Cheaper than Purported

by James West, via Grist.org

Pocket change—the actual cost of fixing the climateYou’ve heard it before: Politicians say they’d love to take action against climate change, but they’re reeling from sticker shock. A new report from the U.K.’s leading climate change watchdog refutes this oft-cited argument that climate action will herald economic Armageddon.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) report, with the hairy-sounding title “Statutory Advice on Inclusion of International Aviation and Shipping,” says that in 2050, the U.K.’s emissions reductions across the whole economy will cost 1 to 2 percent of the total GDP. This updates, in greater detail, the range predicted half a decade ago by the watershed Stern Review.

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How to Start Your Own Alternative Power Company

By Sven Eberlein, via AlterNet.org

Ursula SladekUrsula Sladek, a 2011 Goldman Environmental Prize recipient, is the co-founder and president of EWS, one of Europe’s largest cooperatively owned green energy companies. Motivated by the nuclear fallout from Chernobyl in 1986, the schoolteacher and mother of five from the small town of Schönau (population 2,382) in Germany’s Black Forest region—along with her husband Michael and a group of concerned parents—unsuccessfully lobbied her regional power company to adopt conservation measures, to no avail. After over 10 years of citizen activism and two referendums, Sladek and her small-town energy rebels were able to take over the local grid and start a community-run power co-op.

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The Non-GMO GMO?

GMO No MoIn a stunning reversal of stance, biotech megacorporation FoodGen Inc. has made a guarded admission that genetically modified crops might actually be harmful to human health, soil, and other non-GMO crops. On the heels of this announcement, however, FoodGen also revealed plans to release their new line of GMO corn, which contains genetically altered traits that work to counter previous GMO traits introduced into the corn, thereby producing a “non-GMO” variety.

“We are very attentive to the needs of our consumers,” John J. Phlegm, FoodGen vice president for public awareness told Organic Connections. “Due to considerable misunderstandings of GMO technology created by various radical food factions, many in the public sector have come to believe that GMOs are harmful. While our scientific research runs completely counter to these beliefs, we nonetheless wish to deliver to our customers products which they think are good for them.”

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Mapping Wind Energy as Art

The live wind mapEngineers Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas from Google have produced as astounding personal art project called the Wind Map. It is a live visual demonstration of wind patterns in the United States.

According to their website, "Surface wind data comes from the National Digital Forecast Database. These are near-term forecasts, revised once per hour. So what you're seeing is a living portrait. And for those of you chasing top wind speed, note that maximum speed may occur over lakes or just offshore."

If anyone still harbors doubts about the usefulness of wind as an energy source, this map should allay them.

Below is a video capture of the map in action. Click here to visit the live site.

YouTube Preview Image

 

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A Road Map to Sustainable Agriculture

via University of Wisconsin

Sustainable agricultureAn independent commission of scientific leaders from 13 countries on Wednesday, March 28, 2012 released a detailed set of recommendations to policymakers on how to achieve food security in the face of climate change.

In their report, the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change proposes specific policy responses to the global challenge of feeding a world confronted by climate change, population growth, poverty, food price spikes and degraded ecosystems. The report highlights specific opportunities under the mandates of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Group of 20 (G20) nations.

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Solar Energy Takes on a Third Dimension

by David L. Chandler, via MIT News Office

Two small-scale versions of three-dimensional photovoltaic arrays were among those tested by Jeffrey Grossman and his team on an MIT rooftop to measure their actual electrical output throughout the day. Photo: Allegra BovermanIntensive research around the world has focused on improving the performance of solar photovoltaic cells and bringing down their cost. But very little attention has been paid to the best ways of arranging those cells, which are typically placed flat on a rooftop or other surface, or sometimes attached to motorized structures that keep the cells pointed toward the sun as it crosses the sky.

Now, a team of MIT researchers has come up with a very different approach: building cubes or towers that extend the solar cells upward in three-dimensional configurations. Amazingly, the results from the structures they’ve tested show power output ranging from double to more than 20 times that of fixed flat panels with the same base area.

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Are Lawn Pesticides Endangering Our Children?

by Lynn Peeples, via The Huffington Post

Children can be easily exposed to lawn pesticidesWhen they started feeling woozy barely an hour into their batting practice, Alan Gorkin and his son Tristan, then 12 years old, didn't think too much of it. But as they packed up to leave the grassy field across the street from Tristan's school in Wilton, Conn., they spotted a little yellow sign warning that more than spring was in the air: The field had been sprayed with pesticides the day before.

