Now a days, almost every bikes have a place to hold a water bottle. Kristof Retezár, an Austrian designer, has come up with Fontus, a device that collects the moisture from the air, condenses it and stores it as safe drinking water. In simple word, the device can produce water from air through moisture.
The device Fontus has been especially designed as a self-filling water bottle for your bicycle. It is powered by solar cells and it harvests up to 0.5 liters in an hour’s worth of cycling when under the right climate conditions.
Interested to know how does it actually work? Well, the device has a small cooler called Peltier Element installed in its center. The cooler is divided in two.
According to Retezár, “When powered by electricity, the upper side cools down and the bottom side gets hot. The more you cool the hot side down, the colder the upper side will get. Consequently, these two sides are separated and isolated from each other.”
He has also mentioned that when the air enters the bottom chamber at a high speed when moving forward with the bike and cools the hot side down. Moreover, when the air enters the upper chamber it is stopped by little walls perforated non-linearly, reducing its speed in order to give the air the needed time to lose its water molecules. Droplets flow through a pipe into a bottle. The bottle can be turned to a vertical position; every kind of PET 0.5l bottle fits.
Retezár said, “My goal was to create a small, compact and self-sufficient device able to absorb humid air, separate water molecules from air molecules and store water in liquid form in a bottle.”
After doing more than 30 experiments, Retezár was able to achieve a constant drop-flow of one drop of condensed water per minute. The invention could be useful for cyclists on long tours, relieved of the hassle in looking for nearby stores or rivers or gas stations if one had a bottle that automatically fills itself up.
At present, there are some technical hurdles limiting its usefulness. Fontus produces only about a drop of water per minute, which might be hard for cycling on a hot and humid day. It’s also a challenge in cities, where air pollution would render the water undrinkable. Supporters who like his idea hope that he will find success in order to further refine and develop the device.
When current science news is filled with pictures – incredible, beautiful, literally awesome pictures – of planetary bodies 3 billion miles away, it’s easy to forget what’s happening on the soil beneath our own feet.
California’s already experienced almost four years of drought, brutalizing the state’s ability to provide food to the country and the world beyond it. The state’s insatiable thirst, largely due to its high concentration of farms, is leaving its nonagricultural areas high and dry. But that’s not even the half of what our need for a full pantry is doing to the planet.
The “plastic sea,” a massive industrial agriculture area composed of greenhouses in Almeria, Spain, covers more than 45,000 acres.
Ten years ago, a report in National Geographicclaimed 40% of the Earth’s land was dedicated to agriculture. That was over half a billion people ago. As the world’s population grows at an alarming rate, more of the planet’s real estate needs to be turned into farmland. While that means more food for everyone, it also means destroying the nature beneath it.
The “plastic sea” employs an estimated 80,000 workers.
In Almería province, Spain, where a massive portion of Europe’s fruits and vegetables are grown, plastic greenhouses stretch across the country like creeping moss, overtaking quiet landscapes with hydroponic megafarms. “They block up dry riverbeds and destroy mountainsides but nobody does anything, however much we complain,” environmentalist Juan Antonio Martínez said about diggers carving terraces in a nearby province, according to the Guardian. “If there is a serious storm, much of this will be washed away.”
There’s evidence linking some of the pesticides used in those greenhouses to cancer and other health complications.
If findings from a professor in Granada province ring true, some of the chemicals in use have come with increased breast cancer rates among women and testicular issues in boys. But the money to be made from bolstering demand is enough to keep local authorities from coming down too hard on farmers not obeying the rules.
In 2012, it was estimated that the world’s population produced 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage – or the weight of about 7,000 Empire State Buildings.
Where Martínez lives, the greenhouses are mostly run using hydroponic systems, engineered to keep water use low and evenly distributed. In northern Saudi Arabia, however, where water is scarce and large swaths of real estate have been converted to farmland, the dwindling groundwater, originally the key to keeping Saudi Arabia’s wheat industry afloat, forced the country to search for more desperate options.
Irrigation farm fields near Hail, in Saudi Arabia, don’t use hydroponics. But that means huge water demands in the middle of a desert.
With so many farms, the country needs to look elsewhere for water.
With low rainfall and high export demand, livestock farms in California are turning into dust bowls.
A 2013 study from researchers in Kenya, Australia and Austria found that the livestock sector across the planet produces 285 million tons of meat each year – which comes out to about 80 pounds of meat per person. That, of course, implies that the global community puts away a small person’s worth of animal parts every year. In reality, according to the researchers, Americans eat way more than most people in the world. We consume 270 pounds of meat a year on average.
The drought in California makes this usually lush pasture dry as a bone.
But the amount of meat we eat isn’t what’s striking here. First, global livestock produces enough methane – yep, burps, farts and manure – to affect the greenhouse gases affecting the atmosphere. Second, animals, especially big ones, need to eat to be eaten.
According to Time, 1.3 billion tons of grain are polished off by livestock every year. They’re like walking garbage disposals, and when they aren’t able to eat the grass of their pastures, like when their pastures turn into giant dust bowls, they have to turn to imported options. Grain comes from a lot of places. One of the major producers of cattle’s favorite carb is the incredibly thirsty Saudi Arabia.
Thanks to overfishing, some species of fish are caught faster than they can reproduce.
Thanks in no small part to the global appreciation for spicy tuna rolls, the ocean is running dangerously low on bluefin tuna, among other fish, due to overfishing. According to a 2013 report from the, the sushi mainstay’s population has dropped more than 96% in the Northern Pacific Ocean.
A huge percentage of the fish caught are too young to reproduce, making the population drop faster without offspring to buffer the species.
