What is worse…the Economy…or ABCs?
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Smoke and soot rises into the air over Mumbai. (Photo by Avinash Anand) |
ABC=Atmospheric Brown Clouds!
The build-up of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and the resulting global warming pose major
environmental threats to Asia’s water and food security.
Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide, halocarbons and ozone in the lower atmosphere (below about 15 km) are the major gases
that are contributing to the increase in the greenhouse effect.
In a similar fashion, increasing amount of soot, sulphates and other aerosol components in
atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs) are causing major threats to the water and food security of
Asia and have resulted in surface dimming, atmospheric solar heating and soot deposition in the
Hindu Kush-Himalayan-Tibetan (HKHT) glaciers and snow packs. These have given rise to major
areas of concern, some of the most critical being observed decreases in the Indian summer
monsoon rainfall, a north-south shift in rainfall patterns in eastern China, the accelerated retreat
of the HKHT glaciers and decrease in snow packs, and the increase in surface ozone. All these
have led to negative effects on water resources and crop yields. The emergence of the ABC
problem is expected to further aggravate the recent dramatic escalation of food prices and the
consequent challenge for survival among the world’s most vulnerable populations. Lastly, the
human fatalities from indoor and outdoor exposures to ABC-relevant pollutants have also become
a source of grave concern.
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Ford: Detroit- out / Brazil- in
So, do we bail out Detroit or not?
What do we do about the UAW?
This is a video of a new Ford plant in Brazil. One look at this and you will instantly be able to tell what is wrong with the manufacturing plants of the US car makers and why there will probably never be another one built in the US. It will also point out why more will go off shore.
http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1189
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Ben & Jerry’s serves up Green Ice Cream
Ben & Jerry’s has teamed up with Greenpeace to unveil an environmentally-friendly freezer being called, “The Prius of Refrigeration.”
The freezer, which will eliminate dangerous F-gas emissions found in standard freezers, runs on about three cigarette lighters’ worth of propane.
Greenpeace is hoping their initiative, called “Greenfreeze,” will catch on in the U.S.A. as it has in Europe.
Today, Greenfreeze technology is in use in more than 300 million refrigerators worldwide, but it was not allowed into the United States until earlier this year when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency authorized Ben & Jerry’s to run a test trial of units equipped with Greenfreeze technology.
The impact the project expects to have will be equivalent to taking 850,000 Hummer H3 SUVs off the road.
Greenpeace engineers developed a new climate-safe refrigeration technology known as Greenfreeze in 1992 and gave it away to any company that wanted it.
The technology was developed by two scientists, Professor Harry Rosin and Dr. Hans Preisendanz from the Institute of Hygiene in Dortmund, Germany, who were looking for a refrigerant which neither destroyed the ozone layer nor contributed to global warming. They settled on a mix of the hydrocarbons propane and butane.
“The beauty of Greenfreeze,” Dr. Preisendanz told the UNEP magazine “Our Planet,” back in 1996, “is that anyone can have the technology. It cannot be patented because all we have done is find the right mix of two existing common gases. The technology is totally free and can be used by the whole world, whether rich or poor, for a whole range of uses.”
“The irony is that the chemical industry also searched for a substitute for CFCs but only in one direction - to find substances they could patent.” he said.
Ben & Jerry’s acquired the freezers as part of a two-year EPA-approved trial program of the “Greenfreeze” technology.
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Norway gives Billion Dollars to protect Amazon Rain Forest
Norway will give Brazil US$1 billion to preserve the Amazon rain forest, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday, as long as Latin America’s largest nation keeps trying to stop deforestation.The Amazon loses the equivalent of one-and-a-half football fields of forest every minute to logging, ranching and farming, the Brazilian environmental group Imazon has estimated. READ WHOLE ARTICLE HERE***
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Beijing LEEDS the way to Sustainability
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson presents the LEED Gold Award to Chen Zhili, head of the Beijing Olympic Village. (Photo courtesy BOGOC) |
The Beijing Olympic Village received a LEED gold award from the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, certifies that buildings have met a set of criteria for sustainability and energy efficiency.The LEED gold award was presented to Chen Zhili, head of the Beijing Olympic Village, on Wednesday by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Chen said the presentation affirmed the cooperation between China and the United States in clean energy technology for Olympic Games.
More than 16,800 athletes, coaches and officials of national teams are living in the residential section of the village - in 22 six-story buildings and 20 nine-story buildings that were constructed using environmentally-friendly paint and other materials.
