It sounds like a woolly idea, but Australian sheep are to be fitted with gas masks to find out how much they are affecting the climate.
From DailyMail:
Researchers will fit the masks over the sheep for a short time to obtain a reading from their breath so it can be established how much methane gas they are emitting. Read the entire article here...
Is Offshore Oil Worth the Risk?
From The Daily Green:
"At least 500,000 gallons of oil — nearly 12,000 barrels — spilled into the ocean and tidal wetlands along the Texas and Louisiana coasts after Hurricane Ike ripped up oil platforms, and ruptured tanks and pipelines, according to an Associated Press investigation. That's about 5% of the oil spilled due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Read the entire article here...
When a Wine Bottle Manufacturer Is Fined for Air Pollution, You Know There's More to Think About Than Red or White
From The Daily Green:
"Glass has a pretty good environmental reputation. The material is 100 percent recyclable and is used to make new glass.
While plastic gets plenty of grief for its environmental effects (um, see the large plastic creatures floating at sea), glass is often spared a tongue lashing.
But what about the production process? The EPA reports that the nation's second largest glass manufacturer, Saint-Gobain Containers, is facing a fine (again) for violating air pollution rules. Allegedly, the folks at Saint-Gobain's wine bottle manufacturing facility in Madera, California, have violated the federal Clean Air Act. Read the entire article here...
From mental_floss
"It’s not so much that the noise we humans produce underwater is greater than what we produce on land, but that creatures of the sea are so much more sensitive to it..." Read the entire article here.
From the Ocean Watch Essays
"Imagine the massive breadth and spread of our great state of Texas. Now imagine every milli-inch of that piled high with trash: bottle caps, cigarettes, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, plastic nets, discarded flip flops, Frisbees, soda bottles, milk jugs, diapers, six-pack rings, busted tennis rackets, empty pens, shampoo bottles, empty squeeze bottles of jam, you name it. Now take that image, double it, and plunk into the water. That’s what is floating around the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Nicknamed the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” this buoyant stew of toxic pollution—most of which is plastic—is only one of five such garbage heaps caught in the swirling high-pressure currents characteristic of gyres. The others reside in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. And each year, perhaps unwittingly, each one of us adds to plastic to the heap... Read More.
Hybrid-Electric Cars: How They Work, Battery Technology and More
Ethanol: How the Fuel is Produced, Growing Corn and Other Feedstocks, and More
Compost: How to Make It, Bins, Piles and More
Biodiesel: How It's Made, Environmental Impact, Where to Find a Fueling Station, and More
Submitted by Online University Lowdown
"Hypermiling" is the term for altering your driving habits in order to get the most miles per gallon of gas. Let's face it, gas prices are outrageous and the economy as a whole is being affected. If you are having trouble making ends meet and want to get the most out of your gas money, follow the 50 hypermiling tips below.
Before You Drive
There are a few things you can do before you start your drive that will aid your hypermiling. Follow the tips below.
General Driving Tips
These hypermiling tips are useful for any driving situation, regardless of location or weather.
City Driving
Highway Driving
Parking
Yes, even the way you park can affect your gas mileage. Below are few easy tips to follow.
Bad Weather
Driving conditions change during bad weather and so must your hypermiling techniques.
EcoFlip.org is the eco-friendly alternative to online local classifieds!
From Treehugger
It's the time of year where, as regular as the Fourth of July, we point out that "fireworks are often propelled by gunpowder, and the accelerants and heavy metals used for coloration can leave traces in the air and water for days or even weeks after the party is over." and "fireworks heavily contribute to perchlorate contamination of surrounding water bodies. Perchlorate is well-known to pose risks for both human health and wildlife." The EPA studied a lake in Oklahoma last year and found that within 14 housrs of the fireworks display, perchlorate levels were 1000 times higher than background. (Perchlorate inhibits the workings of the thyroid gland).
While LiveScience reports that there is progress in replacing perchlorate with nitrogen compounds and nitrocellulose, there is still the residue from the colouring agents, made from lovely heavy metals like strontium, barium and copper. We asked last year: It is all very pretty, but is it a celebration of the birth of a country or is it an excuse to blow things up?
This deserves a poll, below the fold.
Buy and sell solar panels and other green products locally on EcoFlip's Green Classifieds
Have a green business or franchise for sale? Buy and sell local businesses for free on BizzFlip!