Bluefin tuna are, by nature, predators. And in the food chain, they keep the ocean balanced, going after schools of smaller fish and keeping them from overrunning the waters. Killing off a predator doesn’t sound too harmful for the environment. But when a top predator is knocked off from overfishing, it can create a butterfly effect, changing the ocean’s composition in ways we can’t know.
Almost all industrial plants function on fossil fuels, like the ones dug up at this oil field in California.
Even though humanity has been getting better about more efficient means of producing food, 85% of U.S. energy still relies on oil, coal and natural gas. But it’s not fueling trucks or tractors. It goes to producing chemicals. Five years ago, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated nitrogenous fertilizers, used for growing plants, accounted for 352 trillion Btu of natural gas for production. That’s a lot of drilling.
Fruits and vegetables are being grown in huge quantities. But they aren’t all getting eaten.
According to statistics from the United Nations Environment Program, the global community wastes 222 million tons of food annually. That means roughly one third of all the food coming from the Spanish greenhouses, the California livestock farms and everywhere in between doesn’t end up in a stomach. According to National Geographic, an typical family of four in the United States doesn’t use up to 1,160 pounds of the food it buys – averaging $1,484 going to waste every year.
Wasted meat, like the 600 tons a South Korean company had to incinerate, spoils and carries disease to other countries.
U.S. farms have had a few problems with diseased meat getting out to the world’s larger importing markets, not least of all in 2012 when a South Korean retailer had to put the kibosh on all U.S.-imported beef. Before that, a U.S. mad cow disease scare in 2004 led to a severe drop in the country’s then $4.3 billion beef export business, and around the world, importers who didn’t find out about the problem until it was too late had to find ways to dispose of the products. In Incheon, South Korea, that meant incinerating 600 tons (1,200,000 pounds) of raw meat.
Waste doesn’t always stay in its own country. Sometimes it ends up in massive garbage dumps, like this one in Haiti, which is over 200 acres.
Whether from food or otherwise, it’s hard to know how much litter is actually created in the world. On New York City subways, an announcement politely informs riders that 1,443 tons of trash were removed from subway tracks in 2014. In the United States, 220 million tons of waste are generated every year, with over half ending up in landfills. And in 2012, it was estimated that the world’s population produced 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage – or as the put it, the weight of about 7,000 Empire State Buildings.
In places with poor or nonexistent waste management, the garbage gets eaten by animals, which in turn get eaten by people.
Depending on where you live, that 2.6 trillion number might sound high or low. For the people of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where massive, 200-acre-plus dumps are scavenged for recyclables, it probably sounds right. Same goes for the electric waste dumps in Accra, Ghana, or the waste management program-less towns of Manila. For many people living in the U.S., we don’t have to witness all the waste piling up except on trash day. But it all goes somewhere.
But there are ways to approach agriculture differently for the sake of the planet.
Global moves are being made from different industries to keep us from starving and to learn to eat in less environmentally costly ways. That may be farming in our homes, printing our own food or engineering meat to take the incredible weight of raising cattle off the planet. But just increasing our technology dependence isn’t enough to save a planet ravaged by the people living on it. It’s time to pitch in.
Tesla’s Model S P85D is well known for its wonderfully named “Insane” mode, which tunes the car to go from 0 to 60 in 3.1 seconds.
Not insane enough for you? Now the Model S is getting a “Ludicrous” mode. Seriously.
The aptly named Ludicrous mode will do 0-60 in 2.8 seconds. According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, that acceleration pins you to the seat at a 1.1 Gs. “It’s faster than falling,” he adds. “It’s like having your own private roller coaster.”
One catch: unlike most Tesla Model S tuning enhancements, this one isn’t a software update — and it’s not free. Why? Because Tesla had to make new, physical hardware to make this possible. Specifically, they had to make a fuse that didn’t melt when you pulled ridiculously high amperages over it.
The fuse upgrade will be a $10k option for new buyers, and cost $5k (before installation) for existing P85D owners.
Musk also announced two other bits of news surrounding the Model S:
They’re introducing the Model S 70, a new single motor 70 kWH model for $70,000
A $3,000 90kWh battery pack upgrade option for the 85kWh Model S. This upgrade is primarily meant for new buyers; while existing owners can purchase it, Elon suggests that current owners wait until an upgrade is necessary as the range will only improve in time.
Also mentioned in passing were very limited details on Tesla’s electric SUV — the Model X — and their more affordable compact option, the Model 3. The first Model X’s will ship “in two months,” while Elon promises Model 3s will roll out “in just over two years.”
(Fun note: before the press call began, Tesla had Ludacris playing on loop — now we know why. How very Apple-y of them.)
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton met behind closed doors with House and Senate Democrats Tuesday to talk about her positions on key issues. According to the members of Congress who attended the lunch, she told them that climate change can be a winning issue for Democrats, especially among younger voters, if they can develop a message to persuade voters that action is essential.
“She was incredible,” said Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin. “She really relates [climate change] to the current political communities and how we have to do a better job. We know the policy, but we have to do a better job on the politics.”
Congressman Raul Grijalva of Arizona, who co-chairs the House Progressive Caucus, also gave Clinton’s session a favorable review.
“I thought it was pretty solid,” he said. “Some of the progressive issues and members have kind of been crying in the wilderness for a while, and now these issues like climate change, income inequality and the jobs agenda are resonating with the public. The fact that the progressive causes and organizations feel more in touch with and included with Hillary now is a mark that she understands that.”
“You hear issues from her when she’s out on the stump that are pretty much identical with what progressives are saying in the caucus,” said Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown.
According to the National Journal, “Clinton framed global warming as a pressing and serious threat and touted the climate credentials of John Podesta, the chairman of her 2016 campaign and a former climate adviser to President Obama.”
