Category: Zero-combustion paradigm


Citizens Climate Lobby is an international non-partisan, non-profit volunteer organization, working to build political will for a livable world. To do that, they aim to find an ideologically neutral, democratically viable, market-focused way to reduce the amount of carbon trapped in Earth’s atmosphere and speed the transition to clean, renewable fuels. I am proud to be a member of the organization, and one who is inspired by the passion of its volunteers and fortunate to count so many good friends among its partners.

This past week, the organization took its campaign to Capitol Hill, bringing 85 volunteers to 140 office visits in the United States Congress —both houses, both parties— along with the State Department, the Department of Energy and the World Bank. The project is more than a response to fallout from excess atmospheric carbon dioxide; the CCL project involves connecting citizens with decision-makers on Capitol Hill, to take ideology out of the energy debate, and fashion policy more democratically.

View full article »

What do we mean when we talk about sustainability? Do we mean forging, after thousands of years of civilization, at last, a truly sustainable relationship with nature? Do we mean “net-zero” resource impact (which, by the way does not necessarily equate to being rid of practices corrosive to natural systems)? Do we mean “living within our means”, according to the metabolic limitations of our natural environment?

At our roundtable discussion on “Utopia or Oblivion“, where we discussed a number of issues which demonstrate that only our best is good enough to solve the mounting global crisis involving climate pattern destabilization, resource depletion, food insecurity and chronic pervasive water scarcity, a graduate student asked why we don’t talk about what lies beyond sustainability, in a genuinely environmentally responsible future.

View full article »

Shai Agassi, the entrepreneur behind Better Place, a global enterprise seeking to build a network of electric battery switch-out stations, says China is the new frontier for electric vehicles, and its adoption of the newest EV technology will push global adoption.

View full article »

Carl Safina’s detailed TED talk on the fate of the Gulf of Mexico explores some of the unseen victims and impacts of the BP oil spill. He demonstrates how dispersants have made the spreading oil slick into an unrecoverable mess that is too pervasive and too blended to be cleaned. Fresh from a visit to the Gulf, Safina explains that the ongoing environmental disaster is building in severe biological trauma to the ecosystem of the entire hemisphere.

View full article »

Professor Paul Ehrlich —of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences— says waste generated by human consumption of energy and industrial processes is the single greatest brake on human development; energy is abundant, but there is not enough absorption capacity in nature to safely continue generating waste from energy consumption.

Switzerland-based Solar Impulse has achieved the first-ever 24-hour solar-powered flight, flying both night and day on solar power alone. World Radio Switzerland reported “History is Made: Solar Plane Makes it through Night”, and the first manned nighttime solar flight is a major technological achievement. The plane was flying, as company partners and engineers have said, at the limits of the technology, and made it to 26 hours after takeoff, with as much batter power as when it took off.

Pilot André Borschberg told World Radio Switzerland, in a pre-dawn interview from the cockpit: “It is an incredible moment to be in this cockpit all alone, watching the stars in the sky and the lights down there…thinking about flying through the night and seeing the sunrise, I think this will be incredible.” Borschberg’s focus on the beauty of the moment may ultimately be overshadowed by his contribution to the future of flight.

View full article »

Bracken Hendricks, from the Center for American Progress, discusses the national project to build a clean-electricity “smart grid” for the United States. The first component is “a large-scale, multi-state, high-voltage transmission infrastructure” to deliver electricity from clean-electricity generation sources (like wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal steam wells), with the second key feature being a smart grid that connects consumers to the wider transmission infrastructure, so homes and businesses can also serve as clean energy generation sources, feeding power back to the grid efficiently and reducing electricity costs.

Solar Impulse, a revolutionary aerospace engineering project based in Switzerland, is closing in on the technological readiness to stage the world’s first ever night-time flight of a zero-fuel, solar-only airplane. On the aircraft’s third full flight, the design team was looking at “the expansion of the flying envelope of the airplane, which is to fly faster, to fly at low speed, to fly at greater bank angle”, in order to understand the behavioral mechanics of the airplane and to know where improvements can be made that will allow for anywhere-anytime, night-or-day solar-powered flight.

View full article »

In a TED talk on the subject of how to do the hard work of really greening the economy, architect Ellen Dunham-Jones explains why “The big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia”. One of the unintended consequences of the suburban design paradigm is the need for roads and infrastructure whose sole purpose is to accommodate automobiles, without which the suburban habitat is not really functional.

View full article »

CafeSentido.com :: Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) this week called for a move toward building consensus for a scaled back version of the climate legislation pending in the United States Senate. Two possible models, given the nature of the Kerry-Lieberman proposal, as written, would be to either establish at the federal level the kind of cooperative emissions reduction strategy already adopted by a coalition of states across the northeast or a limit on total carbon emissions from power plants only.

25 states, plus the District of Columbia, have renewable electricity standards, a requirement that a certain percentage of power generation come from clean renewable resources, by a certain year. 3 more states have voluntary RES goals, and there are incentives both at the state and federal level for power utilities to develop expanded renewable generating capacity. The state of New Jersey has quickly risen to 2nd nationwide in solar power generation, behind California, despite having no sun-scorched deserts and little eligible open space which is not protected.

View full article »

Powered by WordPress | Theme: Motion by 85ideas.