January 7, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The Sandia National Laboratories have achieved a landmark breakthrough in solar-voltaic power-generation technology. The snowflake-like “solar glitter” uses 100 times less material to produce the same amount of electricity as today’s standard 6-inch square solar cells. This achievement of ultra-miniaturization now has the potential to move solar-voltaic power generation to the forefront of the clean energy revolution, and help speed the transition away from carbon-based combustible fuels.
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January 7, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The field of ecological research and reporting is a part of the basic human urge to engage the world through reason and a quest for understanding. It is not about seizing control of society’s urges and services and limiting the freedom of anyone, but rather about making sure we have the information we need to make the best choices, then advocating for those choices, when inertia and custom stand in the way of better health — for individuals and in the manner in which human individuals respond to their social and natural environments.
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August 15, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The quest for the most fuel-efficient vehicles has entered a new phase, with major government private-sector investment in research and development for industrial-scale commercial production of a new class of gas-electric hybrid vehicles and EVs (all-electric cars). Swiss-based Solar Impulse is building the world’s first 100% solar-powered airplane, an achievement that will revolutionize the travel, industrial production, transport and fuel sectors.
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August 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The Chevrolet Volt will get 230 miles per gallon in city driving. The Volt is a plug-in hybrid not yet on the market, which will mark a technological breakthrough if it achieves the projected fuel efficiency, “changing the game” as some observers see it on automotive transport and fuel usage. If realized, the 230 mpg standard will shatter the existing paradigm for automotive fuel efficiency.
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July 29, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
One day, recently, I saw a fire-engine, crawling its way through a stop light, sirens blaring, hulking its way to provide the noble service of putting out someone’s fire or performing some other rescue operation. It was pouring a dark grey exhaust from one side, looking shiny new and well cared for, but obviously lacking advanced exhaust filtering or clean-energy drive technologies.
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July 26, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
In a tucked-away corner of the New Zealand coastline, a couple, both architects, Lance and Nicola Herbst, have designed a self-sustaining “off-the-grid” home that lends flavor and mood to everyday living. Their cedar-clad bungalow is designed to interact with the natural environment and optimize its use of resources, such as energy, water and nutrients.
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July 21, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Pres. Barack Obama has proposed a national high-speed rail program that would develop eight to ten regions for high-speed rail (currently, only the so-called northeast corridor, running from Washington, DC, to Boston, through Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, has a regular high-speed service), as part of a phased-in long-term economic recovery plan. The rail project comes into play also as part of Obama’s plans for a comprehensive energy-sector overhaul, aimed at reducing carbon emissions.
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July 16, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The Labour party government of the United Kingdom has announced plans to establish an aggressive overhaul of national energy markets, shifting to 40% low-carbon energy sourcing, across all industries, by 2020. The energy secretary, Ed Milliband, will be given control of allocation of electricity across the energy grid, in an effort to speed the green-energy revolution to allow the UK to meet its legally-binding agreed emissions cuts of 34% by 2020.
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June 30, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Swiss-based Solar Impulse unveiled this month the first ever 100% solar-powered airplane with global reach. The HB-SIA is the culmination of six years of daring research and hard work. The aim of Solar Impulse is to demonstrate the ability of solar power to enable a plane to fly around the world with no combustible fuel.
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June 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
A coalition of German firms has answered a call to study making an investment of 400 billion € in solar energy across North Africa. The plan, initiated by the Club of Rome, which has been promoting sustainable development and sustainable economic growth practices, since 1972.
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June 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Overfishing has depleted fish-stocks the world over. Subsidies and lack of enforcement of sustainability measures drive the fishing industry to deplete the very stocks on which its existence depends, while climate interference and global contamination are leaving oceans so hypoxic (oxygen deprived) they cannot support marine life. At least 405 such ‘dead zones’ have been identified across the globe.
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June 6, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The European Parliamentary elections are the world’s largest transnational democratic vote, with 375 million people across 27 nations, choosing among 650 parties for 785 seats in the Parliament. It is worth asking what effect these elections, held once every 5 years for all the seats in the European Parliament, will have on EU environmental policy. Will these elections speed the spread of clean energy resources, like wind, solar and wave power, across the EU member states and neighboring states?
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May 26, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
Today we need a similar shift in our worldview, in how we think about the relationship between the earth and the economy. The issue now is not which celestial sphere revolves around the other but whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Economists see the environment as a subset of the economy. Ecologists, on the other hand, see the economy as a subset of the environment.