However, she also went easy on coal, according to Sen. Joe Manchin, who represents the coal mining state of West Virginia. He invited Clinton to tour West Virginia’s coal country.
“She was very much concerned,” he said. “She said people need to realize what coal has done for this country. People don’t realize that; they just want to condemn it now, and she was very compassionate about that.”
In addition, Clinton continued her silence on an issue that many environmental activists see as make-or-break: the Keystone XL pipeline. She has said nothing about whether she would give the project a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.
One of her competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, left the meeting early and held a press conference to remind reporters that he is more progressive than Clinton and that he stands firmly against the pipeline.
“I have helped lead the opposition against the Keystone pipeline,” said Sanders. “I don’t believe we should be excavating or transporting some of the dirtiest fuel on this planet. I think Secretary Clinton has not been clear on her views on that issue.”
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said that Sanders has also been invited to come make a presentation to congressional Democrats.
A third Democratic primary candidate, Martin O’Malley, has also been running on strong environmental advocacy and opposes Keystone XL. He has called for the U.S. to be powered 100 percent by renewables by 2050. Both O’Malley and Sanders joined Green Party candidate Jill Stein in taking a pledge -promoted by The Nation and 350 Action-to reject any campaign funding from fossil fuel companies. Clinton did not respond to the pledge.
But regardless of where Clinton stands in relation to Sanders and O’Malley, her record and her remarks on climate are in stark contrast to the entire Republican field, now up to 15 candidates and soon to be 16 when Ohio Gov. John Kasich announces his candidacy on July 21. While a few have tentatively said that climate change is likely happening, all have warmly embraced the fossil fuel industry and most have joined congressional Republicans in rejecting steps to address climate, and all support the Keystone XL pipeline.
Over the last five years, the cost of large-scale utility solar projects has dropped by 67 percent.
Americans have taken note: between 2010 and 2014, U.S. solar capacity increased 418 percent. More than half of that increase came from home and business owners installing solar technology.
Late last month, President Obama, along with leaders from China, Brazil and a number of other countries, pledged that the United States would get at least 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. That goal will require even more Americans to sign on to solar and the Obama administration hopes to speed that transition with a new program, designed to bring solar power to more low-income Americans.
But as Amit Ronen, director of the George Washington University Solar Institute, explains, utility companies aren’t necessarily on board. Ronen, a former policy analyst with the U.S. Department of Energy, says that many utilities see solar as a threat to their traditional business model, rather than an opportunity — a possible hurdle for President Obama’s energy goals.
When Dennis and Danielle McClung bought a foreclosed home in Mesa, Ariz., in 2009, their new yard featured a broken, empty swimming pool. Instead of spending a small fortune to repair and fill it, Dennis had a far more prescient idea: He built a plastic cap over it and started growing things inside.
Thus, with help from family and friends and a ton of internet research, Garden Pool was born. What was once a yawning cement hole was transformed into an incredibly prolific closed-loop ecosystem, growing everything from broccoli and sweet potatoes to sorghum and wheat, with chickens, tilapia, algae, and duckweed all interacting symbiotically to provide enough food to feed a family of five.
Within a year, Garden Pool had slashed up to three-quarters of the McClungs’ monthly grocery bill (they still buy things like cooking oil and coffee and, well, one can’t eat tilapia every day). Within five years, it’d spawned an active community of Garden Pool advocates – and Garden Pools – across the country and the world.
What began as a family experiment and blog is now a 501(c)3 nonprofit with a small staff. Garden Pool has been voted the Best Backyard Farm in Phoenix, gotten press from National Geographic TV and Wired and Make, and formed a Phoenix-area Meetup group that has nearly a thousand members. It’s attracted hundreds of local volunteers, students, and gardeners who’ve helped build a dozen more Garden Pool systems in and around Phoenix.
Scientists and engineers from Cornell University, Arizona State University, and even the space industry have all visited Garden Pool. This spring, “GP” volunteers paired up with Naturopaths Without Borders to travel to Haiti and build a Garden Pool there. Plus, Dennis says, “we’ve helped maybe three dozen being built across the country” through email and phone consultations, “from Florida to Toledo to Palm Springs.”
At first, McClung just wanted his own family to live more sustainably. Now that he’s seen the all the traction these ideas are getting, and how awesomely productive a Garden Pool can be, he says, “I want everyone else to build great systems.”
And these systems are pretty great. Instead of soil, the Garden Pool’s plants grow on clay pellets or coconut coir. Excess moisture drips into the pond below, and that, plus a rain catchment system, means that the whole thing requires a tiny fraction of the water used in a conventional garden. This is especially crucial in a place like Mesa, which gets just a little over nine inches of rain per year.
Instead of commercial fertilizer, chicken droppings fall through wire mesh strung across the pool’s deep end, nourishing the algae and duckweed in the pond below. The tilapia eat the pond plants, release their own nitrogen-rich excrement, and the fish water then gets funneled (using a solar-powered electric pump) into the hydroponics system that grows the family produce.
The McClungs have added pygmy goats and a bunch of fruit and nut trees to the backyard mix, so their mini farm is starting to look a lot like a very hopeful – and very delicious – urban future.
Dennis says building your own Garden Pool is not as labor-intensive and complex as it sounds. In addition to free online tutorials like “Getting Started in Barrelponics” and “Growing Duckweed,” McClung teaches GP certification courses; so far, he’s certified about 20 “GP” enthusiasts in Arizona and about 12 more during the trip to Haiti this spring. He plans to help a few recent grads start their own Meetup groups in Los Angeles and New York.
