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Colin Bennett

Environmental Economics: Sustainability and Resilience - 0 views

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    A philosophical diatribe to start your week.
davidchapman

MPs' warning on biofuels angers Brussels | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

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    The EU yesterday denounced a House of Commons report calling for a moratorium on the increased use of biofuels and made plain it would stick to mandatory targets for the use of biofuels in transport when it unveils a climate change package today. Yesterday's report from the Commons environmental audit committee warned that biofuels were too expensive, environmentally damaging and making a negative contribution to cutting greenhouse gases, and said British government and EU plans to force greater use of biofuels should be rethought. In an unusually strong criticism of the Commons committee, Andris Piebalgs, the EU commissioner for energy, insisted that biofuels had to be supported as the "most immediately feasible way" of reversing greenhouse gas discharges from cars. "The [European] Commission strongly disagrees with the conclusion of the British House of Commons report," said Piebalgs.
Hans De Keulenaer

Sustainable energy blueprint | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist - 0 views

  • The three primary, longer-term objectives for the nation's energy policy should be: reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level consistent with a world-wide goal of global climate stabilization (assumes curbing U.S. CO2 emissions by 60-80% from current levels by mid-century); eliminate U.S. energy imports (i.e., oil and natural gas - now 58% and 15% respectively), while reducing overall use of oil and natural gas; phase out the current generation of nuclear power while substantially curbing the production and consumption of fossil fuels, by increasing the use of energy efficiency and making a transition to sustainable, environmentally safer renewable energy sources.
davidchapman

Technology Review: Environmentally Friendly Fridges - 0 views

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    ...one step closer to building a magnetic-cooling system that promises energy-efficient, environmentally friendly, and completely silent fridges
davidchapman

Building A Greener Grid - Forbes.com - 0 views

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    The paper itself is flawed suggesting that virtualisation can reeduce the number of servers required to 7% - enough to handle the average processing load. Webusers want instant reaction during the peak - for that you need spare capacity. Is this a surprise?
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    The Internet doesn't produce belching smokestacks or toxin-spewing drainpipes. Instead, the environmental impact of the data centers that power the Web and private networks is about as visible as the electrons moving around a company's servers. But visible or not, the ecological and economic costs of those servers are massive. A report released last week by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that U.S. data centers (collections of computers used to power businesses' and government agencies' IT infrastructures and Web sites) consumed around 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006 at a cost of about $4.5 billion. That's about 1.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption, more than the electricity used by American televisions, or equivalent to the output of about 15 typical power plants
Gina-Marie Cheeseman

Obama Administration Announces Proposal to Increase Renewable Energy Production - 0 views

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    The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Departments of Agriculture and Energy held a press conference yesterday about the Obama administration's proposal to increase research on biofuels and stimulate their commercialization. The Energy and Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 mandates that 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels be produced by 2022.
frank smith

OPT | Ocean Power Technologies - 0 views

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    "Every continent on the planet is surrounded by a cleaner, safer, more efficient answer to our energy needs. The power in ocean waves. Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) is a leading renewable energy company specializing in cost-effective, advanced, and environmentally sound offshore wave power technology. The electrical power generated by OPT's technology is key to meeting the energy needs of utilities, independent power producers and the public sector. OPT's PowerBuoy® system extracts the natural energy in ocean waves, and is based on the integration of patented technologies in hydrodynamics, electronics, energy conversion and computer control systems. The PowerBuoy is a "smart" system capable of responding to differing wave conditions. The result is a leading edge, ocean-tested, proprietary system which generates reliable, clean, and environmentally-beneficial electricity."
Colin Bennett

Green construction code aims to improve commercial buildings - 0 views

  • The International Code Council (ICC) earlier this week launched the first public version of the International Green Construction Code (IGCC), which aims to bring together standards for the environmental performance of commercial buildings.
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    "The International Code Council (ICC) earlier this week launched the first public version of the International Green Construction Code (IGCC), which aims to bring together standards for the environmental performance of commercial buildings."
Energy Net

Favorable Cape Wind Decision Paves Way for American Clean Energy Development, UCS Says ... - 0 views

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    "Facility Could Meet up to 75 Percent of Cape Cod and Islands' Electricity Demand CAMBRIDGE (April 28, 2010) - Leading environmental organizations hailed today's historic decision by Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar to provide federal approval for Cape Wind, allowing the country's first utility-scale offshore wind farm to move forward. The announcement signaled the Administration's intentions to support renewable energy development off U.S. shores, a major component of a clean energy economy and reduced dependence on fossil fuels, the organizations said. Today's announcement ends a nearly nine-year environmental review process, much longer than is typical for a traditional coal power plant. The decision clears the way for Cape Wind to begin the permitting process and develop a 130 turbine wind farm in Nantucket Sound, which could meet as much as 75 percent of the electricity demand for Cape Cod and the Islands."
Glycon Garcia

C-Level and Other Executives Suffer Energy Efficiency Perception Gap, Survey ... - 0 views

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    Top-level executives disagree with other senior executives on how much their companies are doing to address energy efficiency, according to a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). In the survey by EIU and Ingersoll-Rand, 49 percent of C-suite executives said their organizations do not do enough to integrate energy efficiency into business strategy, compared to 61 percent of executives below that level.
Colin Bennett

