Dec 5th, 2008 | Science & Technology, Alternative Energy, Helping the Environment, Innovation, Solar Energy, Today's News | No Comments
POZNAN, Poland (AP) — The first solar-powered car to travel around the world ended its journey at the U.N. climate talks Thursday, arriving with the message that clean technologies are available now to stop global warming.
The small two-seater — made from aluminum and fiberglass — hauled a trailer of solar cells and U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer up to a building in Poznan where delegates from some 190 nations are working toward a new treaty to control climate change.
“This is the first time in history that a solar-powered car has traveled all the way around the world without using a single drop of petrol,” said Louis Palmer, the 36-year-old Swiss schoolteacher and adventurer who made the trip.
“These new technologies are ready,” he said. “It’s ecological, it’s economical, it is absolutely reliable. We can stop global warning.”
To read complete article by Vanessa Gera of Associated Press go to AP.com
Dec 4th, 2008 | Science & Technology, Helping the Environment, Today's News | No Comments
STERKSEL, the Netherlands — The cows and pigs dotting these flat green plains in the southern Netherlands create a bucolic landscape. But looked at through the lens of greenhouse gas accounting, they are living smokestacks, spewing methane emissions into the air.
That is why a group of farmers-turned-environmentalists here at a smelly but impeccably clean research farm have a new take on making a silk purse from a sow’s ear: They cook manure from their 3,000 pigs to capture the methane trapped within it, and then use the gas to make electricity for the local power grid.
To read article by Elisabeth Rosenthal go to NYTimes.com
Dec 2nd, 2008 | Science & Technology, Helping the Environment, Today's News | No Comments
The world’s most prominent environmentalist on carbon taxes, clean coal and the dangers of illusion.
Former Vice President Al Gore—now a Nobel Prize winner and the world’s most prominent environmentalist—isn’t looking for another job in Washington. But his eloquent warnings about the dangers of global climate change have obviously helped shape the priorities of the incoming Obama administration. Gore sat down with NEWSWEEK’s Fareed Zakaria recently to talk about a bailout for Detroit, the greening of China and the elusive promise of “clean coal.” Excerpts:
To read article by Fareed Zakaria go to Newsweek.com
Nov 15th, 2008 | Science & Technology, Alternative Energy, Helping the Environment, Innovation, Solar Energy, Today's News | No Comments
A Future So Bright The History of Solar Energy
Essay: As the world faces economic turmoil, cleaner energy can create jobs and reignite global growth.
In rented offices on a quiet side street in Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower, analysts for the International Energy Agency spend long days and nights crunching numbers about oil production and greenhouse-gas emissions. They’re the staid, sober global accountants who watch over the power supply for the 30 rich countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and their many reports are dry and technical. But lately, the group’s pronouncements have taken on more ominous overtones. With a sense of urgency bordering on desperation, the IEA has begun calling for radical changes in the way the world drives its cars, its factories and, indeed, the global economy. This month the agency will issue a collection of comprehensive reports declaring that “a global revolution is needed in ways that energy is supplied and used.”
To read article by By Christopher Dickey and Tracy McNicoll go to Newsweek.com
Nov 11th, 2008 | Science & Technology, Education, Innovation, Today's News | No Comments
Forty years ago, advances in fertilizers and pesticides boosted crop yield and fed a growing planet. Today, demand for food fueled by rises in worldwide consumption of meat and protein is again outpacing farmers ability to keep up. It’s time for the next Green Revolution.
To read article go to Wired.com
Nov 2nd, 2008 | Architecture, Helping the Environment, Innovation, Today's News | No Comments
WASHINGTON — Tiny Greensburg, Kansas, rebuilding from scratch after nearly being wiped away by a tornado last year, is quickly becoming a model for going green.
Along with Masdar City, a planned car-free community outside Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and other developments, the rural Kansas town offers vivid examples of sustainable living in “Green Community,” a new exhibit at the National Building Museum. The exhibit opened Thursday and will run for a year.