He also just released the second edition of Garden Pool’s extensive how-to book, featuring 117 pages of detailed instructions, illustrations, photos, and QR codes that link to video tutorials. His goal is to encourage aspiring Garden Poolers to build and maintain their own aquaponics greenhouses, whether or not they’ve done anything remotely like it before, and whether or not they even have a pool. (One of Garden Pool’s main taglines is “use an old pool or just dig a pond!”)
Thanks to endless experimentation with new crops and filters and catchment systems, McClung claims his backyard is now “basically a Frankenstein laboratory” and not quite as pretty as the sparkling Garden Pool replicas and spinoffs he’s helped build around town. Various experiments have met with varying degrees of success (blueberries and amaranth didn’t do as well as eggplant and asparagus, for instance), but the list of things that grow like weeds in Garden Pool is long (McClung advises you to check out page 96 of his book).
He manages pest control by doing things like adding ladybugs for the aphids and selecting plants like marigolds and garlic, which repel whiteflies and spider mites, respectively. Since the system is closed and controlled, it’s a pretty fantastic way to experiment with organic gardening methods.
As far as they’ve come in the past five years, though, Dennis says they’re just rolling up their sleeves. Now that all the nonprofit paperwork is settled, Garden Pool staff can apply for grants, and, he hopes, “hop from place to place and make stuff happen.” He’d like to help build more Garden Pools in Haiti, Africa, South America, and across the globe, and eventually become something of an international hub for closed-loop system research.
Although Garden Pool is Dennis’s full-time occupation and has been for some years now, “it’s not a job yet,” he insists. “I love it. I dream about it. What inspires me is watching families’ lives being changed, watching communities change, observing the change.”
The Obama administration’s desire for “fast track” trade authority is not limited to passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In fact, that may be the least important of three deals currently under negotiation by the U.S. Trade Representative. The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would bind the two biggest economies in the world, the United States and the European Union. And the largest agreement is also the least heralded: the 51-nation Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).
On Wednesday, WikiLeaks brought this agreement into the spotlight by releasing 17 key TiSA-related documents, including 11 full chapters under negotiation. Though the outline for this agreement has been in place for nearly a year, these documents were supposed to remain classified for five years after being signed, an example of the secrecy surrounding the agreement, which outstrips even the TPP.
TiSA has been negotiated since 2013, between the United States, the European Union, and 22 other nations, including Canada, Mexico, Australia, Israel, South Korea, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, and others scattered across South America and Asia. Overall, 12 of the G20 nations are represented, and negotiations have carefully incorporated practically every advanced economy except for the ” BRICS ” coalition of emerging markets (which stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).
The deal would liberalize global trade of services, an expansive definition that encompasses air and maritime transport, package delivery, e-commerce, telecommunications, accountancy, engineering, consulting, health care, private education, financial services and more, covering close to 80 percent of the U.S. economy. Though member parties insist that the agreement would simply stop discrimination against foreign service providers, the text shows that TiSA would restrict how governments can manage their public laws through an effective regulatory cap. It could also dismantle and privatize state-owned enterprises, and turn those services over to the private sector. You begin to sound like the guy hanging out in front of the local food co-op passing around leaflets about One World Government when you talk about TiSA, but it really would clear the way for further corporate domination over sovereign countries and their citizens.
Reading the texts ( here’s an example, the annex on air transport services) makes you realize the challenge for members of Congress or interested parties to comprehend a trade agreement while in negotiation. The “bracketed” text includes each country’s offer, merged into one document, with notations on whether the country proposed, is considering, or opposes each specific provision. You need to either be a trade lawyer or a very alert reader to know what’s going on. But between the text and a series of analyses released by WikiLeaks, you get a sense for what the countries negotiating TiSA want.
First, they want to limit regulation on service sectors, whether at the national, provincial or local level. The agreement has “standstill” clauses to freeze regulations in place and prevent future rulemaking for professional licensing and qualifications or technical standards. And a companion “ratchet” clause would make any broken trade barrier irreversible.
It may make sense to some to open service sectors up to competition. But under the agreement, governments may not be able to regulate staff to patient ratios in hospitals, or ban fracking, or tighten safety controls on airlines, or refuse accreditation to schools and universities. Foreign corporations must receive the same “national treatment” as domestic ones, and could argue that such regulations violate their ability to provide the service. Allowable regulations could not be “more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service,” according to TiSA’s domestic regulation annex. No restrictions could be placed on foreign investment-corporations could control entire sectors.
This would force open dozens of services, including ones where state-owned enterprises, like the national telephone company in Uruguay or the national postal service of Italy, now operate. Previously, public services would be either broken up or forced into competition with foreign service providers. While the United States and European Union assured in a joint statement that such privatization need not be permanent, they also “noted the important complementary role of the private sector in these areas” to “improve the availability and diversity of services,” which doesn’t exactly connote a hands-off policy on the public commons.
Corporations would get to comment on any new regulatory attempts, and enforce this regulatory straitjacket through a dispute mechanism similar to the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process in other trade agreements, where they could win money equal to “expected future profits” lost through violations of the regulatory cap.
For an example of how this would work, let’s look at financial services. It too has a “standstill” clause, which given the unpredictability of future crises could leave governments helpless to stop a new and dangerous financial innovation. In fact, Switzerland has proposed that all TiSA countries must allow “any new financial service” to enter their market. So-called “prudential regulations” to protect investors or depositors are theoretically allowed, but they must not act contrary to TiSA rules, rendering them somewhat irrelevant.
Most controversially, all financial services suppliers could transfer individual client data out of a TiSA country for processing, regardless of national privacy laws. This free flow of data across borders is true for the e-commerce annex as well; it breaks with thousands of years of precedent on locally kept business records, and has privacy advocates alarmed.
