-
PoCarles.com & US: Saint-Gobain and Second Life : Explaining glazing and playing for real trees
Saint-Gobain Glass, will run a set of conferences, to co-invent with some eco-friendly Second Life residents their next generation of products. The idea is to inspire more than ever both the R&D and Marketing department.
As well as the conferences, there is a game about the best practices for saving energy in your house, by using the right kind of high-technology glaze. Every resident can play (and win !) and then see a tree growing on Saint-Gobain island. The game will stay open until November 18th. Then, for each virtual tree in Second Life, we will plant a real tree in Lebanon by January 2009.
-
Jon Worth » Lyon-Paris vs. Manchester-London
The case for a high speed rail network in the UK
-
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The Cringely Plan | PBS
In the early 1980s I was a volunteer firefighter for a tiny community in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. We all lived in a beautiful redwood forest and our task was to keep that forest from burning down in a huge conflagration, taking us all with it. The job was made all the harder because our little part of paradise hadn’t burned since the 1920s, so there was 60+ years of flammable undergrowth just waiting to light off. The current financial crisis facing the United States and the world really isn’t much different from that.
ArchivePage 2 of 40

Photo Credit vodstrup
I came across the Clear Climat Code project via a message from Sig.
Like all good ideas, this one is very simple -
The Clear Climate Code project writes and maintains software for climate modelling and analysis, with an emphasis on clarity and correctness.
The results of some climate-related software are used as the basis for important public policy decisions. If the software is not clearly correct, decision-making will be obscured by debates about it. The project goals are to clear away that obscurity, to increase the clarity and correctness of climate science software.
Ticks two of my favourite boxes straight away - open source and the climate!
The guys in Ravenbrook, who are coordinating this project took this task on themselves and they have decided to seek a little outside help in the process.
If you can program in Python and would like to help out, you can get in touch with Ravenbrook by email here
-
In Need Of Energy: 3 Paths To Personal Power: From The South Of Spain ~ by Paul Read
An interesting story about getting solar panels installed living in the South of Spain
-
Straight Goods - Ozone hole, again - Chemical lobby weakening ozone treaty.
More than one million new cases of skin cancer are diagnosed each year and more than 10,000 people will die as a result in the United States alone. That’s nearly 90 percent more skin cancer than in the 1960s.
Although the scientific evidence wasn’t especially strong 20 years ago, 24 nations headed by Argentina, the United States and Canada took a precautionary approach and signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. That foresight prevented the further destruction of the ozone layer and, by good fortune, kept the equivalent of tens of billions of tonnes of additional carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
-
Update: The State of U.S. Geothermal Production and Development
With 2,957.94 megawatts (MW) of installed geothermal capacity, the United States remains the world leader with 30% of the online capacity total. A recent industry update showed an increase in the pace of geothermal production in the U.S., a country that many experts believe should take initiative to shed the expensive, foreign-dependent lifestyle of running on oil and gas and begin to help mitigate the threat of global warming.
Further, new technologies promise increased growth in locations previously not considered, indicating that the future outlook for expanded production from conventional and enhanced geothermal systems is positive.
Geothermal energy, considered by a growing number of renewable energy experts as the best form of renewable energy for its ability to provide continuous, 24-hour, clean, sustainable energy production, has long been an underdog to other technologies. With advances in technology and funding from government and investors, the U.S. can steadily increase development in using the heat of the Earth itself for substantial and widespread energy production
-
Keeping track of your carbon footprint could become as simple as slipping a mobile phone in your pocket: a London-based start-up company has developed software for mobile phones that uses global positioning satellites to work out automatically whether you are walking, driving or flying and then calculate your impact on the environment.
-
Hottest tech job in America? Wildlife biologist - Sep. 18, 2008
With scores of solar power stations planned for sites in the Southwest, demand for wildlife biologists is hot. They’re needed to look for lizards and other threatened fauna and flora, to draw up habitat-protection plans, and to comply with endangered-species laws to ensure that a desert tortoise or a kit fox won’t be inadvertently squashed by a solar array.