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May 24, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Publishing models determine which texts are made available to a wide audience, and by what means. New media, like this social network, are providing new opportunities, but the crossover between print and digital media will provide bold new opportunities for making the best new ideas available to the people who can do the most with them.
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May 23, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
It’s worth asking: how can we achieve products that are produced, packaged, distributed and brought to market, in such a way that they could achieve near 100% organic status? Are we counting the non-organic-quality industrial processes involved in burning fuel and creating plastics? Can we do without such processes? Would corn-based biodegradable plastics be a significant first step?
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May 22, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
NOW, with David Brancaccio, travels to the Indian Himalaya, to examine the problem of persistent accelerating ice melt which is speeding the erosion of glaciers that feed the Ganges River, which in turn provides water for hundreds of millions of people and sustains a precarious but massive food economy.
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May 21, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The new stadium built for the World Games 2009, located in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung City, is being hailed as a landmark example of environmentally friendly building design. The stadium is rimmed with a partial canope roof that trails off into the surrounding promenade and is clad in 8,844 solar-voltaic panels, to generate electricity. The solar complex [...]
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May 19, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 5 Comments
The book Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change addresses the problem of resource depletion and the degradation of our environmental base by illustrating how community erosion due to a culture of excess leaves human society without adequate means of planning for a world in which exponential growth is not the norm. Resource depletion already means the endless expansion of resource consumption is not possible, so author Pat Murphy proposes a localized community-oriented approach to overhauling the prevailing economic paradigm.
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May 18, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Organic solar concentrator systems make it possible for windows stained with transparent dyes to become the most efficient form of clean energy yet developed. They can be used for retrofitting or in new builds. Applications for the technology are easy to imagine, but the engineering to fit readily usable windows of all shapes and sizes with the special edge-mounted solar cells will be key to implementing the OSC paradigm globally.
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May 12, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The US economy has faced serious challenges on a number of fronts, over the last few years, contributing to a complex downturn with little easy salvation in sight. In order to transition to this new era of recovery and slower growth, the US consumer will have to cut back drastically on luxury spending, and the market will have to rely less on the easy flow of consumer credit.
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May 11, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
The wind-power generation paradigm is wind turbines turning due to the pressure of oncoming winds. The standard is a single fan with three blades that turns at a relatively slow and constant rate to maximize energy extraction from wind currents passing over the blades and turning the turbine. The ‘WindCube’, however, fits a wind-amplification paradigm, a possible first-step to a new era in wind-turbine technology.
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April 28, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
We are witnessing the systematic implosion of the American auto industry. The situation is so grave that instead of seeking to reinvent, or spin off or sell off its Pontiac division, GM is simply closing it down and laying people off. No attempt to fix problems or to take advantage of the opportunity to comprehensively reinvent a company already fitted with major industrial manufacturing capacity, just the unilateral shuttering of major plants and an entire company.
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March 20, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The converging crises of carbon-induced climate destabilization and unsustainable transport-related costs and land-use are pushing global society toward a moment of major change, in which “fuel” as we know it will be less a matter of resourced-fuel combustion and more a matter of renewable clean electric power storage and delivery. The petroleum industry needs to adjust its business model to operate in a world where burning its prime resource is not the goal.
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March 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The new administration in Washington, DC, has taken notice: climate change is not about a mild 1º increase in temperature on any given day; it is about a sweeping destabilization of global climate patterns, which could undermine the entire layout of civilization across the world. Building the infrastructure necessary for implementing and sustaining a green energy economy is a security priority in this new environment.
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March 3, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Pres. Barack Obama today visited the Interior Dept., noting it was once called in jest “the Department of Everything Else”, a government agency with responsibility for nearly 1/5 of the entire land area of the United States. He professed his intention to task the Interior Dept. with taking major steps to help build green infrastructure for an energy economy based on solar-voltaic and wind-turbine-generated energy.
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March 2, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The hardest thing to understand about the current, and deepening, economic crisis, is that it came about largely because some of the most experienced, well-staffed and prestigious financial institutions in the world gambled on untenable projects of unlimited expansion, without ever producing sound mathematics to back up the projections. Philosophical exuberance replaced philosophical underpinnings, and the dynamo of financial speculation greased the wheels of commerce in a way that masked underlying shortfalls.
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January 31, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
All systems fail, all organized interactions are vulnerable to entropy, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And at best, we are but stardust, a beautiful yet haunting explanation of our origins. Infused with light. Doomed to shadow. Whatever your spiritual beliefs, in the mortal physical realm, entropy is always interfering. The intellect often uses convenient conceptualizations to feel it is better understood or more secure, more real and lasting, than it is.
