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Google Writing Smart Grid Software for Hybrids – Reviews by PC Magazine
Google Inc is in the early stages of looking at ways to write software that would fully integrate plug-in hybrid vehicles to the power grid, minimize strain on the grid and help utilities manage vehicle charging load.
“We are doing some preliminary work,” said Dan Reicher, Google’s director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives. “We have begun some work on smart charging of electric vehicles and how you would integrate large number of electric vehicles into the grid successfully.”
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Let’s suppose that happens. Humanity’s ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. “A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people,” says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.
Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about “saving the planet” we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?
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HP SkyRoom sets low ceiling on videochat
HP today came up with a videoconferencing product that could work out 1,000 times cheaper than the telepresence mega-productions itself and Cisco have been pushing.
Cisco’s TelePresence or HP’s Halo can cost more than $300,000 for a boardroom suite setup, but HP’s SkyRoom could link two boardrooms for less than $300.
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The green mission statements made by the US energy firm amount to nothing when it dirties its hands with tar sands and campaigns against Obama’s climate bill
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E.P.A. to Require Big Polluters to Report Emissions – NYTimes.com
The Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday that it would require the nation’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases to start tracking their emission levels on Jan. 1 and report them to the government.
The E.P.A. said the reporting would cover roughly 85 percent of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States linked to global warming.
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South Africa appears to have softened its position on greenhouse gas emissions, saying on Wednesday it would support cuts to prevent global warming.
“On global warming, cabinet would like to correct the wrong impression that had been created that South Africa was opposed to targets being set on global warming,” cabinet spokesman Themba Maseko told journalists, according to Reuters.
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Worldchanging: Bright Green: Planetary Boundaries and The Failure of Environmentalism
Planetary boundaries are the natural limits on humanity’s use of the planet. Strikingly, until recently, no one had made a serious effort to quantify these limits in measurable ways. That’s why a new report from the Stockholm Resilience Center, attempting to give hard numbers for most of these boundaries, is so crucial.
The Resilience Center focused in on nine boundaries: climate change, stratospheric ozone, land use change, freshwater use, biological diversity, ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans, aerosol loading and chemical pollution. These are each critical in their own ways:
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UPS to FedEx: We’re Greener Than You | ClimateBiz.com
These days, to my delight (and, I hope, yours), big companies are battling over which one is more sustainable. I’m sure Michael Dell wasn’t happy to read that Hewlett Packard landed atop Newsweek’s new sustainability rankings of the S&P 500 companies, even though Dell was right behind at No. 2. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo monitor each other’s environmental initiatives nearly as closely as they vie for shelf space at Wal-Mart, which, not coincidentally, keeps an eye on the greening of all of its suppliers.
Now UPS and FedEx, longtime and intense rivals, are going at it.
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HP Tightens Smart Grid Security – News – eWeekEurope.co.uk
HP has launched a new audit service for smart grid technology, in response to a series of successful hacking attempts against energy meters and other infrastructure.
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Smart Grid: Whirlpool Promises a Million Smart Clothes Dryers in 2 Years
Whirlpool Corporation says it will manufacture a million Smart Grid-compatible clothes dryers by the end of 2011. In homes where utilities have two-way communications, clothes dryers could be controlled remotely by the utility, powering it down in times of peak usage or running the appliance at a time when electricity is cheaper (for example, at night). Whirlpool estimates that if a utility has time-of-use pricing in place, a smart dryer could save a consumer between $20 and $40 a year.
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IBM to consolidate about 3,900 computer servers onto about 30 System z mainframes running the Linux operating system. The company anticipates that the new server environment will consume approximately 80 percent less energy than the current set up and expects significant savings over five years in energy, software and system support costs.
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Michael Pollan, in ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’ attempts to trace back the history of four very different meals: one from a fast food chain, one based on the multitude of Organic-labeled food, another from a sustainably-farmed meal and finally a meal that was foraged by the author himself.
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Even if carbon emissions were cut to zero immediately, sea levels would continue to rise through the coming centuries, scientists say. A likely projection is an increase of up to five meters over 300 years.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.