From conceptualizing zero-emission transport solutions to exploring solar power in key military centers, the U.S. military’s need to always be ahead of the curve is pushing the bubble for green energy development. And one area that has gone under the radar is the U.S. military’s ambitious goal to meet fifty percent of its fuel usage through biofuels by 2016.
via Tiny Green Bubble • US Military Has Aggressive Biofuel Goals.
The city of El Mirage has a very “un-Phoenix” vision for its future — cut more from the cloth of Santa Fe, N.M., and Portland than the Valley’s sprawling suburbia.
El Mirage voters in November will consider a long-term plan to transform the West Valley city into a transit-oriented, environmentally friendly arts hub. Officials also want to cut the city’s carbon footprint by half over the next several decades and create parcels for organic and urban gardens.
The El Mirage City Council approved the plan earlier this month.
“It’s an ambitious plan,” said Scott Chesney, the city’s economic development director.
El Mirage already is doing some things outlined in the plan, such as trying to attract artists and creative businesses via zoning changes that allow for live-work studios, and hooking them up with federal stimulus help such as weatherization grants and energy-efficiency tax breaks.
But the plan hinges on the recovery of the real estate and lending markets and building transit-oriented, urban development around a possible commuter rail station near Grand Avenue and Thunderbird Road. There is a proposal to create a commuter rail line along the existing Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks to link the city to downtown Phoenix.
“El Mirage wants to build a jobs core around a train station,” Chesney said.
The Maricopa Association of Governments is moving forward with plans for a 30- to 50-mile Grand Avenue commuter line that could run to Wickenburg. But MAG planner Marc Pearsall said such a line hinges on finding funding and likely is a decade away. MAG’s Regional Council approved the idea of a Grand Avenue rail line in May.
“Since there is no existing funding for commuter rail in our existing Regional Transportation Plan, a new funding source would need to be identified and sent to the voters. In today’s economic and political climate, that may be very difficult for the near future,” Pearsall said.
A May MAG report on the Grand line estimates costs of $434 million to $701 million, depending on the length of the line.
About 200 acres of land near Grand and Thunderbird could be redeveloped around the train station, including a 140-acre lot of the north side of Grand used by BNSF.
Chesney stressed the plan is long-term when it comes to transit-oriented developments and finding ways to reduce El Mirage’s carbon footprint.
via El Mirage plan would create urban arts hub – Phoenix Business Journal.
By Maria Recio, Dave Montgomery and Mark Washburn
(McClatchy Newspapers) WASHINGTON — In the days after an oil well spun out of control in the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers tried to activate a huge piece of underwater safety equipment but failed because the device had been so altered that diagrams BP got from the equipment’s owner didn’t match the supposedly failsafe device’s configuration, congressional investigators said Wednesday.
The oil well also failed at least one critical pressure test on the day that gas surged up the drill pipe and set the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig aflame, killing 11 and setting off a spill that has spewed 210,000 gallons of crude into the gulf every day for three weeks, according to BP documents provided to congressional investigators.
“The more I learn about this accident, the more concerned I become. This catastrophe appears to have been caused by a calamitous series of equipment and operational failures,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Read the rest: Oil spill: BP had wrong diagram to close blowout preventer | McClatchy.
In a 2003 paper for the Naval War College Review, author Richard J. Norton defined the term feral cities. “Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles,” Norton begins, as if narrating the start of a film pitch.
With the city’s infrastructure having collapsed long ago—or perhaps having never been built in the first place—there are no works of public sanitation, no sewers, no licensed doctors, no reliable food supply, no electricity.
The feral city is a kind of return to medievalism, we might say, back to the future of a dark age for anyone but criminals, gangs, and urban warlords. It is a space of illiterate power—strength unresponsive to rationality or political debate.
From the perspective of a war planner or soldier, the feral city is also spatially impenetrable, a maze resistant to aerial mapping. Indeed, its “buildings, other structures, and subterranean spaces, would offer nearly perfect protection from overhead sensors, whether satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles,” Norton writes.
Read the rest BLDGBLOG: Cities Under Siege.