"Parents should have a choice over whether their kids are exposed to pesticides or not," says Gorkin, who manages an organic farm in the area.

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Butterfly Wings and Renewable Energy

via American Chemical Society

Black Swallowtail butterflyButterfly wings may rank among the most delicate structures in nature, but they have given researchers powerful inspiration for new technology that doubles production of hydrogen gas—a green fuel of the future—from water and sunlight. The researchers presented their findings here today at the American Chemical Society's (ACS') 243rd National Meeting & Exposition.

Tongxiang Fan, Ph.D., who reported on the use of two swallowtail butterflies—Troides aeacus (Heng-chun birdwing butterfly) and Papilio helenus Linnaeus (Red Helen)—as models, explained that finding renewable sources of energy is one of the great global challenges of the 21st century. One promising technology involves producing clean-burning hydrogen fuel from sunlight and water. It can be done in devices that use sunlight to kick up the activity of catalysts that split water into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. Better solar collectors are the key to making the technology practical, and Fan's team turned to butterfly wings in their search for making solar collectors that gather more useful light.

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Improve Your Soil and Combat Global Warming with DIY Biochar

via Rice University

Biochar is the next big thing in the fight against global warmingBackyard gardeners who make their own charcoal soil additives, or biochar, should take care to heat their charcoal to at least 450 degrees Celsius to ensure that water and nutrients get to their plants, according to a new study by Rice University scientists.

The study, published this week in the Journal of Biomass and Bioenergy, is timely because biochar is attracting thousands of amateur and professional gardeners, and some companies are also scaling up industrial biochar production.

“When it’s done right, adding biochar to soil can improve hydrology and make more nutrients available to plants,” said Rice biogeochemist Caroline Masiello, the lead researcher on the new study.

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Fire Safety and the Chemicals in Your Couch

by Valeri Pacino, via Grist.org

Burning couch. Photo by S. F. Pitman.Eureka! In a legislative dogfight of global significance, the California legislature will consider a bill this spring to modernize the “12-second rule,” the state’s obscure furniture flammability standard that fails to protect us from fires even while it poisons homes across North America.

Late last month, Rep. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) introduced AB 2197 [PDF], a bill that will bring California’s flammability standard into line with 35 years of independent fire safety science and 20 years of research by the U.S. government.

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FDA Decision to Ban BPA Getting Close

via The Environmental Working Group

Most food cans contain coatings with biphenol AThe federal Food and Drug Administration will announce its decision on whether to ban bisphenol A from food packaging by March 31st, 2012! Environmental Working Group, our supporters and many like-minded organizations have been fighting for this moment for years. But for just as long, the food and chemical industries—and their lobbyists—have been striving to make sure it never comes.

The food and chemical industries are so nervous about the FDA's upcoming decision that one sympathizer went as far as to write and publish an outrageous fake strategy memo—purportedly from the environmental community—claiming that this potent synthetic estrogen is safe.

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Over One Million Petition EPA to Ban Bee-Killing Pesticides

via Center for Food Safety

Honey beeOn March 21, 2012, commercial beekeepers and environmental organizations filed an urgent legal petition with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suspend further use of a pesticide the agency knows poses harm to honey bees, and adopt safeguards to ensure similar future pesticides aren’t approved by the agency. The legal petition is supported by over one million citizen petitions also submitted today that were collected from people across the country calling out one pesticide in particular—clothianidin—for its harmful impacts on honey bees.“EPA has an obligation to protect pollinators from the threat of pesticides,” said Jeff Anderson of California Minnesota Honey Farms, a co-petitioner. “The Agency has failed to adequately regulate pesticides harmful to pollinators despite scientific and on-the-ground evidence presented by academics and beekeepers.”

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Finding an Underground Home for Greenhouse Gases

by David Chandler, MIT News Office

Using tiny glass beads, the researchers simulated the way liquified carbon dioxide would spread through salty water in the pores of deep rock formations. Image: Michael Szulczewski, of the Juanes Research Group, MITA new study by researchers at MIT shows that there is enough capacity in deep saline aquifers in the United States to store at least a century’s worth of carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s coal-fired powerplants. Though questions remain about the economics of systems to capture and store such gases, this study addresses a major issue that has overshadowed such proposals.