The Beijing Olympic Village uses solar cells and geothermal heat pumps to supply energy to the buildings. The buildings feature solar heat, solar hot water, solar thermoelectric cogeneration, and intelligent control devices. They consume just 1/30th of the energy consumed by conventional buildings, according to the contractor, Guoao Investment Company.
Through a heat exchange system, the Village is projected to draw 7.89 million kilowatt hours of renewable energy from the Sun during the Olympics and slightly less in the years after the Games are finished and the buildings are used to house other residents.
The system taps energy from Qinghe sewage treatment plant and upgrades it through heat pump devices for winter heating and summer cooling. The technology can save energy by over 40 percent compared with ordinary air-conditioning systems.
In the Village, solar energy collecting tubes have been installed on rooftop gardens. The system can meet hot water demands of 16,000 users during the Games and some 2, 000 households after the Games. The project can save 5 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year,
The wastewater in the Village is being recycled and the 200 tons of water recycled daily is used for landscape watering in the Village.
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Kids on Cell Phones
According to France Telecom, the brains of young children absorb twice as much as radio frequency energy from a cell phone as those of adults. Their research appears in the July 7 issue of the journal “Physics in Medicine and Biology” and it confirms that peripheral brain tissues of children seem to be higher exposed than the peripheral brain tissue of adults.” “Children are not simply small adults,” Joe Wiart, the research director, explained in an interview with “Microwave News.”
“Their skin and their skulls are thinner than those of adults, and their ears are smaller too,” he said. “Given these differences, the higher SAR for children is not surprising.”
SAR stands for specific absorption rate, a measure of the rate at which radio frequency energy is absorbed by the body.
These new findings apply to children who are eight years old or younger. Above the age of eight, the SARs in children are much like those of adults, according to Wiart.
“I agree with Joe,” said Niels Kuster, the director of the IT’IS Foundation in Zurich. A team led by Kuster and Andreas Christ recently completed a project for the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection, which like Wiart, found that regions of the brains of young children can have exposures that are twice those of adults - or even higher.
Even more striking, Kuster and Christ concluded that the “exposure of the bone marrow of children can exceed that of adults by about a factor of ten.”
They also report that children’s eyes are more highly exposed that those of adults.
Whether or not children are at a greater health risk than adults has been debated since at least the year 2000, when a UK panel chaired by Sir William Stewart advised that parents limit their children’s use of mobile phones.
Since then, other government groups, especially those in France and Germany, have issued similar precautionary recommendations.
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Norway’s Sustainable Music Festivals
Norwegian music festivals lead the way to sustainablility by becoming the first music festivals to sign on with the UN Environment Program for climate-friendly events.
The Canal Street Festival in Arendal, Norway and the Hove Festival on the island of Tromoya, outside of Arendal, are lowering the carbon footprint of the entertainment industry through a partnership with UNEP’s Climate Neutral Network. The two big music festivals are the first to sign the UN Environment Program known as CN Net.
The Canal Street Festival, a jazz event taking place from July 21 to 27, is using certified green energy sources for their concerts. They also introduced organic cotton and paper bags in the city and they are selling organic and fair trade T-shirts.
The festival continues through Sunday and features John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, and The Waterboys, many bands of local, European, and U.S. renown, boat cruises, kids’ events, a parade and nightly jam sessions.
The Hove Festival, which featured Jay-Z, Beck, The Raconteurs and the Kooks among their major acts last month, invited their audience, staff, and participants to pay for their individual carbon footprint caused by their travel to the event. They also provided solar-charging points for their mobile phones, LED lighting systems powered by wind and solar power, and they set a target of 50% for recycling materials used during the event.
Funds raised by the offsets are going to support Clean Development Mechanisms in China approved by the United Nations under the Kyoto Protocol.
UNEP’s Executive Director, Achim Steiner, said, “The greening of live musical events represents an opportunity to lower the carbon footprint of not only the entertainment industry, but those of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people worldwide.”
He continues, “The Hove Festival and the Canal Street can serve as models for musical and entertainment events everywhere. Climate change tops the charts as the number one challenge facing this planet. Unless all sectors of society step up to the bar and address this challenge, we will all be singing the blues.”
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Al Gore’s 10 year plan
Al Gore has released a plan from his home office in Nashville titled “A Generational Challenge to Repower America.” The plan is to get everyone on board to tap the entrepreneurial spirit of our nation and convert our dependency on fossil fuel to a carbon neutral source of power in the next 10 years.
Gasoline prices are increasing dramatically, and so are electricity rates. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure and we are at war.
Gore’s says that by harnessing the energy of the sun, wind and geothermal energy we can solve many of our nation’s financil problems as well as putting a tight leash on global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps.
