By Dave Harcourt •
January 14, 2009
SAB Ltd, is funding water saving projects to compensate for its potential water consumption of 14 billion litres a year in South Africa. WWF (World Wildlife Fund) is facilitating the “water neutrality” process with a South African Government Project to ensure that this is not just a multinational greenwashing.
SAB Ltd is the South African subsidiary of SABMiller which is the second largest brewery in the world .
Water Neutrality
In October 2008, Dr Deon Nel, Head of the WWF Sanlam Living Waters Partnership explained
“The concept of water neutrality, based on its carbon equivalent, has been used loosely over the past years; however, until now no-one has been able to quantitatively justify these claims. We believe that our scheme is the first in the world that allows participants to truly claim to be water neutral.”
Participants will replenish water supplies, by investing in projects that quantitatively supplement water supplies equal to their water usage.
Note: Water neutrality has taken on a form in certain areas that is significantly different to the process introduced here by WWF.
By Andrew Williams •
January 6, 2009
Nasa scientists have told government’s that a simple cut in worldwide emissions of soot could lead to a dramatic reduction in the effects of global warming, as well as preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths from air pollution.
Soot contains black carbon, thought to be the second largest cause of global warming after carbon dioxide. Whilst airborne, it it spread around the globe by wind, heating the atmosphere by absorbing and releasing warmth from the sun’s rays. When it falls to the surface it also darkens snow and ice in polar regions or high mountain ranges, further reducing the Earth’s ability to reflect solar radiation.
Cutting soot emissions has a virtually instantaneous effect since it disappears rapidly from the earth’s atmosphere, unlike CO2, which can linger for hundreds of years.
By Andrew Williams •
December 8, 2008
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that, as a result of its enforcement actions, U.S. companies will spend a record-breaking $11.8 billion on pollution control and projects to clean up the environment this year.
By Andrew Williams •
August 27, 2008
A new report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Energy Initiative predicts that a 30-50% reduction in fuel consumption is possible in the US over the next 25-30 years. Initially, this will be achieved through improved gasoline and diesel engines and transmissions, gasoline hybrids and reductions in vehicle weight and drag. In the longer term, the study concludes that plug-in hybrids and, later, hydrogen fuel cells may begin to have a significant impact on fuel use and emissions.
The report, ‘On the Road in 2035: Reducing Transportation’s Petroleum Consumption and GHG Emissions,’ summarizes the results of an MIT research project that assessed the technology of vehicles and fuels that could be developed and commercialized during the next 25 years.
The research team assessed the effect of new vehicle and fuel technologies on the performance, cost and lifecycle emissions of individual vehicles. It then assessed the effects on the total on-the-road fleet of introducing these technologies using “plausible assumptions about how rapidly they could be developed, manufactured and sold to buyers to replace existing vehicles and fuels or to add to the existing fleet.”
Other key findings include:
Image Credit: USDA/Wikimedia CommonsAmericans eat a lot of corn. Sure there's cooked corn and corn chips and corn flakes and cornbread and the myriad other varieties found in the average American market. And, with the arrival of summer, there is now corn-on-the-cob (though here in the upper midwest: the sweet corn at the local supermarket right now is trucked in from Florida, not locally grown).
But in addition
[...]