Water-to-water Heat Pumps to the Rescue? - 0 views

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    By Jorge Moreno, Environmental and Building Technologies, Frost & Sullivan With more end users focusing on reducing energy costs, energy-saving water-to-water heat pump (WTWHP) chillers are being deployed to reduce a facility's utility bills. A WTWHP chiller is a water-cooled chiller that is designed to produce hot water at a specified temperature. The use of a WTWHP chiller is very similar to a conventional centrifugal chiller except for the fact that it uses two compressors, slightly different piping configurations, and more advanced controls in order to balance cooling and heating loads. In a conventional chiller, cold water is produced for comfort cooling, and the hot water that is extracted from the refrigeration process goes into a cooling tower and is released into the atmosphere. In a WTWHP chiller, this hot water is captured and relocated to a second heating stage, where the temperature is raised and the water is used as a heating source for a building's heating requirements. The key strength of WTWHP chillers is the high coefficient of performance (COP) that translates into significant energy savings and a shorter payback period. On the other hand, the key weakness is that it can only provide such benefits in a narrow range of applications primarily due to its coincident need for cooling and heating requirements throughout the year to ensure efficiency. A coincident need means that the application demands sizable water heating load along with the typical high cooling requirements in summer, and a sizable chilled water load along with the typical heating requirements during winter. Cooling output is directly dependent on the demand for heating, and vice versa. Consequently, in the absence of sufficient heating requirements, there is only a limited amount of cooling that can be produced. Any excess heating or cooling cannot be stored and hence, it is critical to align the cooling with the expected heating requirements. Coincidentally, in the absence of suf
Hans De Keulenaer

Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles - 0 views

  • Photovoltaic (PV) technologies have shown remarkable progress recently in terms of annual production capacity and life cycle environmental performances, which necessitate timely updates of environmental indicators. Based on PV production data of 2004–2006, this study presents the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, criteria pollutant emissions, and heavy metal emissions from four types of major commercial PV systems: multicrystalline silicon, monocrystalline silicon, ribbon silicon, and thin-film cadmium telluride. Life-cycle emissions were determined by employing average electricity mixtures in Europe and the United States during the materials and module production for each PV system. Among the current vintage of PV technologies, thin-film cadmium telluride (CdTe) PV emits the least amount of harmful air emissions as it requires the least amount of energy during the module production. However, the differences in the emissions between different PV technologies are very small in comparison to the emissions from conventional energy technologies that PV could displace. As a part of prospective analysis, the effect of PV breeder was investigated. Overall, all PV technologies generate far less life-cycle air emissions per GWh than conventional fossil-fuel-based electricity generation technologies. At least 89% of air emissions associated with electricity generation could be prevented if electricity from photovoltaics displaces electricity from the grid.
Hans De Keulenaer

Environmental Capital - WSJ.com : Burned by Biofuels: McCain, Other Politicos, Turn on ... - 0 views

  • John McCain and more than a score of fellow Republicans called on the Environmental Protection Agency to scupper, or at least reconsider, the ethanol mandates passed in the last energy bill. The bill calls for a five-fold increase in U.S. ethanol production through 2022. President Bush reiterated the need for more “renewable fuels” in his Rose Garden climate speech last month.
Arabica Robusta

Water, Capitalism and Catastrophism » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names th... - 0 views

  • Taking the holistic view, one can understand how some of the most basic conditions of life are threatened by a basic contradiction. Civilization, the quintessential expression of Enlightenment values that relies on ever-expanding energy, threatens to reduce humanity to barbarism if not extinction through exactly such energy production.
  • or every farmer or rancher who has leased his land for drilling, there are many homeowners living nearby who get nothing but the shitty end of the stick: pollution, noise and a loss of property value.
  • What gives the film its power is the attention paid to people like Stevens who organized petition drives and showed up at town council meetings to voice their opposition to fracking. They look like Tea Party activists or Walmart shoppers, mostly white and plain as a barn door, but they know that they do not want drilling in their townships and are willing to fight tooth and nail to prevent it. For all of the left’s dismay about its lack of power, the film’s closing credits reveal that there are 312 local anti-fracking groups in Pennsylvania made up of exactly such people who will likely be our allies as the environmental crisis deepens.
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  • In the collection “Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth”, Eddie Yuen takes issue with an “apocalyptic” streak in exactly such articles since they lead to fear and paralysis. A good deal of his article appears to take issue with the sort of analysis developed by Naomi Klein, a bugbear to many convinced of the need to defend “classical” Marxism against fearmongering. Klein is a convenient target but the criticisms could easily apply as well to Mike Davis whose reputation is unimpeachable. Klein’s latest book has served to focus the debate even more sharply as her critics accuse her of letting capitalism off the hook.
  • While I am inclined to agree with Malm that it is the drive for profit that explains fracking and all the rest, and that the benefits of energy production are not shared equally among nations and social classes, there is still a need to examine “civilization”. If we can easily enough discard the notion of the “Anthropocene” as the cause of global warming, the task remains: how can the planet survive when the benefits of bestowing the benefits of “civilization” across the planet so that everyone can enjoy the lifestyle of a middle-class American (or German more recently) remains the goal of socialism?
  • Ironically, this was the same argument made in the NY Times on April 14th by Eduardo Porter in an article titled “A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development”. He refers to the West’s environmental priorities blocking the access to energy in countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh and Cambodia now flocking to China’s new infrastructure investment bank that will most certainly not be bothered by deforestation, river blockage by megadams, air pollution and other impediments to progress.
  • Yuen’s article is filled with allusions to Malthusianism, a tendency I have seen over the years from those who simply deny the existence of ecological limits. While there is every reason to reject Malthus’s theories, there was always the false hope offered by the Green Revolution that supposedly rendered them obsolete. In 1960 SWP leader Joseph Hansen wrote a short book titled “Too Many Babies” that looked to the Green Revolution as a solution to Malthus’s theory but it failed to account for its destructive tendencies, a necessary consequence of using chemicals and monoculture.
  • To think of a way in which homo sapiens and the rest of the animal and vegetable world can co-exist, however, will become more and more urgent as people begin to discover that the old way of doing things is impossible.
Arabica Robusta

