Photo via the New Republic It's a widely held notion that politicians have long been in the pocket of Big Oil. And there's good reason for that perception: oil companies' huge campaign donations, vast lobbying power, and close ties to politicians have ensured that their taxes remain low , that hidden subsidies are around to provide extra funding, and that they receive preferential treatment in US energy policy. But there could be a new, ... View original post here: The Next Big Oil: Big Smart Grid?
So there really isn't anything that deep to this image. It's just a (more or less) life-sized blue whale eye. And on the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society site you can educate yourself/be mesmerized/ waste some time for a while staring at it while the entire life-sized animal scrolls across your browser window. Believe me, it's way cooler than you might think:... Read more from the original source: Ever See a Blue Whale Life-Sized on Your Computer? Now You Can
published March 18, 2009 and has No Comments
Photo: Toyota We Will Know at the New York Auto Show We've written a few times about the Toyota iQ micro-car (see below for links to those posts for more details). It's a pretty cool and innovative car; Toyota engineers found clever way to package many things more efficiently to save space, so that you can actually seat 4 ...
Read more...published March 18, 2009 and has No Comments
Rolling out attic insulaton. Image credit: Waterworks Valley For implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the US Department of Energy has announced that US$5 billion dollars allocated for the Weatherization Assistance Program , will be used to insulate, seal leaks, or modernize heating and air conditioning equipment for low-income families, " at a cost of up ...
Read more...published March 18, 2009 and has No Comments
Shell hopes that CCS technology will reduce the emissions from carbon-intensive projects such as this Athabasca oil sands project. Too bad that CCS will do absolutely nothing for the water intensity of these projects, nor toxicity of that water afterwards. Photo: Shell In what seems to be to be astounding stubborness, oil company Shell says it will no longer ...
Read more...published March 16, 2009 and has No Comments
Image via Global Warming Art Dear Pablo: I've heard that we don't have enough remaining fossil fuels available to burn in order to reach the carbon dioxide concentrations that the IPCC scientists are predicting. What would happen to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the global average temperature if we were to burn all remaining fossil fuels? ...
Read more...published March 16, 2009 and has No Comments
Where is Your Clean Coal Now? We all know that burning coal is a very dirty source of energy . Just the act of mining it out of the ground causes a fair amount of destruction (and costs the lives of many miners, especially in poorer countries), and burning it produces more CO2 than any other source of energy, ...
Read more...published March 13, 2009 and has No Comments
WattzOn's Raffi Krikorian held a talk at ETech about the user-populated database for energy consumption , and showed off a great feature - the Embodied Energy Database, which helps users know just how much power is held within commonly consumed objects.... Read the original: ETech 2009: WattzOn's Embodied Energy Database
Read more...published March 12, 2009 and has No Comments
29 million acres of land in the Southwest under Department of Interior management have been identified as having good solar power potential. Photo: Rick Cooper via flickr While I'm not so sure his head's in the right place when it comes to oil shale , Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar certainly has been supportive of renewable energy. The latest ...
Read more...published March 12, 2009 and has No Comments
Lithium-Iron-Phosphate particule. Is this the "Holy Grail" Battery We've Been Waiting For? Nature published a very interesting paper by MIT researchers Byoungwoo Kang & Gerbrand Ceder this week: Battery materials for ultrafast charging and discharging . In it they claim that they have discovered a way to make a lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) battery charge and discharge about as ...
Read more...published March 12, 2009 and has No Comments
photo: Chuck Coker via flickr TreeHugger has covered all sorts of plans to transform the US's energy mix towards far greater amounts of renewable energy over the coming years, Al Gore's generational challenge to repower America being perhaps the most prominent. Under than plan (really more a visionary proposal) the US would generate 100% of its electricity from renewable ...
Read more...published March 12, 2009 and has No Comments
In amidst all the academic presentations and statements by high-profile politicians and climate change campaigners, there were a couple of booths set up displaying some interesting products. If you're like me and enjoy playing around with interactive maps and interested in energy issues, then EnergyMap should be right up your alley. While concentrating on Danish companies, it details projects ...
Read more...
Contrary to previously held notions of how whale songs are shared between neighboring populations, a surprising study finds that whales living the same ocean basin are singing different songs. Read the original post: Study: Humpback Whales Living in Same Ocean ...
"The technology that we have here gives us a first-ever look at the Amazon in its full three-dimensional detail, over very large regions," says the study's lead researcher. Here is the original post: Lasers Used to Generate Remarkably Detailed 3D ...