There’s no question that these provisions reinforce Senator Elizabeth Warren’s contention that a trade deal could undermine financial regulations like the Dodd-Frank Act. The Swiss proposal on allowances for financial services could invalidate derivatives rules, for example. And harmonizing regulations between the U.S. and EU would involve some alteration, as the EU rules are less stringent.
Member countries claim they want to simply open up trade in services between the 51 nations in the agreement. But there’s already an international deal governing these sectors through the World Trade Organization (WTO), called the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The only reason to re-write the rules is to replace GATS, which the European Union readily admits (“if enough WTO members join in, TiSA could be turned into a broader WTO agreement”).
That’s perhaps TiSA’s real goal-to pry open markets, deregulate and privatize services worldwide, even among emerging nations with no input into the agreement. U.S. corporations may benefit from such a structure, as the Chamber of Commerce suggests, but the impact on workers and citizens in America and across the globe is far less clear. Social, cultural, and even public health goals would be sidelined in favor of a regime that puts corporate profits first. It effectively nullifies the role of democratic governments to operate in the best interest of their constituents.
Unsurprisingly, this has raised far more concern globally than in the United States. But a completed TiSA would go through the same fast-track process as TPP, getting a guaranteed up-or-down vote in Congress without the possibility of amendment. Fast-track lasts six years, and negotiators for the next president may be even more willing to make the world safe for corporate hegemony. “This is as big a blow to our rights and freedom as the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communication Workers of America in a statement, “and in both cases our government’s secrecy is the key enabler.”
Eighty-five years after the world’s largest ship sank, the famed Hollywood director turned the RMS Titanic’s fatal voyage into a movie that set records for longevity at the box office.
Now Cameron is bringing his love of magnitude to solar energy with the Sun Flower, a large solar structure that’s actually nice to look at.
Brandon Hickman
Composed of one central panel surrounded by 14 smaller “petals,” each Sun Flower is designed to provide an alternative to traditional solar panels that, while functional, strike many people as eyesores.
“The idea was to unify form and function with this life-affirming image that anyone looking at it would instantly get,” explained Cameron, who first launched the Sun Flower grid near Malibu’s MUSE School, to Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker.
MUSE School CA
Sun Flowers, like their yellow-petaled counterparts, track the sun over the course of the day to catch the maximum amount of rays.
This is both an artistic choice and a functional one.
Traditional solar panels sit idly on a hillside, roof, or angled platform. This causes them to miss out on valuable hours of solar energy as the sun moves across the sky, reducing their efficiency.
Total Sun Flower output can reach 260 kilowatt hours per day, or enough to satisfy 75 to 90% of the school’s total energy needs, Gizmodo reports.
Cameron says the project will be patented, but released on an open-source platform.
Brandon Hickman
The designs follow Cameron’s earlier work developing a set of retractable solar panels with FEMA. The panels are designed for emergency situations when the power goes out.
The country of Peru is looking to provide free electricity to over 2 million of its poorest citizens by harvesting energy from the sun. Energy and Mining Minister Jorge Merino said that the National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program will provide electricity to poor households through the installation of photovoltaic panels.
The first part of the program aims to provide solar systems to 500,000 extremely poor households in areas that lack even basic access to the power grid. Unsurprisingly, it is a massive opportunity for domestic solar installers, and Merino has said that bidding for the contract will open later this year to fix the rest of the panels.
The project was first started in Contumaza, a province in the northeastern region of Cajamarca, where 1,601 solar panels were installed. The energy minister has said that when the project is finished, the scheme will allow 95% of Peru to have access to electricity by the end of 2016.
Speaking to the Latin America Herald Tribune, Merino said: “This program is aimed at the poorest people, those who lack access to electric lighting and still use oil lamps, spending their own resources to pay for fuels that harm their health.”
If Peru can do this for its people, it makes you wonder why more prosperous countries can’t do the same.
We are used to hearing that if everyone lived in the same way as North Americans or Australians, we would need four or five planet Earths to sustain us.
This sort of analysis is known as the “ecological footprint” and shows that even the so-called “green” western European nations, with their more progressive approaches to renewable energy, energy efficiency and public transport, would require more than three planets.
How can we live within the means of our planet? When we delve seriously into this question it becomes clear that almost all environmental literature grossly underestimates what is needed for our civilisation to become sustainable.
Only the brave should read on.
The ‘ecological footprint’ analysis
In order to explore the question of what “one planet living” would look like, let us turn to what is arguably the world’s most prominent metric for environmental accounting – the ecological footprint analysis. This was developed by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, then at the University of British Columbia, and is now institutionalised by the scientific body, The Global Footprint Network, of which Wackernagel is president.
This method of environmental accounting attempts to measure the amount of productive land and water a given population has available to it, and then evaluates the demands that population makes upon those ecosystems. A sustainable society is one that operates within the carrying capacity of its dependent ecosystems.
While this form of accounting is not without its critics – it is certainly not an exact science – the worrying thing is that many of its critics actually claim that it underestimates humanity’s environmental impact. Even Wackernagel, the concept’s co-originator, is convinced the numbers are underestimates.
According to the most recent data from the Global Footprint Network, humanity as a whole is currently in ecological overshoot, demanding one and a half planet’s worth of Earth’s biocapacity. As the global population continues its trend toward 11 billion people, and while the growth fetish continues to shape the global economy, the extent of overshoot is only going to increase.
Every year this worsening state of ecological overshoot persists, the biophysical foundations of our existence, and that of other species, are undermined.
The footprint of an ecovillage
As I have noted, the basic contours of environmental degradation are relatively well known. What is far less widely known, however, is that even the world’s most successful and long-lasting ecovillages have yet to attain a ” fair share ” ecological footprint.
