Tag: Environment Posts

Clearly just a myth. Photo from here.

If you pledge between now and 10pm tonight, I’ll feature your name on the top of the next blog post. So please head on over to pledge, and then drop me an email or a comment. Help me reach my goal of $1000, and support the Union Gospel Mission. Sometime last night, while in the middle of a weird, sleep-deprived trance, I blogged about a community in Canada that recently converted to solar power. To show that our American friends down south can be innovative and green as well, I want to talk about another community that has recently embraced the wind. Wind Turbines, Photo From here In Rock Port, Missouri, esidents recently converted their entire community to use wind energy. The town of Rock Port, in Missouri, is another of the growing number of towns and cities laying claim to be powered entirely by a renewable energy. And though […]

Oh, is that right? You mean making crappy vehicles for years and years, and then basically ignoring the whole gas problem might put your company in jeopardy? I guess Ford should have turned the suck-knob down a few notches over the last few years, because apparently they just posted their worst quarter ever. Old Ford Truck, Photo By Steven Eret On Flickr That’s not to say I don’t have friends with Ford vehicles, and the stuff they have seem fairly decent. But compared to vehicles imported from Japan or Europe, North American cars are just built to lower standards. American auto companies have long since trailed behind Japan in important areas such as fuel consumption, thinking that gas would always be a cheap luxury. Take a look at Ford’s main web page. In the “Vehicle Showroom” feature for the Ford brand, six of the vehicles are “cars”, everything else is […]

Today I read an article about a unique solar powered community in Canada. The actual location of this community is Okotoks, Alberta. The residents there have created a solar array for their houses that manages to completely power 52 homes. The 52-home solar community has installed an array of solar panels on the roofs of their houses and garages. Glycol solution runs through an insulated piping system, or collector loop, that connects the array of solar panels. The solar panels absorb the solar energy during the daytime and heat the glycol solution. The glycol solution travels through the collector loop and reaches an underground heat exchanger within the community’s centralized Energy Center. The heat is then transferred from heat exchanger to the water stored in a short-term storage tank. The glycol solution returns to the solar collector system. The Energy Center has short-term thermal storage tanks and long-thermal storage tanks […]

I read this story a few days ago, and found it extremely sad. Hundreds of dead baby penguins have started washing up on distant shores. It is difficult to imagine what must have been going through the heads of Rio de Janeiro beachgoers in recent months as they have seen hundreds of baby penguins wash up onshore dead. At last count, more than 400 penguins, swept from the shores of Patagonia and Antarctica, have been found dead on Rio de Janeiro’s beaches, reports the AP’s Michael Astor. .. Erli Costa, a biologist at Federal University, has a different theory: He thinks rapidly fluctuating weather patterns, influenced by climate change, may be altering ocean currents and making the seas more treacherous. Since most of the penguins washing up are young, he postulates that they are babies that had just left their nests in search of food — and succumbed to the […]

I love hearing stories about groups or cities becoming more environmentally conscious. I have a pile of posts to do in the next 24 hours about clean energy, and I thought I’d start it off with this piece. Photo by Sekihan on Flickr Los Angeles recently voted to ban plastic bags by the year 2010. Not only did the entire city council support that effort, but the vote was actually unanimous. The City Council voted Tuesday to ban plastic shopping bags from stores, beginning July 1, 2010. Shoppers can either bring their own bags or pay 25 cents for a paper or biodegradable bag. The council’s unanimous vote also puts pressure on the state, which is considering an Assembly bill that would impose bag recycling requirements on stores. City officials said their ban would not be implemented if the state passes the bill and requires at least a 25-cent charge […]

I read an article today that indicates how one of the largest ice-shelfs in the antarctic region is in danger of collapse: Photo From ESA The Wilkins Ice Shelf is experiencing further disintegration that is threatening the collapse of the ice bridge connecting the shelf to Charcot Island. Since the connection to the island in the image centre helps to stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the break-up of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk. .. This break-up is puzzling to scientists because it has occurred in the Southern Hemispheric winter and does not have characteristics similar to two earlier events that occurred in 2008, which were comparable to the break-up of the Larsen-A and -B ice shelves. “The scale of rifting in the newly-removed areas seems larger, and the pieces are moving out as large bergs and not toppled, finely-divided ice melange,” […]

I just saw a fairly recent (February 2008) film showing a slide-show that Al Gore recently gave on climate change. Here’s a version of the video from Ted.com. It’s inline with the material presented in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, but includes recent data and observations. I watched that video once earlier today, and once again the moment this posting went live. To be honest, while I think he makes amazing points, I have a hard time watching it, mostly because the frustration is so evident in his speech. As far as he is concerned (along with most of the scientists out there), everything he is stating in so amazingly obvious it’s hard to fathom how there hasn’t been a huge movement to correct these issues. And I completely agree. Real change takes passion. It times time, energy, and sacrifice. But that does not automatically imply that real, meaningful change […]

I spent most of the last hour on the couch, just thinking by candlelight. It was a nice break from the norm, having a dark apartment sans the sound of computer fans spinning or other randomness that goes beep in the night. Looking out my window, it’s hard to tell just how many people participated. It seems slightly darker than normal I guess, but for the most part it looks like business as usual in this city. For those of you who missed it, I took my site down for a few hours in support of the event. Here’s a snapshot Rebecca took: And lastly, I just want to mention that WordPress 2.5 was just released, so if you’re looking for an upgrade, now’s a good time (and in fact, many of you are running less than 2.3.3, which is a very bad idea since those versions are totally hackable). […]

For those of you who hadn’t heard, today is the day of Earth Hour, a event set up by the WWF to show support against global warming and climate change. From their website: On March 29, 2008 at 8 p.m., join millions of people around the world in making a statement about climate change by turning off your lights for Earth Hour, an event created by the World Wildlife Fund. Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. View cities involved around the world. […]