Our Oceans Are Dying and We're At Fault (6)
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Image source: Getty Images The Los Angeles Times report this morning on the state of the oceans sounds like something out of a horror movie - fishermen come in contact with a spongy weed, only to break out into a painful rash that won't go away and literally peels your skin off. Get a drop in your mouth and your tongue swells so much you can't eat for a week. Scientists in labs can't be ...
Sea Levels Still Will Rise Because of Global Warming: Just Not as Much as We Thought (1)
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In the past couple of weeks I’ve felt a bit like the bringer of climate change doom here at TreeHugger. Well, here’s something to balance all that out, at least slightly. From Yahoo News/Reuters: Worst Case: 6.6 Feet Sea Level Rise by 2100 It appears that previous predictions about sea levels rising by 20 feet or more by the end of the this century overstated the case a bit. Tad Pfeffer of the University of ...
Microbes in Dirt Provide Electricity for African Villagers (2)
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A makeshift microbial fuel cell: a bucket, waste water and a graphite sheet. Photo: Lebônê Providing electricity to people in countries where either the grid is not reliable, or nonexistent and unlikely ever to be built, can make a huge difference in people’s quality of life in very practical ways. We’ve written before about companies such as D.Light Design which have solar-powered replacements for kerosene lanterns , and efforts to bring small-scale solar panels to ...
Ivory Gull Wins Most Polluted Bird on the Planet Award (1)
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Image source: Bird Holidays If the ivory gull could, it would tell that polar bear, 'I wouldn't eat that if I were you' - eating carcasses of other animals is what got the ivory gull in this predicament in the first place. The ivory gull, which lives in the Arctic, was recently found to have the highest concentrations of PCBs and DDT when its eggs were tested. The more interesting point is that both of ...
A Reader Responds to Project Better Place Getting Wired (1)
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again –– Israel’s electric car scheme Project Better Place –– needs some serious rethinking. Shai Agassi, who founded the company (pictured above), proposes new infrastructure for the swappable batteries, leased and paid for much in the same way as the cellular phone industry: you pay for use and not the device. Israel and Denmark are buying. In August Wired magazine featured Agassi on the cover (you can ...
Horse and Buggy + Wind Turbine = Indiana Amish Begin Embracing Renewable Energy (2)
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photo: Cindy Seigle The intersection of spirituality and environmental awareness seems to be getting more crowded. Over the summer there were a couple stories of Hindu temples, both in India and the United States, installing various forms of renewable energy. Pope Benedict XVI professed a slightly greener version of the faith at a speech in Australia (BBC News). Apparently, the Dalai Lama is down with solar (
FrogLight LED Bulb Goes in Standard Socket (3)
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Of course, one of the benefits of LEDs is that they last so long that they can be built right into the fixtures or even the fabric of the building. But people own lamps already, and Frog Design "realized the easiest way to create acceptance was to deliver the technology in an already widely accepted form. The form of a standard light bulb was then the obvious choice. It would not ask consumers to change ...
Coke's New Green Vending Machines: "Like Taking 218,000 Cars Off the Road For Two Weeks" (3)
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2 days, 9 hours
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Greenpeace victory NGOs are known for getting on the case of big corporations, but it's not everyday that they get their way. At the Sydney Olympics, Greenpace came down hard on Coca Cola for its vending machines, which keep its drinks cool from Mumbai to Missouri. Greenpeace saw giant refrigerators that relied on HFCs -- greenhouse gases which can be 11,700 times more harmful than carbon dioxide (CO2) -- and used excessive, often unnecessary amounts ...
The Bicycle Helmet Debate is Over. Really. (3)
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guys in helmets Whenever we do a post about bike helmets, we get a controversy in comments that often includes statements like "Nowhere that has introduced a helmet law or considerable helmet promotion has been able to demonstrate any reduction in risk to cyclists." Well, now they have. A new study released in the Journal of Pediatrics looked at the death rate in Ontario, Canada for kids on bikes before and after the mandatory helmet ...
Another Endangered Species Bites the Dust (1)
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Image from mape_s Remember: Just because you claim to be upholding the mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (presumably to preserve and manage said "fish and wildlife") doesn't mean you actually have to follow through with it -- at least if you're the Bush administration. In another sad, but predictable, turn of events, the federal agency tasked with protecting our wildlife has decided to cut by nearly half the habitat for the endangered ...
