It’s been a bummer of a week for climate news. The Senate bill continues to languish behind health care and there have been some disconcerting rumbles that it might now be back-burnered even longer as an increasingly spineless nervous Senate focuses on jobs and deficit. And out of Singapore on Sunday we hear that Copenhagen definitely won’t produce a legally-binding agreement, but will rather be the first piece of a “one-agreement, two-step” process, the controversial (and dangerous (pdf),…

Read & Discuss

We’ve mentioned before that climate change and our dependence on foreign oil represent a couple of the gravest fundamental threats to our national security. So—in honor of Veterans Day—here’s a video of some of our men and women in uniform touring the country in support of clean energy:

These vets of Operation Free took to two buses (yes, they were biodiesel), and rolled across the country talking to the public, political leaders, and fellow veterans about the…

Read & Discuss

The algae industry is still five to 10 years from commercialization, but it has the potential to change our lives.

I use a Britta for drinking water. About a year ago, my girlfriend noticed a neon green film growing from the bottom of the Britta jug. “Damn algae,” I thought to myself. “It grows everywhere.” But that capacity to grow really, really quickly—and practically anywhere—could be the saving grace of humanity (or the cause of more ire).

Among…

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Imagine a world where cords do not exist. Where surge protectors and extension cords are obsolete and multiple wall sockets are unnecessary.

What if your electronic devices could be powered by air?

Sounds like something out of a Sci-Fi movie, but that world of ultra-convenience is right around the corner, according to WiTricity, a Massachusetts-based company that says it will have wireless electricity on the market within the next two years. It’s a bold statement and the…

Read & Discuss

Buildings are actually responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than cars. But simply weatherizing houses and businesses can reduce their environmental impact and lower energy bills—while creating new jobs in the process. Everyone wins.

Created in partnership with Green for All, a national organization dedicated to building an inclusive green economy, strong enough to lift people out of poverty. For more information on programs near you, visit www.greenforall.org.

…
Read & Discuss

Park In the Shade, Recharge Your Plug-In Vehicle Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, now have a shaded solar parking structure called the Solar Grove. It was built by Envision Solar, and it has a capacity of 130 kilowatts, which should help avoid about 145,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year.
But the clean electricity is only part of the benefit; there’s also some energy savings that come from the shade produced by the “solar…

Read & Discuss

Yesterday, Obama announced he’d be giving $3.4 billion in stimulus funds to projects aimed at modernizing our outdated energy grid. The goal is to build a “smart grid” that moves energy more efficiently, has real-time monitoring, can coordinate with energy-efficient appliances, and can link up our cities with sources of renewable energy like wind or solar power.

If we build it right we’ll get lower electricity bills for everyone and lower carbon emissions. (You can see what…

Read & Discuss

Emphasizing cost effective evaluation tools can get us better results with less effort, enabling innovators to do more good with a given amount of resources. In this week’s discussion, we will think broadly about the costs associated with evaluation throughout the innovation process, and suggest we rethink how we approach evaluation in order to get better results with less effort.

To understand what it means to emphasize cost effective evaluation tools, let’s consider what types of costs…

Read & Discuss

Neither ethanol nor electric vehicles address the real problems.

We have two main “solutions” for curbing the unintended consequences of our use of fossil fuels: first generation biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) and electric vehicles. I am unapologetic in my belief that both are very flawed solutions. At best, they make only a marginally positive contribution; at worst, they represent a situation where the patient’s medicine can actually make him sicker.

It may seem like heresy for a self-righteous Prius-driving…

Read & Discuss

This is a future solar chimney project in Australia. I’ve always thought these things could have a dual function, where the floor is flooded with a thin layer of seawater, and the interior of the tower is grooved with channels draining clean condensate from the evaporated water vapor, providing both power and desalinated water.

Original article: YouTube – Solar Tower Energy

…
Read & Discuss

It’s been a bummer of a week for climate news. The Senate bill continues to languish behind health care and there have been some disconcerting rumbles that it might now be back-burnered even longer as an increasingly spineless nervous Senate focuses on jobs and deficit. And out of Singapore on Sunday we hear that Copenhagen definitely won’t produce a legally-binding agreement, but will rather be the first piece of a “one-agreement, two-step” process, the controversial (and dangerous (pdf),…

Read & Discuss

We’ve mentioned before that climate change and our dependence on foreign oil represent a couple of the gravest fundamental threats to our national security. So—in honor of Veterans Day—here’s a video of some of our men and women in uniform touring the country in support of clean energy:

These vets of Operation Free took to two buses (yes, they were biodiesel), and rolled across the country talking to the public, political leaders, and fellow veterans about the…

Read & Discuss

The algae industry is still five to 10 years from commercialization, but it has the potential to change our lives.

I use a Britta for drinking water. About a year ago, my girlfriend noticed a neon green film growing from the bottom of the Britta jug. “Damn algae,” I thought to myself. “It grows everywhere.” But that capacity to grow really, really quickly—and practically anywhere—could be the saving grace of humanity (or the cause of more ire).

Among…

Read & Discuss

Imagine a world where cords do not exist. Where surge protectors and extension cords are obsolete and multiple wall sockets are unnecessary.

What if your electronic devices could be powered by air?