“They are really making a wonderful opportunity out of an absolute tragedy,” curator and architect Susan Piedmont-Palladino said of Greensburg. “Masdar and Greensburg do make a really good pair because they’re both looking at the whole package of green technologies — from very old ways of doing things to high-tech ways.”
To read complete article by Brett Zongker of Associated Press go to USA Today.com
Oct 7th, 2008 | Architecture, Helping the Environment, Education, Innovation, Today's News | No Comments
Nine years ago the California Academy of Sciences asked: What’s a natural history museum in the 21st century? Its stunning new building is the emphatic answer.
The new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, is a building of mythic proportions. At 410,000 square feet, it’s expected to be the largest public building ever to attain a LEED Platinum rating. And, with a $488 million price tag, it also represents the largest fund-raising effort for a cultural institution in San Francisco history. How did this low- profile natural history museum and research facility become a half-billion-dollar marquee project by a Pritzker Prize–winning architect, not to mention a landmark in sustainable design?
According to an oft-told origin story, it all started on the roof. In late 1999, architect Renzo Piano visited the site, climbed up on top of the Academy’s former building, and—there amid the canopy of trees—declared that the roof itself needed to be-come an exhibit of the museum. “This was a magic place in the middle of Golden Gate Park,” Piano recalls. “I said, ‘The roof has got to be part of the experience of the building, part of the itinerary.’”
To read article by Karen E. Steen go to Metropolis.com
Oct 7th, 2008 | Architecture, Helping the Environment, Innovation | No Comments
Ten years ago, Portland developer Mark Edlen and his partner, Bob Gerding, were scarcely known even in their home city. Today, they run the top development company in Portland. Over the past decade, Gerding Edlen Development has been responsible for over ten different LEED-rated condo and office projects, as well as a renovation of a 19th Century armory that became the first building on the National Register of Historic Places to achieve a Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. Along the way, the firm helped transform two blighted industrial areas in Portland, the Pearl District and the South Waterfront (which now boasts one of only two aerial trams in a U.S. city.)
The firm has been busy outside their hometown as well, and are active in transforming downtown Los Angeles. In September of 2007, the Elleven project became the first California condominium to receive LEED Gold and was later honored as the Best Multifamily Highrise at the Los Angeles Architectural Awards.
To read complete article by Brian Libby go to Metropolis.com
Sep 28th, 2008 | Editorial, Innovation | No Comments
Many things make me weep about the current economic crisis, but none more than this brief economic history: In the 19th century, America had a railroad boom, bubble and bust. Some people made money; many lost money. But even when that bubble burst, it left America with an infrastructure of railroads that made transcontinental travel and shipping dramatically easier and cheaper.
The late 20th century saw an Internet boom, bubble and bust. Some people made money; many people lost money, but that dot-com bubble left us with an Internet highway system that helped Microsoft, I.B.M. and Google to spearhead the I.T. revolution.
The early 21st century saw a boom, bubble and now a bust around financial services. But I fear all it will leave behind are a bunch of empty Florida condos that never should have been built, used private jets that the wealthy can no longer afford and dead derivative contracts that no one can understand.
Worse, we borrowed the money for this bubble from China, and now we have to pay it back — with interest and without any lasting benefit.
To read full editorial by Tom Friedman go to NYTimes.com
Sep 16th, 2008 | Science & Technology, Today's News | No Comments
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — It is probably a good thing that the Mohonk Mountain House, the 19th-century resort, was built on Shawangunk conglomerate, a concrete-hard quartz rock. Otherwise, the path to the National Weather Service’s cooperative station here surely would have turned to dust by now.
Every day for the last 112 years, people have trekked up the same gray outcropping to dutifully record temperatures and weather conditions. In the process, they have compiled a remarkable data collection that has become a climatological treasure chest
To read complete article by Anthony DePalma go to NYTimes.com