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate review - Naomi Klein's powerful and ... - 0 views

  • Much of this book is concerned with showing that powerful and well-financed rightwing thinktanks and lobby groups lie behind the denial of climate change in recent years.
  • Klein interprets the marginalisation of climate change in the political process as the result of the machinations of corporate elites. These elites “understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the ‘warmists’ in the political centre, the ones who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we don’t need to go to war with anybody… The deniers get plenty of the details wrong… But when it comes to the scope and depth of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money.”
  • Klein is a brave and passionate writer who always deserves to be heard, and this is a powerful and urgent book that anyone who cares about climate change will want to read. Yet it is hard to resist the conclusion that she shrinks from facing the true scale of the problem. When I read The Shock Doctrine (Guardian review headline: “The end of the world as we know it”), I was unconvinced that corporate and political elites understood what they were doing in promoting the wildly leveraged capitalism of that time, which was already beginning to implode. The idea that corporate elites are in charge of the world is even less convincing today. The neoliberal order has recovered, and in some countries even achieved a spurious kind of stability, but only at the cost of worsening global conflicts.
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  • Another problem with pinning all the blame for climate crisis on corporate elites is that humanly caused environmental destruction long predates the rise of capitalism.
  • Though she identifies the prevailing type of capitalism as the culprit in the climate crisis, Klein doesn’t outline anything like an alternative economic system, preferring instead to focus on particular local struggles against environmental damage and exploitation. In many ways this makes sense, but in a global environment of intensifying scarcities, giving priority to local needs is unlikely to be a recipe for harmony. Whether in the Congo in the 1960s or Iraq at the present time, internecine conflicts – exploited and aggravated by the geopolitical stratagems of great powers – have led to a condition of endemic war.
  • Throughout This Changes Everything, Klein describes the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet. It would be more accurate to describe the crisis as a clash between the expanding demands of humankind and a finite world, but however the conflict is framed there can be no doubt who the winner will be. The Earth is vastly older and stronger than the human animal.
Joshua Sherk

Green Thinking - 0 views

shared by Joshua Sherk on 29 Sep 08 - Cached
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    cool gadgets that are environmentally conscious.
Felix Gryffeth

The big money of environmentalism - CSMonitor.com - 4 views

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    A few good points. And whether we agree on climate science or not, the scientific debate should remain open and serene. In the end, there will always remain a degree of uncertainty, and the decision to act, and to what extent, becomes then a political choice.
Hans De Keulenaer

U.S. Government Asks for Sustainability Reports from Contractors - 0 views

  • Did you know that if you are federal contractor and are on the General Services Administration, or GSA, schedule, you will be asked to report on your sustainability efforts?” That’s the question posed by Anca Novacovici, founder and president of Eco-Coach, an environmental sustainability consulting business, in a recent Huffington Post blog. Not surprisingly for a post titled “Federal Contractors Missing the Boat,” her answer is in the negative. She writes, “Many contractors are unaware of the federal reporting requests around sustainability.”
Phil Slade

Village-Scale Pyrolysis - 0 views

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    "Fueling local economies and soil regeneration: Biofuels and biochar production for energy self-sufficiency and agricultural sustainability Our project combines engineering, social science, and environmental science to advance knowledge in producing biofuels and biochar from local biomass, and analyze its feasability and impact in a rural African context. "
Hans De Keulenaer

Feed-in Tariffs in Ukraine ranking among the highest in Europe - Environmental technolo... - 0 views

  • Ukraine seeks to reduce its current dependency on gas imports. To address the issue, a number of initiatives are being taken which are aimed at boosting energy efficiency, introducing energy saving technologies and renewable energy resources. The feed-in tariffs effective since April 2009, rank among the highest in Europe, which considering the saturated European market, makes Ukraine especially luring for the foreign investors in the field. As forecasted by the government, in the next 3-4 years Ukraine will be able to attract about 3 billion dollars of private investments for the development of renewable energy production.
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