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December 12, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
At a time when major U.S. companies are announcing job layoffs almost daily, the renewable energy industry is hiring new workers every day to build wind farms, install rooftop solar arrays, and build solar thermal and geothermal power plants. The output of industrial firms that manufacture the equipment for these energy facilities is expanding by well over 30 percent a year. These investments both create jobs and help prevent climate change from spiraling out of control.
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December 12, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
Earlier this year UNEP, UNDP and the World Bank teamed up with World Resources Institute to publish a report focusing on the concept of resilience “for cushioning the impacts of climate change and delivering continuing benefits to the poor”. Recently, the Volvo Environment Prize was given to the “father of resilience theory”, C.S. Holling. But what is this resilience-thing really all about? We thought it was about time to try to sort this concept out once and for all.
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December 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The climate change conference currently underway in Poznan, Poland, seeks to build on the Bali agreement, adopted by 180 countries in 2007, in hopes of achieving a global emissions regime. A sweeping economic downturn overtaking North America and Europe, and now hitting China’s manufacturing and export base, it is feared, will hamper efforts to implement comprehensive green industrial and economic reforms.
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December 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
US president-elect Barack Obama pledged on Saturday, in his weekly radio and web address, to initiate a massive public works program to help create jobs, build a greener economy, restore US industrial relevance and spur economic growth. The plan announced by Obama would also require that states who participate in the massive investment in new and upgraded infrastructure use the money quickly or lose the funding.
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November 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.
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November 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The issue is not, as so many would like to believe, whether carbon-based fuels are affordable to the end-user. They are not. The total costs per gallon of gasoline are estimated at more than $11, covered by government subsidies, public-private research funding, tax incentives, military spending, public health funding, and funds devoted to cleaning up the ill effects of pollution. Capitalist markets need not be dependent on unsustainable excesses in resource use, but we are in the current global economic crunch, because they have been.
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November 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The Hot Spring is forming an ongoing research community project to develop zero-combustion energy sourcing technologies. The first phase of the project entails filling in the conceptual space of the zero-combustion paradigm for energy generation. Next, we propose thinking toward the “jump generation” technologies, which emerge from advances still not in practical application, but which will enable us to vastly expand the energy-productivity of our resource base.
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November 23, 2008 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
President-elect Barack Obama said yesterday in his weekly radio address —now also a video staple on YouTube— he has already tasked his economic team “to come up with an economic recovery plan that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January 2011″. Obama has long pledged he would incentivize development of a green-energy economy, as a response to the imperatives of economic sustainability, job-creation and reduced environmental impact. The president-elect added that “it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job-creation”, ostensibly a first building-block in what may be a broader economic recovery, which he hopes will be in full swing before the end of his first term.
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November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Just a couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom dictated that financial minds must view “green technology” as pie in the sky, an unaffordable idealistic quest for something beyond the “easy” solution of endless oil. Then, almost overnight, the financial markets discovered that oil was not infinite, that the entire US economy was beholden to the pricing whims of an international cartel —this was long known, but tolerated—, and failure to go green could cripple the world’s most powerful democracy.
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November 12, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Complexity is not an outlandish tendency of troubled souls and pretentious intellects; it is the basic state of nature as we know it. The more we discover, the more certain we can be of this: even elemental particles are less solid than they seem, behaving like tightly bound arrangements of spherical bodies —irreducible monads—, they apparently achieve this physics by behaving like something they are not (now widely accepted in particle physics, “string theory” proposes that elemental particles are actually 2-dimensional vibrating “strings” whose vibration causes them to interact as if they were not strings at all).
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November 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
To understand the relevance and virtues of Barack Obama’s economic vision, we have to look at the long history of struggle between American laissez-faire capitalism and American middle-class capitalism. We are on the verge of what is likely to be a comprehensive philosophical shift in economic policy toward generative investment, which means counting as economic imperatives the resilience and productive expansion of the positive bases of economic growth, i.e. human and environmental health and well-being, resource-density and cyclical models of resource use and reproduction.
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October 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The electric car has long been plagued by the problem of its range and the need to recharge a battery, which takes time, before continuing. So the implementation of new “live-fueling” technologies, like solar panels that help maintain the car’s charge and extend its range, will be key to bringing a shift toward viable, mainstream, [...]
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October 9, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The United States Supreme Court, in the spring of 2007, ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate carbon emissions. That ruling could now be the basis for legislation moving the nation toward a fully combustion-free economy.
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