From Yahoo News
WASHINGTON (AFP) - A debate over water is boiling over in the United States and elsewhere amid growing environmental concerns about bottled water and questions about safety of tap water.
Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, cites a "backlash against bottled water as more people are realizing what they get out of the bottles is not any better than what they get out of the faucet."
The Pacific Institute, a California think thank on sustainability issues, contends that producing bottles for US water consumption required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil in 2006, not including the energy for transportation. The group says bottling water for Americans produces more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide and consumes three liters of water for each liter of bottled water produced.
The debate in the US mirrors that taking place worldwide in places such as Paris; Liverpool, England; Florence, Italy; Vancouver, Canada. According to the EPI, the issue making waves among policymakers in locations including Denmark and New South Wales, Australia, among others. The backlash comes even amid surging sales of bottled water in the United States. Some of this is linked to concerns about contamination of public water supplies, although critics of the industry say marketing hype is a greater factor.
Aficionados of Evian from France or Fiji from the South Pacific swear by the taste and health benefits of those waters, but others decry the high cost of energy for a product that may not be any better than local water.
A Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that "most of the tested waters were found to be of high quality (but) some brands were contaminated." The group said bottled waters "are subject to less rigorous testing and purity standards than those which apply to city tap water."
In fact, says the group "about one-fourth of bottled water is actually bottled tap water" while government rules "allow bottlers to call their product 'spring water' even though it may be brought to the surface using a pumped well, and it may be treated with chemicals."
Americans drank about 8.8 billion gallons (33 billion liters) of packaged water in 2007, or 15 percent of their total liquid intake, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp. Per capita bottled US water consumption is up to 29 gallons (109 liters) per year, from 20 gallons in 2002. The US is the largest consumer of bottled water, but on a per capita basis it ranks far behind Italy, the leader which consumes nearly twice as much, and others such as the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and France.
Advocates of bottled water they the industry is being used as a scapegoat. Kevin Keane of the American Beverage Association said the mayors' resolution was "just cynical politics. It's like being against rope until you need a lifeline."
Keane says the bottled water industry is needed for communities hit by floods or other natural disasters and compromised municipal water systems. Bottled water "is convenient and a good tasting beverage, especially in this day when you have fewer water fountains and even when you have them, people are skeptical about using them."
Beyond questions of safety and environment, some activists say the bottled water industry is seizing a public resource. In the northeast state of Maine, a battle is brewing over access to a large aquifer by Poland Spring, a large US bottler owned by Swiss-based Nestle.
"Nestle's water grab is ruining streams, ponds, wells and aquifers," said Judy Grant of the activist group Corporate Accountability.
"Nestle's practices are raising serious questions about who should be allowed to control water, our most essential resource, and to what end."
The mayors, meeting in Miami, approved a resolution proposed by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom along with 17 other large-city mayors to redirect taxpayer dollars from bottled water to other city services. Joe Doss, president and chief executive of the International Bottled Water Association, an industry group based near Washington, said it was "unfortunate this is turning into a tap water versus bottled water debate."
Doss said most people drink both and that in many cases bottled water is a healthy replacement for sweetened or carbonated drinks. The IBWA says the industry uses less than one percent of groundwater supplies and produces only a tiny fraction of greenhouse gases. According to Doss, water bottles represent a tiny fraction of plastic waste that even if not recycled, and that any effort to improve recycling should cover all industries, not just bottled water.
BizzFlip's local business classifieds provides free business classifieds for local business people!
From Timesonline
When Marika Holland announced the imminent demise of the Arctic ice cap 18 months ago, she was worried.
Her findings, based on predictions from one of the world’s most powerful super-computers, had been double-checked and peer-reviewed – but they still seemed extreme.
“We were suggesting the Arctic ice cap could disappear in a few decades,” said Holland, a senior researcher at America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “We were confident of our methods but it still felt very dramatic.”
What Holland and her colleagues from the University of Washington and McGill University in Canada had done was analyse the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the Arctic – and predict that its summertime ice cap could vanish by 2040.
The corollary was that in the longer term it could vanish in winter too. Future explorers would have to use boats rather than sleds.
The idea that the Arctic ice might shrink had been around for a long time but the suggestion that it could disappear, and so quickly, caused a storm.
Pretty soon the climate change sceptics were at work. Holland and her colleagues, they pointed out, had based their work on a computer model – and such models were hardly accurate enough to predict more than a few days of weather. How could they make predictions over decades?