Take the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland, for example, probably the most famous ecovillage in the world. An ecovillage can be broadly understood as an “intentional community” that forms with the explicit aim of living more lightly on the planet. Among other things, the Findhorn community has adopted an almost exclusively vegetarian diet, produces renewable energy and makes many of their houses out of mud or reclaimed materials.
An ecological footprint analysis was undertaken of this community. It was discovered that even the committed efforts of this ecovillage still left the Findhorn community consuming resources and emitting waste far in excess of what could be sustained if everyone lived in this way. (Part of the problem is that the community tends to fly as often as the ordinary Westerner, increasing their otherwise small footprint.)
Put otherwise, based on my calculations, if the whole world came to look like one of our most successful ecovillages, we would still need one and a half planet’s worth of Earth’s biocapacity. Dwell on that for a moment.
I do not share this conclusion to provoke despair, although I admit that it conveys the magnitude of our ecological predicament with disarming clarity. Nor do I share this to criticise the noble and necessary efforts of the ecovillage movement, which clearly is doing far more than most to push the frontiers of environmental practice.
Rather, I share this in the hope of shaking the environmental movement, and the broader public, awake. With our eyes open, let us begin by acknowledging that tinkering around the edges of consumer capitalism is utterly inadequate.
In a full world of seven billion people and counting, a “fair share” ecological footprint means reducing our impacts to a small fraction of what they are today. Such fundamental change to our ways of living is incompatible with a growth-oriented civilisation.
Some people may find this this position too “radical” to digest, but I would argue that this position is merely shaped by an honest review of the evidence.
What would ‘one planet’ living look like?
Even after five or six decades of the modern environmental movement, it seems we still do not have an example of how to thrive within the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet.
Nevertheless, just as the basic problems can be sufficiently well understood, the nature of an appropriate response is also sufficiently clear, even if the truth is sometimes confronting.
We must swiftly transition to systems of renewable energy, recognising that the feasibility and affordability of this transition will demand that we consume significantly less energy than we have become accustomed to in the developed nations. Less energy means less producing and consuming.
We must grow our food organically and locally, and eat considerably less (or no) meat. We must ride our bikes more and fly less, mend our clothes, share resources, radically reduce our waste streams and creatively ” retrofit the suburbs ” to turn our homes and communities into places of sustainable production, not unsustainable consumption. In doing so, we must challenge ourselves to journey beyond the ecovillage movement and explore an even deeper green shade of sustainability.
Among other things, this means living lives of frugality, moderation and material sufficiency. Unpopular though it is to say, we must also have fewer children, or else our species will grow itself into a catastrophe.
But personal action is not enough. We must restructure our societies to support and promote these “simpler” ways of living. Appropriate technology must also assist us on the transition to one planet living. Some argue that technology will allow us to continue living in the same way while also greatly reducing our footprint.
However, the extent of “dematerialisation” required to make our ways of living sustainable is simply too great. As well as improving efficiency, we also need to live more simply in a material sense, and re-imagine the good life beyond consumer culture.
First and foremost, what is needed for one planet living is for the richest nations, including Australia, to initiate a ” degrowth ” process of planned economic contraction.
I do not claim that this is likely or that I have a detailed blueprint for how it should transpire. I only claim that, based on the ecological footprint analysis, degrowth is the most logical framework for understanding the radical implications of sustainability.
Can the descent from consumerism and growth be prosperous? Can we turn our overlapping crises into opportunities?
Some very prominent voices have gotten a lot of media attention for their comments on climate change, including President Obama and Pope Francis. And there are people within the scientific community who have been speaking out for years, providing us with information and thoughtful insights.
The Weather Channel’s new media package, The Climate 25: Conversations With 25 of the Smartest Voices on Climate, Security, Energy and Peace, is bringing to the forefront a diverse set of voices and perspectives worthy of more attention.
It describes the project as “a digital media and television experience featuring interviews with the world’s 25 most compelling voices on one of the most pressing issues of our time-the impact of climate disruption on human security.”
“There are are only a few issues more contentious than climate change in American political life,” it says. “But while the climate change debate rages in some quarters, in others, most notably among those who study the climate, there is wide consensus. It’s for this reason that the Weather Channel has adopted a position on climate change that can generally be summed up as follows: we report the science, and the science consistently says climate change is real, humans are causing it and we must prepare for its effects.”
All 25 people spotlighted start with the assumption that climate change is occurring, and go on from there to offer their opinions as to what that might mean for the planet, for local economies, and for peace and security. Some of the voices have names people might know, such as former Republican governor of New Jersey and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator under President George W. Bush, Christine Todd Whitman. Others most probably have never have heard of such as Ugandan community leader/farmer Constance Okollet, who speaks out about the impact of climate change on her village.
The 25 individuals spotlighted include former politicians and government officials, business people, scientist, writers, retired military officers and community leaders. They range from the powerful, such as former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulsen who calls climate change “the biggest economic risk the world faces,” to Syrian refugee Farah Nasif who talks about how drought fueled the revolution and the refugee crisis in her homeland.
“Everything changed with the drought,” she says. “The drought was one of the main reasons for the revolution. They have that anger, that hate for the government. They said, ‘Oh, this government doesn’t help me before and I don’t expect in the future so I will destroy it.'”
One interesting aspect of the Weather Channel’s Climate 25 is that most of the political figures are Republicans, including Whitman, Paulson, former South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis and William K. Reilly, U.S. EPA administrator under President George H.W. Bush, a rebuke to the climate deniers who make up the majority of the Republican presidential field. Inglis has attributed his defeat in 2010 to his outspokenness on the need to take action on climate change. In his video, he explains how he evolved from thinking climate change was a figment of ” Al Gore’s imagination ” to introducing a carbon tax bill in Congress.
