Posts

Great post from Gristmill, getting perspective on the fossil fuel “debate” by referencing Lincoln and slavery.

Lifehacker has a post (that points to this eHow page) about garden and lawn water conservation. It’s easy to use way more water than is appropriate to satisfy your parched lawn in the blistering heat of the summer, so if you’re interested in saving water, these are some good strategies to keep in mind.

This Gristmill post introduces the news that due to rising gas prices, asphalt too is becoming more expensive. That makes it more difficult for tight-budgeted local governments to keep up their roads. Kif at Gristmill comments that this is an indication of how oil reliance drags us down. I’ve been thinking recently about cross-state highways and how such existing infrastructure might be perfect to convert into mass transportation networks. Eliminate, say, the leftmost one or two lanes on either side of the highway, and replace them with some sort of high-speed tracks. The reduction in roadspace would cause worse traffic until people realized that they could where they were going faster by taking the train along the same path. The problem is how you get people from this central line to wherever they’re going, because their destination is usually not going to be in walking distance of a station. Hmmm…any thoughts?

First, this company, JC Decaux, that apparently owns the advertising on all sorts of public bus shelters etc. around the globe, is trading rent-a-bike programs in cities around Europe in exchange for more advertising contracts. They intend to introduce such programs in about a third of their 1500 cities over the next ten years.

Next, the New York Times has an article about converting diesel vehicles to run on straight vegetable oil. It’s illegal, according to the EPA, but it’s economical and might possibly reduce your environmental footprint. And it also reuses waste, which is something that is good (biomimicry and all that)

Apparently IKEA, the WalMart of the furniture world, is really socially and environmentally responsible. Go figure.

The Bishop of London has said that it’s a sin to unduly contribute to climate change. This is great, I think, because so many people around the world seem to listen to their religious leaders more than nearly anyone else, and if those listened-to people are advocating energy conservation, that might be a good incentive to otherwise obstinant people to do the right thing.

That’s it for now. Slainte.

From BusinessWeek, via Digg/science comes “Green Wonders of the World“, a guide to some of the most environmentally conscious structures and communities around the world. This is REALLY cool, I think, but the problem I see with green architecture is that for many of these designs, they are much more expensive than a conventional building. Communities around the country and world won’t start using environmental architecture en mass unless it’s of comparable cost to what they’re used to. I’m going to check out the LEED people and see if they have anything about that.

Another great week’s summary of sustainable mobility from WorldChanging. I don’t know how frequent these “The week in ___” pieces are, but WorldChanging just finished up a week of “CanadaChanging” posts, so perhaps this is the mobility topics they didn’t cover in that time. I also just noticed that these sustainable mobility summaries are written by a guy from Green Car Congress, another wonderful blog, although a little too much for me in frequency and technicality.

Here’s a link from Hugg: a detailed description of what’s wrong with the American concept of lawns from the blog “The Worsted Witch“. I’ve just discovered this blog, and it looks cool, discussing frugality as well as sustainability and environmentalism, the first of those being another major interest of mine. You go, Worsted Witch.

An article from Christian Science Monitor about turning waste grease into biodiesel. I’m not sure, do naysayers take this into account when they argue that going all the way over to biodiesel would involve a ridiculous amount of corn production?

Huzzah! Two European countries have initiated new measures to tax gas-guzzlers and subsidize fuel-efficient vehicles. This is great; wish it could happen in the US. One can always hope…

This is what everyone thinks about when they hear “Global Warming”–very hot temperatures a lot more frequently. More evidence…

Looks like MIT is putting on a Vehicle Design Summit whose goal is to design more efficient motorized vehicles. Power to the engineers!

So there’ve been a lot of great Treehuggs since I last check them. Here they are with efforts toward brevity:

Wind-powered bike lights, although on a site that has an overabundance of flash and noise.

Annoyed by nimbyism blocking wind farms? New concept of “DOWNVInD” might be the answer.

The University of Florida is going to be holding a Conference on Campus and Community Sustainability on October 25th and 26th.

A new Greenpeace ad against gas guzzlers that looks good.