Recycled Typewriter Creatures by Jeremy Mayer (1)
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Photo credit: Jeremy Meyer Tahoe City, Calif.-based artist Jeremy Mayer's mechanical, steampunk-esque creatures are the subject of Wired.com's latest slide show. Assembled from vintage typewriter parts without welding, soldering, or gluing, his recycled sculptures range from lithe, 18-inch-long mecha-crickets to seven-foot-tall aluminum skeletons that weigh between 60 to 100 pounds. A full-size human figure takes Mayer around 40 typewriters and 1,000 hours to piece together. "That's how the typewriter was made in the first place," ...
Me to We Tees Promote International Development (1)
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Image source: Me to We There are lots of eco-tees out there today, we'll admit it. The tees designed by Me to We clothing have improved on the design of most eco-tees in that they fit better because they are cut longer and larger than your standard organic tee. They fit a little lower on the waistline so you don't have to worry about sporting a muffin-top while trying to wear your conscience on your ...
68 Gigawatts of Offshore Wind Power in North Sea = No More N (3)
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3 days, 10 hours
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photo: m.prinke Norway may be planning on becoming Europe's battery, but based on what Reuters is saying about a new proposal from Greenpeace it won’t just be Norway which supplies Europe with electricity, it will be the North Sea. The head of renewable energy for the European Commission, Hans Van Steen, has called the proposal “ambitious ...
More Proof of the Effects of Global Warming? Past 10 Years Were Hotter Than Previous 1,300 in Northern Hemisphere (1)
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4 days, 8 hours
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photo: Eric via flickr When I wrote last week about how at least one scientist believes we are witnessing the "death spiral" of Arctic sea ice, even though this year’s summer melt-off may not surpass the record set in 2007, a number of commenters seized upon that to jump to the conclusion that perhaps things aren’t so bad as we thought. It even brought out of a couple of genuine climate change deniers. Just in ...
Savvy Vegetarian Hosts Carnival of the Green (1)
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This week is Carnival of the Green # 143 and it's being hosted by Savvy Vegetarian, a blog that supports a vegetarian diet, healthy eating and sustainable living for a green planet. So head on over to this week's Carnival and check out a round up of green news and events from the past week, submitted by other bloggers and green sites. To learn more about Carnival of the Green, where it will be and ...
Why Won't Congress Just Extend Renewable Energy Tax Credits (7)
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photo: slimmer_jimmer via flickr I’ve written a number of times on how tax credits for renewable energy development in the United States have been stalled in the Senate for a while, and without these a number of large renewable energy projects’ futures are in question—the Pickens Plan, as well as ...
Incredible Sahara Forest Project to Generate Fresh Water (13)
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Can you imagine being able to produce enough water in the Sahara to grow crops there? Can you imagine harnessing sufficient quantities of solar power to supply electricity to cities in Africa and cities in Europe? Can you imagine producing a sustainable bio-fuel that doesn’t impact on world food supplies? Charlie Paton, Michael Pawlyn and Bill Watts can and what’s more they can imagine all these happening in the same place at the same time. ...
Stair of the Week: Made From Skateboard Decks (6)
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4 days, 12 hours
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It was back in 1972 when Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver wrote Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation. Jencks wrote "The new strategy is latent within the do-it-yourself industry, hippie consumer tactics, and the re-use of old parts and the recycling of waste." It should be big again as we come up with creative ways to re-use things instead of just junking them. At the Roarockit Skateboard School in Toronto, they used skateboard decks to build ...
Peak Cactus: Can Microchips Thwart Cailf. Urban-Landscaping Thieves? (1)
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4 days, 13 hours
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Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times A few years ago the City of Palm Desert, Calif. gave up on lawns and started converting to indigenous plants that could survive without water. Landscape manager Spencer Knight says "The city decided to stop apologizing for the desert and said, 'We live in the desert; it is what it is ". Unfortunately, the golden barrel cacti are expensive, and now fetch as much as eight hundred bucks. They ...
Food Foraging for the Faint-Hearted (2)
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We have read about food foraging and the hardy men who do it. They are wild and bearded and live near the forest and spend all their time digging for exotic mushrooms and unrecognisable flowers and grasses. Great for them but no thanks. But there is a coward's way to do this, especially now that the fertile harvesting season is upon us: go for the local. Dandelions are the easiest; their young and tender leaves ...