“Our challenge is explaining why conservative would want a new tax, especially a tax on carbon dioxide,” he says. “My fellow conservatives, they sort of break out in hives if you mention the word ‘carbon.’ They go into anaphylactic shock when they hear the word ‘tax.’”
“You cannot have thriving economy if people don’t have clean air to breathe or clean water to drink or good quality of life,” says Whitman. “The way the Republican Party is addressing the issue of climate change is both frustrating and puzzling, because if you think about it, it’s our history. The first president to set aside open space was Abraham Lincoln with Yosemite. Then you have Teddy Roosevelt and the national park system and all he did to expand that. It was Richard Nixon who established the EPA. It’s ours. It’s our issue. It’s conservation. It’s conservative. This is an issue we should be talking about in a rational way.”
In addition to those mentioned above, the Weather Channel’s Climate 25 includes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, General Charles H. Jacoby (ret.), Unilever CEO Paul Polman, Climate Central chief scientist Heidi Cullen, White House science advisor Dr. John Holdren, Global Crop Diversity Trust special advisor Cary Fowler, Energy Innovation CEO Hal Harvey, author Cleo Paskal, Major General Munir Muniruzzaman (ret.), Papua New Guinea community leader Ursula Rakova, Rear Admiral David Titley (ret.), former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Sherri Goodman, Eli Lehrer of free market think tank R Street Institute, Brigadier General Stephen Cheney (ret.), founding editor of Climate Progress Joe Romm, president & CEO of Care USA Helene Gayle, former firefighter and director of climate change science and policy integration at WWF Nicky Sundt, former CIA director James Woolsey and Associate Director for Climate Change at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. George Luber.
The multi-platform project launched today on the website, mobile and Facebook, with a week of five mini-episodes airing on the Weather Channel. The Climate 25 is the latest commitment by The Weather Channel to “explore important topics at the nexus of weather, climate and impactful news.”
IKEA, a company known for its ready-to-assemble furniture, is also a leader in renewable energy and climate mitigation. The Swedish furniture giant today announced a massive $1.13 billion commitment to address the effects of global warming in developing countries.
According to an announcement, the generous measure was made to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy and to support the communities most at risk. The massive $1.13 billion total is made up of combined pledges from the IKEA Group and the IKEA Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the group. The majority of the commitment (around $560 million) will be invested in wind energy and around $110 million is expected to be invested in solar up to 2020.
“Climate change is one of the world’s biggest challenges and we need bold commitments and action to find a solution,” said Peter Agnefjäll, IKEA Group president and CEO. “That’s why we are going all in to transform our business, to ensure that it is fit for the future and we can have a positive impact. This includes going 100 percent for renewable energy, by investing in wind and solar, and converting all our lighting products to affordable LED bulbs, helping many millions of households to live a more sustainable life at home.”
IKEA said it’s on track to become energy independent, producing as much renewable energy as it consumes in its buildings. The company, which has invested around $1.7 billion in wind and solar since 2009, has also committed to owning and operating 314 offsite wind turbines and has installed 700,000 solar panels on its buildings.
Agnefjall told Reuters that the newest investment would “absolutely not” increase prices at the stores, adding that the investments will be “good for customers, good for the climate and good for IKEA too.”
The IKEA Foundation’s funding will go towards helping vulnerable communities build resilience to the impacts of climate change such as floods, droughts and desertification, Reuters noted. The funding will also go towards helping these nations adopt renewable energy technologies in homes, schools and businesses, IKEA said.
“We’re working toward a world where children living in poverty have more opportunities to create a better future for themselves and their families. Tackling climate change is critical to achieving this goal,” said Per Heggenes, CEO of the IKEA Foundation.
The IKEA commitment coincides with the Bonn Climate Change Conference, where world governments are preparing on a global climate agreement to be negotiated at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) meeting in Paris this December.
IKEA’s announcement makes it clear that the private sector is not waiting for world governments to act. On the contrary, companies like IKEA are committing now to real climate action, including industry-changing investments in solar and wind projects.
Hopefully, IKEA’s investment in the health of our planet and in at-risk communities will encourage other companies and governments to do the same.
The world is less than 40 years away from a serious problem: producing enough food for 9 billion mouths. But with climate change cutting more than a quarter of crop yields by 2050, innovators must devise strategies to confront dwindling global food supplies.
The Barcelona-based design company’s Smart Floating Farms (SFF) concept is a sustainable, solar-powered vertical farm that floats on pontoons, making it possible to grow food off a coast, in the open sea or just about any large body of water. The designers estimate that SFF can produce an estimated 8,152 tonnes of vegetables and 1,703 tonnes of fish annually.
The farm is comprised of three levels and features innovative agricultural technologies that are already in use around the globe. It can be modified or stacked in different ways to suit the needs of respective locations.
The top level incorporates rainwater collectors for irrigation needs, photovoltaic panels for electricity and skylight openings to provide natural light for plants. It’s also possible to integrate other renewable power technologies such as micro wind turbines or wave energy converter systems.
These solar-powered floating farms could cut the reliance on imported food and reduce number of miles that food has to travel to get to our plates. Photo Credit: Forward Thinking Architecture
The second level features a greenhouse and hydroponic systems (which allows crops to grow year round in any weather and without soil).
“Because it does not require natural precipitation or fertile land in order to be effective, it presents people who are living in arid regions and others with a means to grow food for themselves and for profit,” the designers said.