Within just a few months, however, Holland’s findings were borne out even more dramatically than anyone could have expected.
Each year scientists use satellites to measure the area of the Arctic ice cap as it grows and shrinks with the seasons. In winter it normally reaches about 5.8m square miles before receding to about 2.7m square miles in summer.
Last summer, however, things suddenly changed. For day after day the sun shone, raising water temperatures by 4.3C above the average. By September the Arctic ice cap had lost an extra 1.1m square miles, equivalent to more than 12 times the area of Britain.
The melting reduced the summer ice cover to just 1.6m square miles, 43% less than in 1979 when accurate satellite observations began. It left so much open sea that the Northwest Passage, the fabled link between Asia and Europe, became navigable.
For Holland and her team the great melt prompted a great rethink. Their predictions seemed to be coming true, but far earlier than expected. Why?
Holland now wonders whether she and her colleagues had been “too conservative” in their published report.
When they looked at their models again, they found the events of 2007 had indeed been predicted. “We had said this melting process was likely to start around 2025 but the models also showed that there could be periods of very rapid ice melt much earlier,” she said. “Some even showed that the summertime ice cap could start to vanish by 2013.
“Now we are wondering if that is what is happening now. If it is, then the summertime ice cap may never recover and by 2013, or sometime soon after, it could be gone.”
If Holland is right, then the destruction of the Arctic ice cap could become the first great global warming disaster. Why is it happening so fast? And how will it affect the rest of the world?
At the heart of the melting in the Arctic is a simple piece of science. Ice is white, so most of the sunlight hitting it is reflected back into space.
When it melts, however, it leaves behind open ocean which, being darker, absorbs light and so gets warmer. This helps to melt yet more ice. It means that beyond a point, the ice cannot recover. The process keeps accelerating until there is no more ice to melt.
Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, has been watching this process for two decades, making trips under the polar ice cap in a Royal Navy submarine equipped with radar that can measure the thickness of the ice. Over that period the average thickness has fallen by 40%.
Professor Mark Serreze, from the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre, who works with Holland, believes that this latest thinning represents a significant change in the destruction of the ice cap. “The key new idea is that as the ice thins it reaches a point where it becomes very vulnerable. It gets so thin that it can get broken up or just melt away very easily. Once that happens it could be very hard for it ever to recover, especially if we get more hot summers. This year is going to be crucial.”
There is some faintly good news. The melting of the Arctic ice cap will not, for example, cause a rise in sea levels – because it is already floating.
In the short term there may even be some economic opportunities. Already the possibility of new shipping routes, as well as access to the wealth of oil and other mineral resources thought to lie under the seabed, has fuelled a flurry of claims and counterclaims from the nations bordering the Arctic.
Russia has been among the most active. Last August it sent a mini-submarine to the seabed to plant a national flag directly on the North Pole. Scientists from Denmark are mapping the seabed around Greenland, a Danish dependency.
Last August, Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, announced plans for an Arctic military training facility and a deep-water port in the Northwest Passage. America has sent armed coastguard cutters to patrol the waters it claims off Alaska.
All are studying the underwater geology to try to increase their claims. Under international law countries have exclusive economic rights to the sea within 200 nautical miles of their coast. If, however, they can prove that the continental shelf extends beyond that limit, the rights can stretch to 350 nautical miles.
Such an extension could be lucrative. The oil and gas fields in the Arctic ice cap are estimated by some geologists to contain very large reserves.
Others have a different dream for a warmed-up Arctic – as a new cradle of civilisation. Trausti Valsson, professor of environmental planning at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, believes that as rising temperatures make many lower latitudes uninhabitable, so the lands around the Arctic will evolve into “the new Mediterranean”, with towns and cities springing up in Arctic Canada, Alaska and Siberia.
Such a scenario may seem unlikely now but an ice-free Arctic would have many attractions – not least being the Northwest Passage itself, which would immediately cut 5,000 miles from shipping routes between Europe and Asia via the Suez canal and whose development would prompt pressure for new ports along Canada’s northern coast.
However, most climate researchers view such thinking with despair. “It is a great irony,” said Serreze, “that the melting of the ice cap could give us access to yet more fossil fuels that will accelerate climate change even further.
Read the latest sustainable news on EcoFlip's Ecofriendly Blog!
Looking to have your green business funded? Post on BizzFlip's Venture Capital setion for free!
