Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
U.S. chamber wants Scopes trial on climate change
The biggest business lobby in the United States wants to hold a public hearing “to put the science of global warming on trial,” The Los Angeles Times reports.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to drive back major emission limits, wants the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to hold the hearing on evidence that climate change is man-made.
“Chamber officials say it would be ‘the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century’ — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect,” the newspaper reported.
“It would be evolution versus creationism,” William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs, told the LA Times. “It would be the science of climate change on trial.”
Smithsonian gets solar panel that once graced White House roof
U.S. President Barack Obama has made climate change legislation one of his top goals and has pushed for more clean, renewable energy like solar and wind power.
But back in 1979, when another Democrat was in the White House, 32 solar panels graced the roof above the Oval Office.
Part of an initiative called “Solar America,” the panels turned sunlight into electricity that heated water in the staff kitchen — which President Jimmy Carter often used. They were removed during Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1986.
Now, one of those presidential solar panels has joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
Of this whole issue, the most important fact is that the Solar Panel is once again coming into use at the White House. That is important than anything else. This should be an example for the whole country how power needs to be conserved by solar energy usage.
Mickey Mouse meets Mr. Polar Bear at green theme park
Southern California — home to Disneyland, the mother of all amusement parks — welcomed a new attraction this month. But this theme park has no Mickey Mouse or roller coasters and is housed inside a mall instead of spread out over a swath of space.
Called Environmentaland, it is more of an interactive museum that has taken the environment as its theme.
The goal is to show there are “no free rides in life,” said Eric Ritz, executive director of Global Inheritance. The nonprofit opened the self-proclaimed first environmental theme park this month in Hollywood.
“We promote more along the lines of common sense rather than being green,” Ritz said.
Onion grower powers up on its own juice
The green industry prides itself on innovation, perhaps especially in California, one of the most environmentally progressive states.
So it should be no surprise that a company in California has made headlines with a new technology that converts onion juice into electricity. Read about it here.
The company, Oxnard, Calif.-based Gills Onions, has been working on the project for years. But Steven Gill, co-owner of the family-owned company, didn’t set out with green energy as his goal. Gill just wanted to figure how to get rid of his onion waste in a sustainable, responsible way. Trucking excess onion tops, tails and skins out to the fields for composting was becoming a big hassle – and expensive.
In his research, and help from engineers at University of California at Davis and others, he discovered he could use the onion waste, especially the juice, in an anaerobic digester to create gas and then power up fuel cells. He ended up killing two birds with one stone. He got rid of his waste and created a clean energy source for his processing plant.
Great initiative, that’s what some farmers are already doing, they collect methane gas from dung tanks and use it as green energy.
MINI leases not good enough for some electric car champions
Sometimes, even electric vehicles aren’t good enough for the die-hard green car set.
An electric car advocacy group on Tuesday criticized California’s influential air quality regulator, the California Air Resources Board, for allowing BMW’s one-year pilot program of electric Mini Coopers to earn the same credit towards the state’s clean vehicle program as standard production cars.
California is requiring that automakers, collectively, put 7,500 zero-emissions vehicles, or ZEVs, on its roads.
But Plug In America on Tuesday said there is a “gaping loophole” in the program that “could deal a blow to the proliferation of plug-in vehicles.”
BMW cannot get away with pulling an “EV-1 lease” scam on us. Sell these cars and support them.
People want these cars and would buy them, even at 50K. I know I would. Please take my money!
IBM supercomputer reuses heat to warm buildings
IBM’s latest green venture is a highly efficient supercomputer that uses water to siphon off waste heat, and then uses the excess energy to warm up a building.
High-tech giants from Microsoft to Google are eager to cut the huge amounts of power used to run their data centers, particularly now that the recession has companies leaving no stone unturned to slash costs and global warming is driving them to think green.
Developed by IBM jointly with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) — a sort of Swiss version of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — the new supercomputer’s microchips avoid cooling with energy-sucking air conditioning.
Thanks to a network of water-carrying “micro-capillaries” that take water very close to the microchips, the system is cooled at a temperature of 60 degrees Celsius, rather than a “normal coolant” that requires a temperature of about 20 degrees Celsius, or air at around 6 to 12 degrees Celsius, according to IBM researcher Dr. Thomas Brunschwiler.
That’s the way to go, a smart invention, what if we could apply the same techniqe in cars and use the heat of the engine to generate electricity.
Concerns about fed probe of First Solar deal overblown, some analysts say
Shares of U.S. solar company First Solarhave dropped about 7 percent this week on concerns about a federal review of the company’s recent acquisition of rival OptiSolar, which was first reported by the Los Angeles Times on Monday.
