Category Archives: Green Resources

Worldisgreen Links 02/03/2010

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  • Carbon copy | Giles Parkinson | News | Business Spectator

    tags: wiglinks

    • The climate change policies of the prime minister and the leader of the opposition have more in common than you might think.

      For a start, both studiously ignore the need for the Australian economy to make any sort of transition, despite the clear global trend. If you are in any doubt about that, check out the Obama budget, overnight.

      Rudd’s policy achieved this omission through a staggering amount of compensation to industry and because his policy was all about creating division in the Coalition. It wasn’t until Turnbull had been condemned to execution that it suddenly dawned on the government that it had skewered an ally. Or maybe it wasn’t in search of one.

      Abbott’s policy avoids transformation by ignoring the subject altogether – plant more trees, bury a bit of charcoal, take care on how you cut the grass and keep the plough in the shed.

  • Abbott’s great big axe | Alan Kohler | News | Business Spectator

    tags: wiglinks

    • He said: “One of the large power companies has provided us with their advice. Because it’s commercial-in-confidence, they didn’t want it released – but they provided us with their advice that they could convert from coal to gas for $13 per tonne under this system.

      “Now we want to check that, but … the oldest and least efficient of the power providers has said to us that under the government’s ETS we’re just not going to be able to afford the capital to transition because we will be struggling just to survive… Under this they’ve said that if our balance sheets are clear and there’s an incentive to change from coal to gas, this is very attractive and we are more likely rather than less likely to change under this system.”

      Australia’s oldest and least efficient power station is Hazelwood in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, owned by International Power of the UK and the Commonwealth Bank (8.2 per cent). In fact, in 2005 it was nominated the least efficient power station in the world.

      Yallourn, owned by China Light & Power subsidiary, Truenergy, is next. If Hazelwood and Yallourn convert from brown coal to gas, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions would drop by 5 per cent, as required. Job done.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Worldisgreen Links 02/02/2010

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Cities – problem and solution

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Atanu Dey points to this article on cities in the SEED magazine by Geoffrey West.

Doubling the size of a city increases wealth and innovation by about 15 percent, but it also increases the amount of crime, pollution, and disease by roughly the same amount. Apparently, the good and the ugly come hand in glove, an integrated, almost predictable, package. A person drawn to the city by innovation, a greater sense of “action,” and higher wages can also expect to confront an equivalent increase in smog, garbage, theft, stomach flu, and AIDS.

[...]

In contrast, the social networks that underlie the “superlinear scaling” of wealth creation, innovation, crime, and pollution behave in exactly the opposite fashion: The bigger the organization, the faster the pace of life. In big cities, disease spreads more quickly, business is transacted more rapidly, and people walk faster — all in approximately the same systematic, predictable way (the same ~15 percent rule).

[...]

In contrast, in social organizations where growth is driven by superlinear scaling, growth is unbounded, never reaching an “asymptotic” stable state, and proceeding at a rate that is faster than exponential. To sustain such growth in the light of resource limitation requires continuous cycles of paradigm-shifting innovations such as the discovery of iron, steam, computation, and most recently, digital technology. Indeed, the litany of such breakthroughs is testament to the extraordinary ingenuity of the human social mind when it comes to overcoming resource limits. There is, however, a serious catch: Theory dictates that the time between successive innovations must get shorter and shorter. So if we insist on continuous growth driven by wealth creation, not only does the pace of life inevitably quicken, but we must also innovate at a faster and faster rate!

[...]

The challenge is clear: The key to long-term sustainability of the planet lies in applying a scientific lens to cities, with the goal of understanding their dynamic structure, growth, and evolution.

Amazon: Reinventing the Book

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Microsoft’s Bill Hill has a riff where he runs through the energy-wasting, resource-draining process of how we make books now. We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world. “Do you really believe that we’ll be doing that in 50 years?” he asks.

The answer is probably not, and that’s why the Kindle matters. “This is the most important thing we’ve ever done,” says Jeff Bezos. “It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it. And maybe even change the way people read.” As long as the batteries are charged.

Amazon: Reinventing the Book | Newsweek The Technologist | Newsweek.com.

Worldisgreen Links 08/22/2008

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  • Download Free PDF Book from Amazon – Blue Planet Run

    tags: Water, WiGLinks

    • Don’t miss this. Blue Planet Run is a book with over 250 awe-inspiring photographs captured by some of the world’s top photojournalists. The idea is to help you know about water problems faced by people in different parts of the globe.

      Here are some pictures from the ‘Blue Planet Run’ book:

    • water-africa
    • 40 billion – The number of hours spent each year in Africa due to the need to collect water.
    • water-fight
    • People wrestle in Delhi for water.

Worldisgreen Links 08/14/2008

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  • RoofRay Launches Online Solar Clearinghouse « Earth2Tech

    tags: solar, WiGLinks

    • The biggest complaint we hear from homeowners who are considering rooftop solar systems is the lack of information: How much will it cost; how long until it pays off; who’s the best local installer? A new site that launched this morning, is looking to help answer all of those queries using satellite data and a hands-on web site — RoofRay.com.
    • Here’s how it works: enter an address, pull up the satellite image of the chosen building’s rooftop and then using the RoofRay tool based on Google maps, draw your solar arrays (see image below and YouTube video below the jump). Data on square footage of the system, slope of the roof, power per square foot and total peak power all show up in a chart, and the info displayed depends on how big you’ve drawn your system.

Worldisgreen Links 08/12/2008

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  • Clinton Foundation mulls world’s largest solar project in Gujarat

    tags: solar, energy, india, WiGLinks

    • The project, tagged as one of the largest foreign direct investment (FDI) into the state, will also be a landmark project as the cost of power generation is likely to be 70 per cent less — around Rs 20,000 crore — than the conventional cost of generation, say sources close to the development.

      The project envisages an integrated solar city wherein all the raw materials including glass and panels will be produced by them, bringing down the cost substantially, said a senior government official.

      The cost of generation for thermal energy is about Rs 10-11 per unit. However, according to estimates of Clinton Foundation, the power produced in the solar city will cost around Rs 4 per unit, going by the scale of the project and technology advancement they have on hand.

Worldisgreen Links 08/11/2008

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  • An Energy Diet for Power-Hungry Household PCs – NYTimes.com

    tags: computers, energy, WiGLinks

    • The potential savings in both dollars and pollution is huge, analysts say, when the estimated one billion PCs in use globally are taken into account. The research firm Gartner estimates that 40 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions resulting from information technology and telecommunications are attributable to PCs. Data center computers account for 23 percent, and the rest is attributable to printers and telecommunications equipment.

    • “There are large potential savings beyond what Energy Star can do,” he said.

      The free software, called Edison, is a consumer version of the PC energy-saving software sold to corporate customers by Verdiem, which is financed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a leading venture capital firm and an aggressive investor in green technologies, and other venture investors.

  • TechNation Australia » Applying For A Climate Ready Grant – Part 1

    tags: WiGLinks, australia, govt, grant, climatechange, technology

    • Hi, My name’s Malcolm Lambert. I’m the founder of a startup called Intresto which aims to use computer science to improve our ability to use the world’s largest resource of low-embodied energy building material, rock rubble.

      I’ve just sent in my pre-application application for Climate Ready funding. Over the next few weeks and months I’ll be posting about the grant process hopefully to let other startups in this space know what to expect if they go down the same route. Below is my first post. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I do…