Green Options

Plans were announced today that will bring the United States and China together in order to fight the issue of global climate change. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Chinese Minister of Science Wan Gang, and Administrator of National Energy Administration Zhang Guo Bao announced plans to develop a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, which will facilitate cooperative research and development of clean energy systems.

Scientists gathering specimens in a submersible off the coast of Hawaii have discovered the oldest living colonial creature on Earth, dated at 4,265 years old.

The geriatric discovery (Leiopathes sp.) is a deep water tree-like coral, which grows only a few micrometers every year. That’s an annual growth rate at around the size of a human blood cell. And the Leiopathes sp. wasn’t the only old creature found. Also discovered was a 2,742 year old gold coral (Gerardia sp.).

The discovery raises needed awareness about the delicate, fragile ecosystems of deep sea reefs, which are endangered due to trawling and global warming.

NASA and Cisco, Inc. have joined together to implement and manage an online global environmental monitoring platform, which is named Planetary Skin.

The platform will be used for data collection and analysis utilizing sensors in space, the air, the oceans, and on land.

A sea otter sighting has been confirmed in Oregon near Depoe Bay. There have been no confirmed sightings of the creature in Oregon waters since 1906. Morris Grover spotted the animal but did not want to tell anyone until he sent photos of it to biologists and they told him what he photographed. They identified it as a sea otter. (Many river otters there have been mistaken for sea otters).

Harnessing the Earth’s Heat for Food and Power

As the rumbling temblors beneath Yellowstone National Park continue (over 900 hundred such weak quakes in 2008), media attention shifts to two topics: the possibility of a super-volcanic eruption (not likely, according to most geologists), and secondly, the harnessing of geothermal energy.

This latter consideration is all the more fashionable these days as America struggles to embrace an alternative and sustainable energy future.

Geothermal energy offers the promise of a virtually unlimited source of power. Although less energetic in terms  of total constant power output compared to the sun, harnessing the geothermal venting from a single, sufficiently high-grade, hot-spring could conceivably provide power for a population of tens of thousands, and it’s not weather dependent.  But there are also plenty of “lower grade” springs that can be put to other uses, such as growing hothouse produce (and the spring water is also used for watering the plants) and  naturally warming water for fish farming (the Talipia species, a popular dinner fish, is one species farmed this way). Not all animals that are farmed this way are used for food, some, like the farmed alligators in Mosca, CO (see photo), are raised for their skins primarily (though some do eat the meat).

Climate change, developers, and logging are blamed

Since the winter of 2006, when a state of emergency was declared for 18 counties in the state, Western Washington has experienced increasingly dramatic annual flooding episodes creating a state of emergency in growing numbers of counties each year.

For the past three years here, the number of roads, farms, buildings, and houses damaged or destroyed increased—helped along by the landslides that usually follow in the wake of such flooding. Although with this year the number of landslides has been somewhat constrained, the total area of flooding has increased from the previous two years (several sections of Interstate 5 remained shut down as of Saturday night, Jan. 10), and tens of thousands of people have had to be evacuated over the past 10 days. The governor declared a state of emergency in late December, which has only abated in the past couple of days.

It would seem that a “trifecta” of reinforcing factors is to blame: climate change (an extra heavy dose of snow, followed by several days of heavy rains), upland forest clear-cutting (leaving less vegetation to soak up water and hold the soil in place), and over-development in flood plane areas (leaving too many people’s houses too low in the face of rising rivers) …all of which set the stage for the current state of emergency. The damage is still being tallied, and although the heavy rains have largely abated, repairs to roads and highways will take months if not a full year (and with state budgets so tight) or more.

The problems of the US auto manufacturing industry have been widely reported in recent weeks.The big surprise is that to many, this actually came as a surprise.

But is it really surprising that the industry is in a state of collapse considering they continue to make cars that are increasingly irrelevant to the needs of the rest of the world?

This issue is no better demonstrated than by the US Government’s introduction last year of average fuel consumption targets. The legislation mandates a national passenger car fleet average consumption of 32 mpg by 2015, and 35 mpg by 2020.

Is this progress, or is it too little too late?

According to a recent report the fleet average for Europe was 34.4 mpg in 2007. Putting Europeans practically 14 years ahead of the game. Other major auto markets are similarly ahead.

The business case for reducing corporations’ water footprints was explored at last week’s Corporate Water Footprinting conference held in San Francisco.

“Water is the new carbon,” said Gil Friend, President and CEO of Natural Logic, during his moderation of a session on “The Outlook for Water Supply Shortages.”

The conference, held December 2 and 3 and organized by Green Power Conferences, engaged corporations to discuss how to become more proactively involved in the water management of their facilities. Companies such as The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo International, Nestle Waters, MillerCoors, and Cadbury were represented. Professors, water experts and consultants from a variety of firms, including Business for Social Responsibility and Natural Logic, also participated in panels.

What do Peruvians think about Barack Obama’s exciting victory? If you are an American, it’s not quite what you might think.

LIMA (EcoWorldly) -  After having successfully negotiated a free trade agreement with the United States, Peru is now strategically positioned to become one of the U.S.’s key allies and trade partners in Latin America. Given the American media’s substantial touting of international interest in the U.S. presidential election, I decided to go out the morning after Obama won and see what I could find out about the reactions among Peru’s newspapers and citizens.

What I found out surprised me. While newspapers wrote articles that I would have expected, the reaction I got from people was different.

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For two weeks in the end of September, there was no gas to be found in the county surrounding Asheville, North Carolina and most of the gas stations remained closed.

The recent hurricanes are being blamed for shutting down the nation’s gas supply by up to 22%. But the problem remained far worse in this region of North Carolina.

Even over a week after the main pipeline to the East Coast, the Colonial pipeline, had reopened, gas remained scarce and there were few answers as to why.

The United States has good reason to take pride in its recent green technology achievements. A look at world-wide wind energy production alone should give Americans cause to brake into the famous “We’re number one!” chant. However, there are a number of truly remarkable, environmentally-friendly technologies that have so far, at least for the most part, passed the US by.

#1: High-speed trains

America, this is what a train should look like. These streamlined vehicles rocket between destinations at around 190 MPH (300 km/h) in at least eighteen countries outside the US. And they’re getting even faster. This week, Kawasaki made headlines with plans for a new 217 MPH (350 km/h) train in Japan. High-speed trains make long-distance travel fast, comfortable, and more hassle-free than flying. You sit back with a book, a beer, or a sandwich and relax, watching the scenery whiz past. Seriously, what’s a red-blooded nation like the US doing without a form of transportation that actually encourages beer drinking?

Although there is not currently a nation-wide high-speed train system in the US, things are looking up. In 2000, Amtrak opened the Acela Express, a 150 MPH (240 km/h) train serving Boston and Washington DC. More exciting yet, Californians will get to vote this November on whether to build a 220 MPH high-speed train connecting Sacramento and San Francisco in the north with Los Angeles and San Diego in the South.