And Now For The Best Argument Against Global Warming . . .
Image via SF Gate
Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, Dr. Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute has come up with the most believable argument against global warming that I’ve yet encountered. And so, I’ll close out my Friday by sharing it….Read the full story on TreeHugger
Batman in the Bike Lanes: Guerilla Bike Activists Fight Back
Photos by Lloyd Alter
With the constant rewiring of the internet, deferred maintenance and the inevitable freeze-thaw cycle, you need good teeth to ride in Toronto bike lanes; otherwise they are shaken out of your skull. The Urban Repair Squad to the rescue, giving our roads a Pow! Bam! and Crunch!, just like an old Batman episode, warning us if the dangers ahead.
…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Is Creating Green Jobs a “Sensible Aspiration” for Governments?
Photo via A Green Living
That’s the topic of an ongoing online debate over at the Economist.com. In one corner, green jobs advocate Van Jones, who argues that governments should engage in the active practice of creating green jobs, by, for example, incentivizing clean energy projects. In the other, Andrew P. Morriss, a professor of business and law at the University of Illinois, who argues that green job creation should be left to the marketplace. …Read the full story on TreeHugger
Robert Llewellyn’s Gearless Update: Reviewing the MiEV and Much More (Video)
Image credit: Gearless
I was quite excited the other day to learn about Robert Llewellyn’s Gearless show in which he will be driving and reviewing a Mitsubishi MiEV over the course of an entire year. (Robert previously filmed a test drive of the MiEV for his carpool show.) But I wasn’t entirely clear on what exactly he will be doing to fill up the entire year. In the video b…Read the full story on TreeHugger
After Smart Grids, Smart Sewage? Urine-Separating NoMix Toilet Gets Thumbs-Up in 7 European Countries
NoMix Toilet. Photo: Flickr
Technological Innovations in the Bathroom? You Bet!
Being green is all about solving problems and grabbing overlooked opportunities. It turns out that there’s such a double-win in most bathrooms around the world; if we had “NoMix” toilets that separate urine from solid waste, municipal wastewater plants would have a significantly easier task (and produce more methane to generate electricity), and we could much more easily extract precious nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen for use as fertilizer (instead of using fossil fuels). So what’s stopping us from going NoMix?…Read the full story on TreeHugger
World’s Scientists to Carry Out Independent Review of IPCC
Photo via FreeSpeech
Ban Ki-moon has announced that a comprehensive, independent review of the IPCC is to be carried out, after calls from world governments were made to do so. The Secretary General for the UN said that scientists from academies around the world will take part in the review, which will be headed by the Inter-Academy Council–and it will be conducted completely independently of the United Nations. …Read the full story on TreeHugger
Starbucks’ Farmers Discuss the Impact of Fairtrade
Images by B. Alter
It’s been Fairtrade Fortnight, and in celebration Starbucks has released a special new Fairtrade coffee from Rwanda. It’s part of their complete switch-over last year to selling only 100% Fairtrade espresso-based coffees in the UK and Ireland. This makes Starbucks the largest buyer of Fairtrade Certified Coffee in the world which is pretty impressive, no matter what you think of them.
This TreeHugger was invited to a Starbucks tasting and informal discussion with coffee farmers and producers from Costa Rica and Tanzania. As a long-time anything-but-Starbucks coffee drinker, I att…Read the full story on TreeHugger
There Could Be Libraries For Everything
Trinity College, Dublin
TreeHugger loves Product Service Systems, where you borrow and share instead of own. They are also called libraries, and Kris De Decker of No-Tech Magazine points us to a lovely post by Brian Kaller, a former newspaper reporter now living in rural Ireland. He loves his local library, but more importantly, writes about the principle beh…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Freakonomics Watch: “The Primitive Food Movement”
The first Freakonomics book was a lot of fun; the second less so, as it sort of devolved into “if the scientific consensus and/or coast-hugging liberal elite are for it, we are against it” type of thing. Hence Freakonomics Watch; or perhaps it should be called James McWilliams Watch, since he appears to be the contributor to their blog with the most attitude about anything green. Now he is on about The Persistence of the Primitive Food Movement, where “Bicycles are losing gears, runners are afoot in shoes designed to create a barefoot sensation (some are even running barefoot), and m…Read the full story on TreeHugger
MIT Scientists Discover a Way to Generate Electricity with Thermopower Waves in Carbon Nanotubes
Image: MIT
Could Store Power at 100x More Energy/Weight Than Lithium-Ion
A team of scientists at MIT has discovered a new way to generate power with carbon nanotubes. In a paper titled “Chemically driven carbon-nanotube-guided thermopower waves” published in Nature Materials, they describe how they made “thermopower waves” flow through the nanotubes, generating a significant amount of power relative to the size of the nanotubes. This opens up new areas of research in energy gener…Read the full story on TreeHugger
