(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.
Last September, the Flax Council of Canada (FCC) announced that an unapproved variety of genetically modified flax was detected in food products in Europe. The GM flax variety was identified as FP967 or “Triffid,” which had been developed in Canada, but was never commercialized and has been illegal to grow in Canada since 2001. Since the initial announcement last September, GM flax contamination has been reported in 35 countries.
The contamination has decimated Canada’s flax exports to Europe, which buys 70% of Canada’s flax exports worth an estimated $321 million (Canadian). The European Union has zero tolerance for unapproved GMOs.
28% of Republicans said the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made them more likely to support drilling off the coast to an equal 28% who said it made them less likely to be supportive. 44% said it made no difference
(BusinessGreen) A “bladeless” wind turbine that has been designed to pacify protestors who dislike the visual and noise impact of traditional three-blade turbines could soon be launched.
US startup Solar Aero Research claims its soon-to-be-released Fuller Wind Turbine circumvents many of the objections to the traditional three-bladed wind turbine by reducing noise levels and avoiding any form of radar interference or injuries to wildlife.
“As we see more and more of the population rising in opposition to the windmills due to noise and wildlife injury concerns, we see more opportunities for our system, so we are… redoubling our efforts to make people aware that there is an alternative,” chief executive Howard Fuller told BusinessGreen.com.
The completely enclosed device secured a patent last month and after six years of development Solar Aero is now looking to start manufacturing from next year and is in talks to find licensees around the world which can produce the units.
Fuller said that the company ultimately planned to target both the micro-generation and the utility-scale wind farm market.
April 23 Bloomberg — On windy nights in northern Germany, consumers are paid to keep the lights on. Twice this year, the nation’s 21,000 wind turbines pumped out so much power that utilities reduced customer bills for using the surplus electricity. Since the first rebate came with little fanfare at 5 a.m. one October day in 2008, payments have risen as high as 500.02 euros $665 a megawatt-hour, about as much as a small factory or 1,000 homes use in 60 minutes.
The wind-energy boom in Europe and parts of Texas has begun to reduce bills for consumers. Electricity-network managers have even ordered windmills offline at times to trim supplies. That hurts profit for wind-farm operators, said Christian Kjaer, head of the European Wind Energy Association, which represents RWE AG of Germany, Spain’s Iberdrola SA and Dong Energy A/S of Denmark.“We’re seeing that wind energy lowers prices, which is great for the consumers,” Kjaer said at his group’s conference in Warsaw this week. “We as producers have to acknowledge that this means operating the existing plant fewer hours a year, and this has an effect on investors” and profit.
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.
New 'PlantBottle' from Coca-Cola will use up to 30% plant-based materials and will be 100% recyclable.
By Timothy B. Hurst
(earthandindustry.com) PlantBottle made with 30% plant-waste to be in North American markets by January. Coca-Cola execs says they are working towards plastic bottles that will be made entirely out of plant material.
It is only a matter of time before Coca-Cola products in North America will be packaged entirely in plant-based containers. Mono-ethylene glycol (MEG) derived from sugarcane and molasses has already started popping up in Coca-Cola bottles in Europe and company officials say the new PlantBottle will be ready for a North American debut by the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
And if Coca-Cola is able to carry out its strategic vision of finding other sources of waste-plant material to make MEG from, it may not be long before most Coke products are packaged entirely in 100% plant-based, 100% recyclable bottles.
Vermaland, a land holding company in Phoenix, will hold an auction on June 6 to sell off 1,938 acres that it says could accommodate 388 megawatts of electricity, according to the company. That would be enough to power 100,000 homes, says Vermaland.
Arizona has been trying to promote solar in its borders with credits and incentives for manufacturers and consumers. Arizona Public Service has a mandate to provide 4.5 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2014. The state offers a $3 per watt credit, nearly twice as high as California’s. Baseline power in the state, however, is comparatively cheap so some of the advantage is eroded. Nonetheless, some power providers want to produce power in Arizona to sell to California.
One of the state’s chief assets, of course, is the sun and empty land. Sempra Generation, an independent power provider, has said it will build more than 300 megawatts of PV parks on 4,000 acres it owns near Phoenix. Land was part of the motivation behind First Solar’s purchase of Optisolar. First Solar is discarding Optisolar’s technology but keeping the deals and land rights.
(NY Times) New York City is among the few jurisdictions in the country that deem beekeeping illegal, lumping the honeybee together with hyenas, tarantulas, cobras, dingoes and other animals considered too dangerous or venomous for city life. But the honeybee’s bad rap — and the days of urban beekeepers being outlaws — may soon be over.
On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s board will take up the issue of amending the health code to allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Health department officials said the change was being considered after research showed that the reports of bee stings in the city were minimal and that honeybees did not pose a public health threat.
(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.
By Mireya Navarro
