published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo: MFN Berlin In the first half of the last century, a German blacksmith named Alfred Keller began crafting some of the most surrealistic, alien-seeming sculptures the world had ever seen -- delicate works which took months to complete. These incredible creations, meticulous in detail, rivaled even the most imaginative pieces from contemporary artists -- but they weren't inspired ...
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published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
photo: Charles Henry / Creative Commons Steven Chu just said now is the US' Sputnik moment for clean technology, and here's some independent confirmation of that: Ernst & Young has just released a new Country Attractiveness Inde... Read the full story on TreeHugger
The rest is here:
China Overtakes US as Most Attractive Country for Renewable Energy For First Time
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published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
photo: Diane Worth / Creative Commons Considering the considerable official enthusiasm for the highly polluting and carbon intensive Alberta tar sands, this really isn't so surprising: According to correspondence obtained by the Pembina Institute , the Canadian Government is "pursuing an orchestrated strategy to undermine US effort to combat climate change" and partnered with polluters to fight US effort ...
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published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons In medieval England, a beaver pelt was worth three years of wages to a peasant laborer . So important, in fact, was the beaver, that the Church of England classified it as a fish so it could be eaten on Fridays. After a few hundred years of such popularity, however, the European beaver became extinct ...
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published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Photos: Wikipedia, Public domain. Investing Now for a Better Future In a speech at the National Press Club, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu made the case for more R&D in the U.S., especially in the energy sector ("the 2010 federal budget is $3.6 trillion, of which 0.14 percent went for research and development related to energy"). Dr. Chu explains ...
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published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Starbucks has very proudly announced the completion of a pilot project where they have proven that paper cups can be recycled into new paper cups. They call it a breakthrough in their "goal of ensuring 100 percent of its cups are reusable or recyclable by 2015" In a press release they say: "This innovation represents an important milestone in ...
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published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo: Youtube Let's Hope it Won't Stay Just a Commercial German car maker Volkswagen has produced a series of ads based on "fun theory", the simple idea that if something is fun or if there's something in it for you, you are more likely to do it than if you're just "supposed to". It's pretty simply psychology, yet if ...
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published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo: Zainub , Flickr, CC It's so simple -- so gloriously simple. In 2008, China instated a law that made it illegal for stores to give out plastic bags for free . Instead, shop owners were required to charge for the bags, and allowed to keep any profit they made for themselves. The results? After two years, the poorly-enforced ...
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published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Image: Youtube 2 Square Meters of Sunlight is All it Takes Last summer, I wrote about a cool video that showed how a solar oven could be used to melt steel . It's a good demonstration of just how much solar energy is hitting the Earth (it's one thing to know abstractly, but it's much more memorable to see ...
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published November 30, 2010 and has No Comments
Photo: DVIDSHUB , Flickr, CC In the first nine months of this year, more than 21,000 people perished around the world due to climate-related events, a new report from Oxfam finds. That's more than twice as many died in all of 2009. This news should hardly be surprising to anyone who follows international news -- the flooding in Pakistan ...
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