As a former teacher of students with autism, a current and lifelong fear-er of cancer, and an avid environmentalist, I always saw a link between these three “interests” of mine. Many types of cancer can be/have been linked to the various environmental toxins introduced into our environment by major polluting industries (plastics, chemical, coal, oil, to name a few major offenders).

Yet, with autism, the link has long been mentioned, studied, and brushed aside due to lack of evidence. I’d imagine that if you had a line chart with three lines, one for the rate of environmental toxins 1900 to present, and the other two with the rate of cancer and autism cases during that same time, the three lines would ride the same “hockey stick curve”.

Read more of this story »

Let me start off, though, by expressing my immense gratitude to all of the writers who contributed during 2008. This was our first full year as a multi-author blog, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the way it turned out. Some of the writers I’ll mention have moved on; others on coming on board. I’m grateful for the inspiration you’ve all brought to the blog over the past year, and look forward with anticipation to what the new year brings us.

January 2008

Like New Year’s fireworks, January started off with a bang.  Here are a few great posts to remember:

• Jason Phillip’s post on Chicago’s bottled water tax was one of our most popular ever… it’s still getting pageviews!
• Maria Surma Manka wrote a very thorough (and also very popular) review of Scientific American’s “Solar Grand Plan.”
• I took a look at an innovative South African whose developed a low-cost, high-yield method of generating energy from chicken poop.

Read more of this story »

]]> http://sustainablog.org/2008/12/19/the-twelve-days-of-sustainablog-bees-stimulus-checks-and-biodynamic-wine/feed/ http://sustainablog.org/2008/09/26/genomatica-turns-bacteria-into-plastic/ http://sustainablog.org/2008/09/26/genomatica-turns-bacteria-into-plastic/#comments Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:02:53 +0000 Adam Williams http://sustainablog.org/2008/09/26/genomatica-turns-bacteria-into-plastic/ Scientific American reports that like so many elements in the world, it’s all in the use and volume for whether that something, say poison or E. coli, is a friend or foe: “Escherichia coli (E. coli) can give you a severe case of food poisoning or, with a little genetic engineering, a useful plastic.”

San Diego-based scientists at Genomatica have developed the ability to manipulate bacteria into being useful to feed our societal lust for plastics, by producing “butanediol (BDO), a chemical compound used to make everything from spandex to car bumpers, thereby providing a more energy-efficient way of making it without oil or natural gas,” the article says.

Read more of this story »

]]> http://sustainablog.org/2008/09/26/genomatica-turns-bacteria-into-plastic/feed/ http://gas2.org/2008/03/25/how-solar-panels-could-power-90-of-us-transportation/ http://gas2.org/2008/03/25/how-solar-panels-could-power-90-of-us-transportation/#comments Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:26:57 +0000 Clayton B. Cornell http://gas2.org/2008/03/25/how-solar-panels-could-power-90-of-us-transportation/

In January, Scientific American writers unleashed an ambitious plan to halt global warming, eliminate our dependence on petroleum and the substantial trade deficit, boost the economy and create 3 million jobs, and brighten the dismal forecasts for the mid twenty-first century.

The plan is conceptually simple but would be substantial to implement:

• Construct a 30,000 square mile array of solar panels in the Southwest,
• along with concentrated solar power arrays and,
• a massive direct-current power transmission backbone to distribute electricity throughout the country.
• Excess power produced by the photovoltaic arrays would be distributed and stored as compressed air in below-ground caverns.

Development of such a system could provide almost three-quarters of the nation’s electricity by 2050.

Read more of this story »

]]> http://gas2.org/2008/03/25/how-solar-panels-could-power-90-of-us-transportation/feed/ http://sustainablog.org/2008/01/07/scientific-americans-solar-grand-plan/ http://sustainablog.org/2008/01/07/scientific-americans-solar-grand-plan/#comments Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:38:39 +0000 Maria Surma Manka http://sustainablog.org/2008/01/07/scientific-americans-solar-grand-plan/ Scientific American has a thought-provoking proposal in its January 2008 issue. The magazine proposes a massive, far-reaching plan to get solar power generating 69 percent of America’s electricity 35 percent of our total energy by 2050, thus replacing all of our foreign oil needs and slashing global warming emissions. Below are some of the highlights of that “solar grand plan.”

Technology

The American Southwest would be the home of massive amounts of solar power needed for this clean energy conversion. Specifically, two types of solar power would be employed: Photovoltaic (PV) cells and concentrated solar power.

According to the solar grand plan, 30,000 square miles of PV cells would provide 3,000 gigawatts (GW) of energy. The “30,000 square miles” part made me flinch, but already existing solar installations indicate that the land needed for each gigawatt-hour of solar energy in the Southwest is less that the amount of land needed to run a coal plant and mine the fossil fuel for it.

Concentrated solar power would supply about one-fifth of the solar energy in the plan. Concentrated solar power uses long metallic mirrors that focus the sun’s rays onto a pipe filled with fluid. The fluid is heated and runs through a heat exchanger that produces steam that turns a turbine. Nine plants like this already exist in the in U.S.

Read more of this story »

]]> http://sustainablog.org/2008/01/07/scientific-americans-solar-grand-plan/feed/