Category Archives: sustainability

An Infographic – Seven Billion People

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I don’t have a clue who the people from Masters Degree Online are or what their game is, but one of their people has offered to send me infographics that they put together, and this one I really found interesting. It’s about the earth’s population, some trending, some comparisons, and all kinds of neat stuff. I haven’t fact-checked it, so please if there are errors or things you find misleading, let me know here and I’ll forward those to the authors. After the graphic, I’ll provide my thoughts. And you can click to embiggen, and view the graphic after the fold.

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Oil And Energy

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I heard recently that if one in ten vehicles were hybrids, we would end our dependence on foreign oil. I have no idea if that statement is true it not, but exploring alternatives is not just in our best interests, it is fast becoming a necessity.

Oil, despite what some will tell you is not a renewable resource. In theory, we can make a series of synthetic products as good or better than the oil we currently suck out of the ground, but still we suck and suck. It keeps many people gainfully employed, people like me who, at least until the end of the year, work for oil and gas companies. Those high gas prices people bitch about? Yeah, those keep food on a whole lot of tables.

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Fake Leaf Is Awesome And Makes Me Think Of Energy

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Scientists have created a fake leaf. I imagine that if I said this to 100 people on the streets of My Home Town, I would probably get at least a handful of people telling me that science is wasting money doing stupid things like inventing leaves when God already invented them, and they work great. Those people couldn’t be more wrong.

An artificial leaf isn’t what you might think. It is a photosynthesis device, and that’s where things get a whole lot more nifty in this story. What scientists built was a cost effective doohickey that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and create energy. That’s essentially what leaves do, but for the first time, we’re doing it better. By an order of magnitude.

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The Golden Spruce

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I am mere pages away from finishing The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant (who I must admit I want to refer to as “Johnny Valiant” because it sounds way cooler) and thought I’d pass it along to the readers. My good friend Keith Morrisson (who, for those who know me, is the other half of the duo I play my upright bass in) passed the book along to me, and I’ve very much enjoyed it.

It’s sort of three stories in one, all true, and all tightly intermingled because the story of the golden spruce would make no sense without an understanding of the history of the Haida natives of the BC coast, the history of the logging industry, and the tale of Grant Hadwin, a logger and environmentalist.

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The Plan For Ending AIDS In Africa

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Okay, admittedly, that’s kind of a misnomer. There isn’t one. At least not one that presently shows any real reason to believe it would work. In order to truly end the threat of AIDS as a widespread pandemic both in Africa and the rest of the world, we need to do three things:
 
1. Make people aware of the fact that condoms are just good.

Okay, it’s really just one thing. I admit it, but bullet points usually look nicer if you have three or more things in the list. In order to make that one point stick, we need to do three things:
 
1. Slap the mouth of any religious zealot who insists that condoms promote AIDS, that God hates you if you have sex, or that condoms are not a viable preventative for AIDS transmission.

Again, the bullet point list with only one bullet. It’s a sign of lazy writing, isn’t it?

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Please, Sir, Wash The Damned Carrot

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I get riled up. I admit it. When a topic that seems to me to be bleeding obvious comes along and stays along, I start to get punchy about it. And today I’m punchy about organic food. I have some friends and some parents (well, two parents to be precise) who will no doubt hate me for saying this, but it matters not. I’m too annoyed. If this offends you, then I’d say do something about it, but no doubt your bodies lack the hormones to rile you up enough to do more than piss in the wind about it.

Organic food is, by and large, a hoax. And it’s a hoax for rich people. I know, you’re thinking, “But I’m not rich! I live on a modest income and make sacrifices for better food.” Yes, you may not be rich in the context of your surroundings, but I’m pretty sure you’ve got amazing buying power next to your average Somali refugee. It’s all in the context, people.

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Fear Of The Unknown And The Plight Of The Poor

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We as a species are very much defined by the fear of the unknown. This is, for the record, normal, and I’m not in any way advocating that we stop being afraid of the unknown. One of the things that has led to our survival as a species and as individuals is selectively listening to that fear. But at the same time, we have (or should have) a thirst for knowledge that leads the unknown to become knowable. Where does the line exist? I’d be a fool to speculate.

Religion comes in large part from fear of the unknown. When we are presented with things we do not know, it is easy to turn to a god figure who will answer the question for us. What happens when we die? Why did the volcano erupt? Why did the crops this season do so well? All of these questioned we have traditionally answered with religion and with an emphasis on how well we have behaved. But that’s just one example of how we deal with this fear of the unknown.

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Peein’ In The Shower

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I’ll admit it, I pee in the shower. I don’t pee on myself and I do it down the drain so it’s not all gross. And the reason I do? Because cute Brazilian children sang me a song.

Okay, I can see you’re confused. Once upon a time, I saw a link to this ad and it made me giggle. The Brazilians put together the advertisement to encourage people to pee in the shower. You see, if you can cut down the amount of water wasted in flushing the toilet once a day for most of the population, that’s a dramatic amount of water saved. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s one of those small things you can do to save resources.

It works on the same principal as when you were a kid and working in a fast food restaurant. If you ever make the mistake of putting more than one napkin per sandwich or one straw per drink in the bag, your manager will be right there yelling at you with something that sounds a bit like “Each napkin costs five cents. If every McDonalds order had an extra napkin in it, that would translate to an extra cost of $9.2 million per year!” Of course, those numbers aren’t accurate, I was illustrating the point.

So do it, people. Pee in the shower. Be proud of the little things we can do to save the environment.

Jim

Go Ahead, Throw the Chip Bag Away.

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screen-shot-2010-02-23-at-100108-pmI was just sitting back, enjoying some wine and watching a little Rick Mercer Report. A commercial break starts and I see that Sunchip’s has just released a 100% biodegradable chip bag.

Someone finally got it right! I’m not saying this is going to solve our environmental problems , but it’s the kind of commercially available product I’m very happy to see.

So way to go Sunchip’s. I already liked ya, but now i love ya.

Two Interesting Articles About Green Energy

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I just read a couple of interesting articles from Science Daily about energy and thought I’d share them.

The first article is about a group of researchers who have managed to find a much more efficient means of generating hydrogen through photosynthesis. Hydrogen as a gas is very intriguing in terms of the war on greenhouse gasses, but there have been technical difficulties in finding a way to generate it efficiently. However:

Bruce and his colleagues found that by starting with a thermophilic blue-green algae, which favors warmer temperatures, they could sustain the reaction at temperatures as high as 55 degrees C, or 131 degrees F. That is roughly the temperature in arid deserts with high solar irradiation, where the process would be most productive. They also found the process was more than 10 times more efficient as the temperature increased.

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