You may MUST read the Nobel Prize winner’s plan here:
Al’s Journal : A Generational Challenge to Repower America
…also check out: www.wecansolveit.org
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We can save 100 million Trees this year!!!
Do you like fresh air, do you like the environment, do you care? Considering the data about junk mail may make you feel green in a whole new way. Read it and weep and then pick up your phone and cancel all those Pottery Barn and Frontgate catalogs you get weekly in your mail box. Do you really need those catalogs? Do you even want them? You are probably getting catalogs and junk mail from companies that you have never even heard of. The truth about the volume may shock you into action. Read it and then contact one of the links below. Breath deeply…now grasp the facts…
More than 100 million trees’ worth of bulk mail arrive in American mail boxes each year – that’s the equivalent of deforesting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every four months. (New American Dream calculation from Conservatree and U.S. Forest Service statistics)
In 2005, 5.8 million tons of catalogs and other direct mailings ended up in the U.S. municipal solid waste stream – enough to fill over 450,000 garbage trucks. Parked bumper to bumper these garbage trucks would extend from Atlanta to Albuquerque. Less than 36% of this ad mail was recycled. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
Americans pay $370 million annually to dispose of junk mail that does not get recycled.
The production and disposal of direct mail consumes more energy than 3 million cars. (New American Dream calculation from U.S. Department of Energy and the Paper Task Force statistics)
On average, Americans spend 8 months opening junk mail in the course of their lives.
250,000 homes could be heated with one day’s supply of junk mail.
There are several easy and painless (read the Lazy Environmentalist) ways to reduce your junk mail burden. Do yourself a favor and take advantage of one or more of the free (or slightly cheap) services listed below:
http://www.stopthejunkmail.com/
…and the Coup De Grace, goes to an organization founded by a college student from Missouri who was perplexed by the unsolicited yellow and white pages delivered to his doorstep and the daunting task of recycling all of them. He founded http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/
Why?
Over 500 million of these directories are printed every year. That is nearly two books for every person in the country! These directories produce a staggering amount of waste, not only in terms of misused natural resources but also in filling of valuable landfill space.
To produce 500 million books:
- 19 million trees need to be harvested
- 1.6 billion pounds of paper are wasted
- 7.2 million barrels of oil are misspent in their processing (not including the wasted gas used for their delivery to your doorstep)
- 268,000 cubic yards of landfill are taken up
- 3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity are squandered
Ever heard of www.Google.com? Who needs a 20 lb. hard copy of www.yellowpages.com?
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Know your Carbon Footprint
A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide. You can measure your carbon footprint by using a carbon calculator which tells you how much carbon your lifestyle produces.
For instance if you plan to take a trip and you are flying economy class from JFK International airport to Los Angeles, a distance of 2,466 miles, your trip will generate about 659 lbs. of carbon dioxide. If you are making the same trip by car and you happen to drive a Toyota Prius ,which gets between 45- 48 MPG, your carbon emissions would be 1,027 lbs. In a Hummer H3 it would be 3,216 lbs.
It is easy to make these calculations at sites like Terrapass.com and Greenprogress.com. With a little information you can make simple calculations on the impact of your vacation or with a little more detail you can work out the impact of your entire annual energy consumption. Your carbon footprint is calculated based on questions such as your energy and food consumption, recycling and driving habits and more. All these factors add up to an estimated number of pounds of carbon dioxide produced by you in a year which describes your “carbon footprint“.
Once you know the impact you have on the environment you can begin the process of reducing your carbon footprint. You may choose to do this by the three R’s: Reduce, Re-use and Recycle or by buying carbon offsets which are available on-line at sites like Carbonfund.org and Terrapass.com. These sites allow you to pay for trees to be planted on your behalf or invest in alternative energy production like wind and solar power.
Some are skeptical about carbon offsets because it is like buying forgiveness for over consumption and pollution and simply planting trees does not cure the ills of burning fossil fuels. Carbontradewatch.org has a very detailed discussion of this topic in their article “The Carbon Neutral Myth”.
This summer you may choose a carbon neutral vacation rather than jet setting. You may use wind power and go sailing (like Kjell) around the Scottish Isles or go biking around the wine country in Napa with Life Cycle Adventures (ask for Tony). Or simply stay home and plant a tree, enjoy the warmer than ever weather or redecorate with furniture made from reclaimed wood.
*UrbanWoods makes furniture from reclaimed wood. Reclaimed wood continues to trap carbon from years of absorbtion and does not allow the carbon to be released due to decomposition. Furthrmore Urban Woods furniture remains tree free meaning that no trees are harvested or cut in any way to make the product.
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