(WebUrbanist) Outdoor advertising is so ubiquitous in almost every urban setting around the world, it’s difficult to walk down a street, take an escalator or sit on a bench without getting slapped in the face with one product or another. But the city of São Paulo, Brazil is like an advertising ghost town: all of its billboards stand oddly blank and empty.
In September of 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis was scrubbed of almost every type of outdoor advertising – even pamphlets. It’s all part of mayor Gilberto Kassab’s quest to eliminate visual clutter, making the city itself the focal point rather than colorful, increasingly desperate marketing campaigns.
Read the rest: weburbanist.com | Sao Paulo scrubbed of out door ads
By Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson
(Washington Post) Three key senators are engaged in a radical behind-the-scenes overhaul of climate legislation, preparing to jettison the broad “cap-and-trade” approach that has defined the legislative debate for close to a decade.
The sharp change of direction demonstrates the extent to which the cap-and-trade strategy — allowing facilities to buy and sell pollution credits in order to meet a national limit on greenhouse gas emissions — has become political poison. In a private meeting with several environmental leaders on Wednesday, according to participants, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham R-S.C., declared, “Cap-and-trade is dead.”
Graham and Sens. John F. Kerry D-Mass. and Joseph I. Lieberman I-Conn. have worked for months to develop an alternative to cap-and-trade, which the House approved eight months ago. They plan to introduce legislation next month that would apply different carbon controls to individual sectors of the economy instead of setting a national target.
According to several sources familiar with the process, the lawmakers are looking at cutting the nation’s greenhouse gas output by targeting, in separate ways, three major sources of emissions: electric utilities, transportation and industry.
Read the rest: Senators to propose abandoning cap-and-trade – washingtonpost.com.
(Washington Post) Jess Parker hugs trees. In the woods of Anne Arundel County, he throws his arms around tulip poplars, oaks and American beeches, and holds them so tightly that his cheek presses into their bark. This is not some hiker on a lark: anybody, hopped up on campfire coffee and exercise endorphins, might hug a tree once.
This is science. Parker has done it about 50,000 times. Parker, a forest ecologist at the Smithsonian Institution, has spent the past 22 years on a research project so repetitive, so time-consuming, that it impresses even researchers with the patience to count tree rings. Since 1987, he and a group of volunteers have embraced thousands of trees, slipped a tape measure behind them, and wrapped it around to measure the trees’ girth.
This year, after about 250,000 hugs between them, the work paid off. Parker’s data, which showed the trunks gradually fattening over time, indicated that many of the trees were growing two to four times faster than expected. That raised questions about climate change’s impact on the age-old rhythms of U.S. forests.
Read the rest: Climate change’s impact on forests being measured via expanding tree trunks – By David A. Fahrenthold washingtonpost.com.
Aerogels are made by removing the liquid from gels, resulting in a material that is more than 90 percent air. The porous structure of that nanomaterial makes it difficult for heat to pass through. As a result, aerogels make very good and light-weight insulators.
Because of costs, aerogel manufacturers have focused on high-end industrial applications, such as insulating oil and gas pipelines and even the Mars Rover spacecraft.
But now, a handful of aerogel companies are offering thin blankets that serve as replacements for traditional fiberglass, foam, or cellulose insulation. It’s still more expensive upfront but the costs have fallen to the point that it can make sense in certain cases, particularly masonry or curved walls, according to Aspen Aerogels.
via High-tech aerogels wrap homes with insulation | Green Tech – CNET News.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Urban gardening used to seem subversive. People planted tomatoes in public parks, strung their hops to rooftops to make homebrew and reclaimed empty lots as community farms, never mind the property owner.
Yet here in one of the more thoroughly tilled cities in America, subversive has come full circle: the federal government plans to plant its own bold garden directly above a downtown plaza. As part of a $133 million renovation, the General Services Administration is planning to cultivate “vegetated fins” that will grow more than 200 feet high on the western facade of the main federal building here, a vertical garden that changes with the seasons and nurtures plants that yield energy savings.
“They will bloom in the spring and summer when you want the shade, and then they will go away in the winter when you want to let the light in,” said Bob Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the G.S.A. “Don’t ask me how you get them irrigated.”
To read complete article by William Yardley go to NYTimes.com
ENN News