Green Options

As the fastest land animal on Earth, the cheetah is a beast often referred to in metaphors, and studied for its movements. Humans, as you may have noticed, have something of an obsession with speed. Many of us won’t give up that obsession, no matter how much climate change may endanger our future. Did I mention humans are stubborn as well?

Thus the quest for a fossil fuel free future brings about a lot of interesting, outlandish, and outright weird ideas. This one is one of the weirdest, and yet it may actually have a future of sorts. Its a tricycle designed to mimic the movement of a cheetah… and, apparently, it works.

This is a followup post that will attempt to address some additional, wide-spread myths about the commercial sale of seed.  In this case the topic with be “GMO” seed improved through genetic engineering (an industry that is now 13 years old and which has been planted on well over 2 billion acres cumulatively, much of it in the developing world). As someone with substantial direct experience with this industry over the years, I’d like to try to speak to some distorted perspectives on this technology.

The First Biotech Crops

The four earliest commercial biotech crops commercialized in 1995/1996 were squash (virus resistant), corn (insect resistant), potatoes (insect resistant), and soybeans (herbicide tolerant). For the squash, corn and potatoes, commercialization was straight forward because it was already standard practice for farmers to buy new seed (tuber seed pieces in the case of potatoes) each year.

For soybeans there was a major commercialization challenge.  There was no question that the new technology was valuable — it would displace millions of pounds and hundreds of millions of dollars of herbicide sales.  It would also greatly increase the efficiency and convenience of producing soybeans. The challenge was that it was standard practice at the time for farmers to save-back some of their crop to use as seed the next year - more in some geographies than others.  If this practice were to continue with the new herbicide tolerant soybeans, it would have been very difficult for the company to recover its high risk investment in the new technology. Growers would simply buy seeds the first year, and then be set until they wanted to buy a new variety. This is not so different from the challenge that record labels with illegal file sharing via the internet.

The two standard solutions that most expected were either (a) charge enough upfront to make up for pervasive seed savings, or (b) raise the price of the herbicide to recover the genetic investment in that way. The first would have discouraged adoption; the second would have disrupted other crops and uses that also depended on the product. Instead, Monsanto tried something completely new (at least to the seed industry). They decided to charge a “technology fee” (”Tech Fee”) of a few $/bag and ask the farmers to sign a license agreement saying they would not save seed.  This was a pretty radical step at the time.  Monsanto also licensed the technology to many other seed companies and they too had to get growers to sign the licenses.

According to press reports, nearly 50 pilot whales were found stranded on an Argentine beach over the weekend.  Two workers discovered the whales in the province of Chubut in the coastal region of Bustamante Bay on Sunday.  All of the whales have died.

In recent posts on Planetsave and EcoWorldy about moratoria on soya and cattle products related to Amazon destruction, it was mentioned that McDonald’s is helping to save the Amazon. With the company also delving into green building, progressive energy saving software, and charging stations for electric vehicles, is McDonald’s a green company?

In the western Argentinian province of San Juan, the provincial government has authorized the development of what will be the most powerful solar energy park in Latin America to date. The park is hoped to be operational by the summer of 2010.

A Buenos Aires landmark, the solar powered Floralis Generica.

A bidding process will begin in June of this year, and Brazilian, German, and Spanish companies are expected to invest in the project, which has an estimated price tag of $120 million dollars. The provinicial government of San Juan has already agreed to invest between $15 and $20 million.

Argentinian President Cristina Fernández vetoed a previously passed bill aimed at protecting Argentina’s glaciers.

The province of Corrientes, in Argentina, is accomplishing the goal of bringing solar power to faraway schools. On July, we told you about this proyect but in Catamarca province.

Last year the provincial government announced the Renewable Energies Program for Rural Sectors and started to placed solar panels on schools. We told you about it here.

Today in Corrientes 75 out of 85 rural schools already have solar energy that is used to power lights, fans, televisions, computers and other equipment.

Latin America already has the first green building, the Céfira Tower, located on Mar del Plata, a seaside town in Buenos Aires province, Argentina.

The building has been named after Cérifo, the Greek god of the winds because it can get power form the sea wind thanks to a windmill placed on the flat roof. The turbine can generate 4,5 kilowatts of wind power, more than enough to cover the needs of the share spaces.

Besides the wind generator, the tower makes the most of the sunlight, because 80% of the facade is pure glass. The building also has intelligent lights that automatically turn off  when they aren’t needed.

Below you will find summaries and links to several of the more interesting ecologically-related stories to come out of South American countries in the past month. The list is not meant to be comprehensive or definitive, but hopefully you will find something that teases your interest. Enjoy.

“Very good night, here we are at Las Lomitas, on a radio of Mocase Via Campesina. This is our first time on air, our name is Paj Sachada, which means mount flight and we are running on solar power.”

This is the opening message of the radio station Paj Sachada and it was broadcasted by Margarita, who is only 17 years old.

This station is located on Las Lomitas, a remote spot in Santiago del Estero, Argentina. Because electrical power does not reach this place, the local people are using solar power to feed the radio station.

Argentina will produce massive wind power turbines. This country of South America is using some of the biggest generators with de Eolis-15, that has 1,5 megawatts of power and almost 80 meters tall.

Río Negro and Neuquén, two of the southeast provinces in Argentina, along with the Science and Technology Department from Cutral-Có and Plaza Huincul-both municipalities with oil royalties- have joined each other to develop the wind turbine Eolis-15, designed by Invap to make the most of high speed winds.