However, in a note to clients on Wednesday, Pacific Crest analyst Mark Bachman called the story “sensational, at best.” A day earlier, Cowen and Company analyst Robert Stone said “the issue looks overdone.” Both have “outperform” ratings on First Solar.
According to Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Jan Bedrosian, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s inspector general is probing whether OptiSolar’s applications to develop 136,000 of public land were included in the value of the $400 million deal.In the event of an acquisition, applications can be transferred from one company to another, Bedrosian said, though no value can be attached to them.
“There is no value associated with a mere application, which could be rejected by us for a variety of reasons,” Greg Miller, renewable energy program manager for the Bureau of Land Management office in Moreno Valley, told the Los Angeles Times, saying the agency was trying to weed out speculators who are snapping up land only to turn around and sell it for a quick profit.
Every analyst is biased in terms of interpreting news -good or bad. If you are an analyst recommending the stock, you have to down play any bad news and vice versa. This is understandable since this is analyst’s job. It would be interesting to see what a short-seller would say about this bad news! In any event, all investors should evaluate analysts’ comments carefully to ensure the information is biased or objective. But if analysts’ opinions are unbiased, we would not have tech-bubble and the current financial crisis.
Coal-promoting ringtones draw Sierra Club’s ire
West Virginians who want to show off their pride in the state’s coal industry can now do so via some catchy, coal-promoting ringtones put together by the West Virginia Coal Association.
Beware, however, that the ringtones have already drawn the ire of environmentalists.
The ringtones are jingles the West Virginia coal group has used for some time to promote the state’s vast coal resources (and presumably to offset the bad rap coal gets for producing about 30 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases).
Below are some of the lyrics:
Coal mine operators have a history of using private armies and murderous security forces to block union organizing efforts and environmental responsibility. These practices go back over a hundred years. Like so many other industries in this country, mine operators will stop at nothing to preserve their business and wealth. The have the help of legislators who receive campaign contributions from these mining aristocrats.
Wacky windmill forces California highway shutdown
Turns out birds aren’t the only ones with a reason to steer clear of wind farms.
This past weekend, a wind turbine spinning out of control forced California police to shut down a stretch of highway because of concerns that it could break into large, heavy, and very fast-moving pieces.
California Highway Patrol officers late on Sunday morning noticed that a roughly 125-foot tall turbine on a ridge near the desert town of Tehachapi was spinning much faster than any of the others at the Tehachapi farm.
“It looked like a propellor on an aircraft… and it was giving off a loud racket as it failed,” Officer Ed Smith said.
Uh,
….did anyone think that something that was built in the 80’s might oughta be taken off line by now????
What scares me are the “microburst” and I can honestly attest to the fact they are not fun at all! I cannot understand how even the strongest windturbine can survive after going through one of them!
Now on the bright side, I am still going ahead with building my wind turbine even though I live in the high desert an have clocked some of the wind gust at 82 m.p.h. so quit trying too discourage me! I am going too proceed anyway!
A bad week for U.S. coal projects
It was a bad week to be planning a coal-fired power plant in the United States.
The industry suffered its second blow of the week on Friday with the cancellation of a plant in Michigan. The move by power plant developer LS Power marks the ninth such plant to be dropped in the United States so far this year, according to a count by environmental group the Sierra Club.
The company blamed regulatory uncertainty and the weak economy for the cancellation, which environmentalists cheered because coal-fired power plants are responsible for more than 30 percent of the United States’ global warming emissions.
The Michigan plant cancellation wasn’t the first blow to coal this week, either. On Tuesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency withdrew a permit for a massive coal-fired plant in New Mexico that would have been built on an Indian reservation.
Emissions reduction mandates are expected to come into effect very soon—not just for heavy emitters, but medium and small emitters too. While mandatory reporting is a useful tool for managing carbon change, what is lacking in a lot of these programs is the ability to provide contextual detail, or to showcase emissions reduction achievements. Canadian Standards Association (CSA, World Secretariat for the development of ISO 14064, an international carbon accounting standard) just launched the GHG CleanStart™ Registry based on ISO 14064. It’s a voluntary program, but it covers the same bases as the regulated programs, while also allowing organizations to highlight their successes. Check it out at http://www.csa.ca/carbonperformance
-
Search
Follow Environment Forum
Businesses rely on you, the consumer to buy their products and services to survive, prosper,develop and expand. Therefore you are the key to reversing climate change. If you care enough to question who sells you your products or services and vote with your feet, big business will be forced to move with you. In the old days, you did not expect the milk man to deliver your milk and then trample over your tulips on the way out, so today we don’t expect companies to make profits at the cost of the environment that we and our children live in. Big business needs to change in its own sector, as we all do, and every little reverses climate change.