Green Options

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.

This week, Ecoworldly celebrates the Water Week, and between September 8 - 14, readers of the blog will be reflecting on a lot of water issues here. But isn’t it exciting that this is also the week that word finally leaked out that Google was patenting a retrofitted floating water and wind energy data center.

What does that mean? According to documents filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office August 28, the Google water-powered data center will be - a system that includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.

Dogs have long been accepted as man’s best friend. But nosy ones have provided inspiration to a laser research team working on early cancer detection methods to devise a breathalyzer-type tool that could significantly improve survival rates for suffering millions.

Researchers at University of Oklahoma are reportedly working to create a sensor to detect bio-marker gases exhaled in the breath of a person with cancer, picking up on earlier studies showing that dogs can detect cancer by sniffing the exhaled breath of cancer patients.

In a study published two years ago, it was found that dogs identified breast and lung cancer patients with accuracies of 88% and 97%, respectively by smelling breath samples.

It has been proven elsewhere that gas-phase molecules are uniquely associated with cancer but the team will use nanotechnology to improve laser performance and shrink laser systems, which would allow battery-powered operation of a hand held sensor device.

100 Million Trees Are Cut Each Year to Generate Junk Mail
A report by ForestEthics, the nonprofit environmental organization whose mission is to protect endangered forests, has made a very startling revelation: that there are 100 million green reasons why junk mail are an annoying intrusion.

Not that the 100 billion pieces of junk mail Americans receive each year are irksome enough or that the emissions of junk mail are equal to those of over nine million cars or 51 million tons of greenhouse gases.

The group estimates that every year, more than 100 million trees are cut down to make junk mail - the equivalent of clear-cutting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months!

In May of 2006, I had the chance to attend the China-US Climate Change Forum hosted by the University of California at Berkeley. To an eco-geek, the list of speakers was star-studded with Nobel laureates, professors from top universities, famous innovators, and leaders from the business communities in China and the United States. The conference opened with the premier of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, just before it hit theaters. Before a university worker’s strike altered plans, Al Gore himself was slated to join the stage.

But it was a random guy in the audience who stole the show with a single insightful comment in the closing moments.

US Presidential Candidate Barack Obama made it clear again this week that he would not have attended the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing because of concern over China’s policies in Tibet and Sudan. His statements came in response to President Bush’s contrasting decision to attend the opening ceremonies.

However, in recent months, Senator Obama has also expressed some mixed feelings about boycotting the Olympics.

The US has in the past shown great moral strength, courage and sacrifice to respond to global crises but no so with the imminent threat of global climate change.

Yet, in order to accelerate global efforts to protect the environment, the US must not only be held to a higher environmental standard than the rest of the world, it must also show greater commitment to a coordinated worldly response.

The statistics speak for themselves - the US produces a total of 5,410 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, almost a quarter of the global emissions, according to researchers. This makes the US the world’s leading polluter, making it imperative to hold the country to a higher environmental standard.

1. United States (FY08 budget), $623 billion
2. China (2004), $65 billion
3. Russia, $50 billion
4. France (2005), $45 billion
5. United Kingdom, $42.8 billion
6. Japan (2007), $41.75 billion
7. Germany (2003), $35.1 billion
8. Italy (2003), $28.2 billion
9. South Korea (2003), $21.1 billion
10. India (2005 est.), $19 billion

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Data source: TomDispatch.com