Sounds like something out of a Sci-Fi movie, but that world of ultra-convenience is right around the corner, according to WiTricity, a Massachusetts-based company that says it will have wireless electricity on the market within the next two years. It’s a bold statement and the…

Read & Discuss

Buildings are actually responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than cars. But simply weatherizing houses and businesses can reduce their environmental impact and lower energy bills—while creating new jobs in the process. Everyone wins.

Created in partnership with Green for All, a national organization dedicated to building an inclusive green economy, strong enough to lift people out of poverty. For more information on programs near you, visit www.greenforall.org.

…
Read & Discuss

Park In the Shade, Recharge Your Plug-In Vehicle Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, now have a shaded solar parking structure called the Solar Grove. It was built by Envision Solar, and it has a capacity of 130 kilowatts, which should help avoid about 145,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year.
But the clean electricity is only part of the benefit; there’s also some energy savings that come from the shade produced by the “solar…

Read & Discuss

Yesterday, Obama announced he’d be giving $3.4 billion in stimulus funds to projects aimed at modernizing our outdated energy grid. The goal is to build a “smart grid” that moves energy more efficiently, has real-time monitoring, can coordinate with energy-efficient appliances, and can link up our cities with sources of renewable energy like wind or solar power.

If we build it right we’ll get lower electricity bills for everyone and lower carbon emissions. (You can see what…

Read & Discuss

Emphasizing cost effective evaluation tools can get us better results with less effort, enabling innovators to do more good with a given amount of resources. In this week’s discussion, we will think broadly about the costs associated with evaluation throughout the innovation process, and suggest we rethink how we approach evaluation in order to get better results with less effort.

To understand what it means to emphasize cost effective evaluation tools, let’s consider what types of costs…

Read & Discuss

Neither ethanol nor electric vehicles address the real problems.

We have two main “solutions” for curbing the unintended consequences of our use of fossil fuels: first generation biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) and electric vehicles. I am unapologetic in my belief that both are very flawed solutions. At best, they make only a marginally positive contribution; at worst, they represent a situation where the patient’s medicine can actually make him sicker.

It may seem like heresy for a self-righteous Prius-driving…

Read & Discuss

This is a future solar chimney project in Australia. I’ve always thought these things could have a dual function, where the floor is flooded with a thin layer of seawater, and the interior of the tower is grooved with channels draining clean condensate from the evaporated water vapor, providing both power and desalinated water.

Original article: YouTube – Solar Tower Energy

…
Read & Discuss

Crude Blogging

We’re running out of oil, but search for the phrase “peak oil” on the websites of 31 major U.S. newspapers, and you’ll get a mere 941 hits, total. That’s the kind of thing the Oil Drum would like to address. The online think tank, launched in 2005, is filling that void with grounded writing on natural resources and energy.

According to co-founder Kyle L. Saunders, a political-science professor at Colorado State University, “We started off like…

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Doing Justice to Climate Activism

Michael Wolkind is the lawyer who defended the Greenpeace activists for disrupting operations at a British coal power plant.

In October, 2007, six Greenpeace activists climbed the chimney at the Kingsnorth power station, a coal and oil plant, in Kent, England. The dramatic 650-foot ascent was followed by a frightening rappel down the side to paint a political message.

They did it as a protest against a dirty plant and a shocking government…

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A major obstacle to improving health and business in rural Africa is a lack of connectivity. In some nations, 95 percent of the population lives off the grid with almost no access to electricity. That makes cell phones and light bulbs—both of which are critical to facilitating development—tough to use. Enter Lebônê Solutions, an organization that has figured out how to generate energy from an unlikely source: dirt. Using microbial fuel cell technology, Lebônê was able,…

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Fake Plastic Trees

Some 2.4 billion years ago, tiny blue-green algae figured out a neat trick. Using sunshine, water, and carbon dioxide, they produced plant food as well as the oxygen that makes our existence possible. We’re still driving around on the fruits of their labor all these eons later—not to mention turning on the lights, flying into space, and everything else we do with the energy embedded in the fossilized sunshine that is coal, oil, and…

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Even Less Evil

Fact: Google is a Really Important Company. Sure, it boasts massive profits, and it fights with Microsoft, and there is still debate over whether it is staying true to its do-no-evil mantra. All that aside, however, Google is also taking on several projects that, if successful, will certainly help tip the “not evil” side of the scale. Here are three of them:

GOOGLE POWERMETER  Imagine if checking your electricity meter were part of your daily…

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Follow or Get out of the Way: The household name in green construction needs to innovate in order to keep up with the competition.

Imagine if teachers gave out grades on the first day of school based on students’ promises of how hard they each plan to study. Oddly, we use this backward system to grade green buildings in the United States.

LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the certification system created by the U.S.…

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Protecting Our Peaks

If coal is the enemy of the human race, as the environmental blogger David Roberts has said, then mountaintop-removal mining is its doomsday device. This technique for getting at coal involves stripping entire mountains of vegetation and literally blasting their tops off. It produces tons of toxic sludge, disrupts biodiversity, and contaminates the water and air—all to supply us with one of the world’s dirtiest forms of energy. The website iLoveMountains.org is providing people with…

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Buildings are actually responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than cars. But simply weatherizing houses and businesses can reduce their environmental impact and lower energy bills—while creating new jobs in the process. Everyone wins.

Created in partnership with Green for All, a national organization dedicated to building an inclusive green economy, strong enough to lift people out of poverty. For more information on programs near you, visit www.greenforall.org.

…
Read & Discuss