The MIT team’s analysis — led by Ruben Juanes, the ARCO Associate Professor in Energy Studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and part of the doctoral thesis work of graduate students Christopher MacMinn PhD ’12 and Michael Szulczewski — is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Study Says Fracking Air Pollution May Impact Health

via University of Colorado Denver

Fracking wellIn a new study, researchers from the Colorado School of Public Health have shown that air pollution caused by hydraulic fracturing or fracking may contribute to acute and chronic health problems for those living near natural gas drilling sites.

"Our data show that it is important to include air pollution in the national dialogue on natural gas development that has focused largely on water exposures to hydraulic fracturing," said Lisa McKenzie, Ph.D., MPH, lead author of the study and research associate at the Colorado School of Public Health.

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Suckin’ It Up: Capturing Carbon from the Atmosphere

by Marc Gunther, via Grist.org

CO2 emissionWhat if, in addition to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, we could capture them from the air? That’s the question that prompted Marc Gunther, an author and contributing editor at Fortune magazine, to write the e-book Suck It Up, a Kindle Single. Below is an excerpt from the book on the history of the start-up Kilimanjaro Energy, a private company that is seeking to solve the carbon extraction equation.

Working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the 1990s, Klaus Lackner had numerous interests: the behavior of high explosives, nuclear fusion, and self-replicating machine systems. At some point, he turned his attention to the technology used to capture CO2 from the smokestacks of coal plants—technology in which the U.S. government has invested billions of dollars, with little to show for it. He began to wonder whether it might make more sense to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. So when his daughter Claire asked for help with a science project, he asked her: “Why don’t you pull CO2 out of the air?”

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Can Demolishing Urban Freeways Help Revive Cities?

by Matt Bevilacqua, via Grist.org

The Westside Highway, New York. Photo by m.joedickeOne of John Norquist’s best-known achievements as mayor of Milwaukee—an office he held from 1988 to 2004—was demolishing the Park East Freeway, a 1960s-era expressway that restricted access to the city’s downtown. Today, he is CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an organization that promotes urban highway removal and walkable, mixed-use urban development.

Norquist, who is also author of The Wealth of Cities, an argument for using the free market to achieve urbanist goals, will be one of the featured speakers at the Congress’ 20th annual gathering in West Palm Beach, Fla., this May. Here, he discusses urban highway removal—where it’s been done, where it will happen next, and why we as a nation must overcome our obsession with reducing congestion.

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Achieving True Sustainability: Economics for a Blue Planet

by Jurriaan Kamp and Marco Visscher, via ODE Magazine

Gunter PauliArmed with an MBA from the French business school INSEAD, Gunter Pauli was in his mid-30s when he took the reins at Ecover, the Belgian cleaning products manufacturer that ran into financial difficulties when it expanded internationally too quickly. Pauli, who was responsible for construction of Europe’s first “ecological factory,” left Ecover in 1994 after discovering that cultivation of the palm oil for his products was damaging Indonesia’s primary forests.

Since then, he has been living “on a path that pursues a sustainable world,” he says. The 55-year-old Belgian, fluent in seven languages, has lived on four continents and set up 10 companies. He also supports initiatives that develop sustainable production methods via his foundation ZERI (Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives). Pauli has written 15 books published in 30 languages, including short stories for children about science and technology.

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Solving the Problem of Antibiotic Resistance and Bee Deaths in One Go

via Univserity of Lund

Lactobacilli attached to the wall of a honeybee crop. Photographer Lennart Nilsson.The stomachs of wild honey bees are full of healthy lactic acid bacteria that can fight bacterial infections in both bees and humans.

A collaboration between researchers at three universities in Sweden—Lund University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Karolinska Institutet—has produced findings that could be a step towards solving the problems of both bee deaths and antibiotic resistance.

The researchers have now published their results in the scientific journal PLoS ONE and the legendary science photographer Professor Lennart Nilsson from Karolinska Institutet has illustrated the findings with his unique images.

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The Shale Gas Boom: Energy Solution or Just Another Bubble?

by Sharon kelly, via Grist.org

Natural gasRight now the fossil fuel industry, utility execs, pundits, and politicians from both parties would like us to believe that natural gas will solve our chronic energy woes. But they all suffer from short memories. For years, natural gas has been known in the field as the “crack cocaine of the power industry.” As one energy company official famously put it: “They get you hooked and then they raise the price.”

Natural gas earned this reputation because its prices have fluctuated dramatically over the years. When prices are low (like now), lawmakers, power utilities, and consumers eagerly embrace natural gas. Then the price rockets up and they all suffer the consequences

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