Category: Uncategorized

Here is a great post about how to quickly green your house on the cheap. Speed and low-cost, those are two things that are important for widespread adoption.

I have a couple burning questions and ideas on environmental issues:

Is it at all practical to have wind turbines and solar panels over the same area, in a solar/wind farm?

How practical would it be to pitch large-scale solar farms to those African countries that are being swallowed up by the Sahara? It’d be like oil in the Middle East…that is, a source of income based on energy from the natural landscape, not the strife and warfare caused by it.

There are more questions that I can’t think of at the moment. But hey, I think this is the first post that I’ve felt is significant enough not to include a link.

A green living expert in the UK wrote an article in the Independent about the “seven deadly eco sins” and how we can green our lives a lot in just a week. Via Treehugger.

A major solar panel producer has just received $25 mil. in venture capital. They’ve got production costs down to $2/watt, soon to be perhaps 50cents/watt. I wonder how much fossil fuel plants cost per watt?

This is just too good to be true. Could it be something like one of the problems with nuclear, that it requires electricity just to function? I’d like to hear more about it.

There’s a good post on DeSmogBlog listing the ten countries with the most per capita CO2 emissions. The United Nations study that the post links to is more comprehensive, but doesn’t organize the data in the nice “top 10” way that we short-attention-span web surfers enjoy.

This is Wonderful with a capital W. I always fret over whether I should flush that yellow stuff (or wait until next time; I’m not a TOTAL gross-pot). It seems like such a waste of water. But here’s this cool contraption that allows you to have two flush modes on your toilet: a heavier flush for solid waste and a lighter one for liquid. Ingenious.

My philosophy about bad climate news is this: we’re at a point where a lot of bad things are unavoidably going to happen, and we just have to live with that. However, if we change our ways NOW, we can stop even worse disasters from happening down the road. Some people will get distressed to hear that we can’t really avoid a lot of the problems caused by global warming. I don’t get distressed; I just say, silly humans, and mull over how to survive it. It may be difficult. But there are a lot of us, and we (as a species) are pretty good at survival. I doubt climate change will kill off the human race. At least, not imminently.

But anyway, the article that made me think of this is from the BBC. It appears there will be more and worse disasters caused by higher global temperatures. Surprised?

Another Eco Street Blog post, this one about a nifty contest on YouTube. Submit a short video, and get prizes. Check the link for details. What I do find annoying about the post, though (my Wikipedian habits are hard to drop), is that they link to YouTube a total of four times in a basically 4-paragraph post. And write out another link. Yuck. But not to be down on Eco Street, they’re great. And the contest sounds awesome too.

There’s a post on the Eco Street Blog about some research done by Train Chartering that says trains use 70% less energy and are 85% less pollutant than planes. I’m unsure that the results could stand up to public scrutiny, though, simply because it was done by an organization that is focused on trains. However, this reflects what I’ve heard in the past, so I’m inclined to believe it. I’m just waiting for the trans-Atlantic train connector…