Green Options » Albert Einstein

How to Become Vegetarian: 5 Key Steps (& Famous Vegetarian Celebrities)

Zachary Shahan — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:01:56 +0000

If you are thinking about going vegetarian, here is a list of things that should help you to actually do it,… and to stick to it once you’ve started.

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Einstein Refrigerator Making a Comeback?

Max Lindberg — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:04:46 +0000

Albert Einstein is probably most remembered by the public for his General Theory of Relativity, but how many remember his 1930 invention of a refrigerator that used no electricity? I wasn’t there when it was introduced, but I knew several people who had one, and they weren’t all that happy with it, primarily because it wasn’t that efficient.

The idea was great, it operated without electricity, using ammonia, butane and water. The principle being that water boils at a much lower temperature at high altitudes where air pressure is lower than it does when you’re at sea level, where air pressure is higher.

Malcom McCulloch, an electrical engineer at Oxford University in the U.K., is leading a team in a three year project to produce appliances that can be used in places without electricity. Or, for that matter, places with electricity, why not?. That’s when McCulloch latched on to Einstein’s fridge idea.

Einstein’s concept, shown in the image above, works thusly. At one side is the evaporator, a flask that contains butane. “If you introduce a new vapor above the butane, the liquid boiling temperature decreases and, as it boils off, it takes energy from the surroundings to do so,’ says McCulloch. ‘That’s what makes it cold.”

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The Hidden Giant #1: “Food” — Vegetarianism

Zachary Shahan — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:53:47 +0000

It is one of the least discussed issues when we discuss solutions to the environmental crisis. It is not whether or not the food is organic or sprayed with synthetic chemicals, or whether or not it is grown locally. The underdiscussed issue is the importance of a vegetarian diet for addressing critical environmental issues.

As Albert Einstein said, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

The big issue today is global climate change. It is likely to dwarf any environmental issues we faced in the past. As reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization:

[T]he livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as a whole. Globally it is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases…. It currently amounts to about 18 percent of the global warming effect — an even larger contribution than the transportation sector worldwide.

This is a critical issue. This is more critical than our power plants, our industries, the energy efficiency of our homes and appliances, or even transportation.

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Green is In, but What is Green? “Green” Lifestyles and Green Living

Zachary Shahan — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:19:18 +0000

In preparing for this new job, writing for GO Media’s Sustainablog and Planetsave blog, I was picking up green magazines, green newspaper articles, advertisements for green books and goods, and thinking (even more than normal) about green living, green lifestyles, and how we are going to find ourselves out of the mess we have put ourselves in.

It is a complicated situation we’ve put ourselves in. Beyond the water quality and air quality problems we’ve had for more than a century, we are now facing global climate change, there is concern about ‘peak oil’ and all of the ramifications related to that issue (including drilling for oil in ecological world treasures), and there are increasing concerns about the sustainability of our global food systems and how we are going to feed our future generations. Cities and stores are just now starting to ban plastic bags, realizing after a few decades that a product that will not disappear for thousands of years should not be reproduced.

We are facing very complicated issues that are a result of the very unnatural and complicated things and systems we have created in recent times.

How do we address these problems and concerns?

As Albert Einstein said a few years ago,

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