-
Ostara secures $10.5M for wastewater-to-fertilizer technology » VentureBeat
Vancouver, Canada-based Ostara Nutrient Recovery Systems is the latest in a series of companies to make its business converting waste into useful products — in this case by removing nutrients, like phosophorus, from wastewater and recycling them into fertilizer. The water treatment firm has just raised $10.5 million in private equity financing from VantagePoint Venture Partners and Foursome Investments Limited.
-
New Battery Alternative Stores Huge Amounts of Energy : Gas 2.0
A research group at the University of Texas at Austin has taken a carbon-based nanomaterial called graphene, and developed it into a device that has the potential to vastly improve upon the energy storage capacity of batteries. Reportedly, graphene could also double the current maximum storage capacity of the group of battery alternatives known as ultracapacitors
-
Ocean offers hope for green energy
Indeed, ocean energy is “probably the last of the large natural resources not yet investigated for producing electricity in the United States,” according to a report from the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.
While the technology is still in its infancy, the report predicts ocean energy could be among the most environmentally benign generation methods yet developed.
-
Wave power to the people – Sweden.se
wave power could supply Europe with 2,000 terawatt hours of clean electricity per year. That is about half the electricity used in Western Europe or the United States each year.
-
A dynamic Energy map of America showing infor on everything from the grid to biomass, geothermal, wind solar etc.
-
The Energy Roadmap - Houston, we have a problem! Energy storage
Business Week is reporting that ”…13 days since Hurricane Ike ripped through Texas, and nearly one-quarter of the residents of the fourth-largest U.S. city still don’t have electricity.”
Is the problem electricity production?
No. The power plants are fine.The problem is the wires. The grid itself
The network is too vast to repair quickly in the fall out of Hurricane Ike.The problem is storage.
We have no viable way of storing vast amounts of electricity at the local level.The solution? Making energy storage a priority and create systems that support a local ‘Electron Reserve’.
-
The Energy Roadmap - Consumers looking to cleantech startups
The key word for the cleantech (or alternative energy) world is momentum.
Market conditions change, as do consumer attitudes and expectations. If alternative energy concepts fail to live up to their hype, public support could fade along with political will and policies that enable growth.
Cleantech startups are trying to reach people who are asking ‘What can I do to accelerate changes in energy?’
-
Helix Wind Energy for Home Use | Green Tech Gazette
Helix Wind out of San Diego, California has come up with an atypical wind turbine design for home use. While most wind turbines still use the tried and true rotor or propeller style to catch the breeze, the Helix Wind turbines use something more akin to artwork.
Because of their unique design Helix Wind turbines are capable of capturing omni-directional winds and transforming this into electrical energy. In addition, the turbines are extremely quiet, operating just 5 decibels above ambient background noise.
-
Finextra: Visa launches carbon-offset credit card in Europe
Visa has launched a ‘green’ credit card that will enable its business cardholders in Europe to offset the carbon emissions created by the products it is used to pay for.
-
Global carbon emissions rising rapidly: study | Environment | Reuters
The Global Carbon Project said in its report carbon dioxide emissions from mankind are growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the 1990s, despite efforts by a number of nations to rein in emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.
-
After Gutenberg » Siemens SISHIP Eco Prop
Siemens Marine Solutions. They have developed “a very compact hybrid propulsion system for small vessels, using a combination of standard commercial generators, motors and mechanical gear package.” Green Car Congress2 describes the SISHIP Eco Prop as “an integrated solution which provides the benefits of Hybrid Diesel Electric Propulsion systems for smaller vessels traditionally powered by conventional mechanical propulsion systems.”
-
UK needs ‘Green New Deal’ to tackle ‘triple crunch’ of credit, oil price and climate crises
On the first anniversary of Northern Rock falsely reassuring markets, and 75 years since President Roosevelt launched a New Deal to rescue the US from financial crisis, a new group of experts in finance, energy and the environment have come together to propose a ‘Green New Deal’ for the UK.
And, as the Green New Deal Group launch their proposals, new analysis suggests that from the end of July 2008 there is only 100 months, or less, to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before we hit a potential point of no return.





Recent Comments