The second level features hydroponics, which is a method of growing crops without soil. Photo Credit: Forward Thinking Architecture
Lastly, the ground level is designated for offshore aquaculture. According to the designers, this cage fishing method takes place in the open sea and eliminates the exposure to wind and waves.
This level also includes a hatchery where fish eggs are incubated and hatched, a nursery for growing fish, a slaughterhouse and a storage room to hold the fish before they are ready for the market.
Workers on the bottom level catch fish and other seafood in an enclosed farm. Photo Credit: Forward Thinking Architecture
“Facing the current challenges of cities growing, land consumption and climate change, I believe projects like the Smart Floating Farms can help change some of the existing paradigms which have led us to the present situation and open new possibilities which can improve the quality of human life and the environment,” said SFF project director Javier F. Ponce on the company’s website.
The designers said the farm is ideal for many large cities or densely populated areas with access to water, such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Tokyo, Singapore, Mumbai, Jakarta, Cairo, Hong Kong, Shangai, Sao Paulo, Osaka, Bangkok, Shenzen, Istanbul, Montreal, Seoul, Karachi, Sydney and more.
With more people moving away from farms and into cities, advancements in urban agriculture is more important than ever.
The company says the project design is flexible enough to adapt to local food production needs and can be located close to many mega-cities or dense populated areas with water access. Photo Credit: Forward Thinking Architecture
You might have seen the news from NASA last week: Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf could disappear before the end of the decade.
But even while the Antarctic land ice disintegrates down south, and Arctic ice contracts further up North, climate changedenier s are touting the record extent of Antarctic ice and using that to claim that climate change isn’t even happening.
“It is certainly a warning. The conclusion is inescapable.”Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf could disappear before the end of the decade. NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
In short, there’s a difference between sea ice and land ice. Antarctica’s land ice has indeed been melting at an alarming rate.
Land ice-also called “glaciers” or “ice sheets”-is ice that has accumulated over time on land. Sea ice is frozen, floating seawater.
Overall, the Antarctic sea ice has been stable-but that fact doesn’t contradict the evidence that our climate is warming.
The ice sheet-land ice-that covers most of Antarctica is melting at the rate of about 159 billion tons every year in recent years. When land ice melts, it flows as water into the ocean, contributing to sea-level rise. Antarctica’s melting land ice poses a direct threat to the hundreds of millions of people living on islands and near coasts.
Here’s more about why this is the case-and how glaciologists know this isn’t normal-from our friends at Yale Climate Connections:
What can you do?
First, get informed so that you can respond when you hear misinformation about the ice caps. Visit Skeptical Science for a complete debunking right now, and don’t forget to speak out when you see climate myths perpetuated.
Then, attend a Climate Reality Leadership Corps training to learn more about what’s really happening with our planet-and what you can do to build powerful momentum for solutions. Our next training is July 9-10 in Toronto, Canada.
The Climate Reality Leadership Corps is a global network of more than 7,600 activists working to educate and empower communities in more than 125 countries to take action on climate change. Climate Reality Leaders come from all walks of life but all come with the same deep desire to make a difference and help solve the climate crisis.
By attending a focused multi-day training in Toronto with former US Vice President Al Gore and other experts and influencers, you’ll learn about:
The science of climate change
The direct cost of climate impacts on communities across continents
The practical solutions available and working today
Effective grassroots organizing for solutions
Click here to apply to The Climate Reality Leadership Corps today.
Key film industry leaders announced their support for Film4Climate, a dual commitment to reduce the environmental impact of film production and to tell stories about climate change through cinema at events during the ongoing Cannes Film Festival.
Several speakers at a Film4Climate panel discussion agreed to support the initiative, including: Cannes Jury Member and Connect4Climate Global Ambassador, the Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré; the Director of the Guadalajara International Film Festival, Ivan Trujillo; the CEO of the Ile-de-France Film Commission Olivier-René Veillon; Publisher and Chief Editor of Green Film Shooting Brigit Heidsiek; Head of Training and Film Education of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund Siebe Dumon; the CEO of the Sardinia Film Commission and Vice President of the Italian Commission Association (IFC) Nevina Satta; and Michael Geidel of Climate Media Factory and the Green Film Initiative, Potsdam.
They join filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci, Wim Wenders, Fernando Meirelles and Pablo Trapero who have also endorsed and lent their support to the initiative. In addition, more than 100 film industry executives and representatives have become partners of Film4Climate during the festival, and have pledged to reach a consensus on industry standards to reduce film production impact on the environment and raise climate change awareness through film.
“Every day in Africa, we are facing climate change consequences,” Rokia Traoré told Connect4Climate. “We have to make people aware that humans are simply one of the elements of nature. We have to be able to think not just about now, but tomorrow. What are our responsibilities concerning our children and their world? We are the ones responsible for that.” Veillon added: “To have a sustainable approach in production is also the right economic approach.”
This new initiative aims to drive consensus across the film community on a shared set of global standards to sustainably produce motion pictures, building on the protocols and guidelines already created in a number of countries. It also establishes a global network of knowledge partners representing the industry’s practitioners and associations, including film institutes, film commissions, producer networks, film directors, actors and international film festivals. Partners such as Ecoprod, which created the first software to calculate the carbon footprint of film productions used by many French producers, will work together and share their experiences, knowledge, tools and best practices to green silver screens.
“It’s time for a global creative and influential alliance to tackle the climate crisis,” said Donald Ranvaud, Oscar-winning film producer and Film4Climate’s Creative Producer. “We can unite the film industry to reinforce that we do care about the environment and are prepared to do something concrete about the dramatic issue of climate change,” added Lucia Grenna, Connect4Climate’s Program Manager.
Watch this short clip to see how the film industry is taking on climate change:
