Here’s an informative short video on energy entrepreneurs in a poor part of southern Mexico the provide sustainable electricity to locals. The generators are built locally and are designed to allow almost anyone build a generator. This is really good to see happening.
With so many reports of Canada and the US flouting international agreements on environmental reform, it’s nice to see that we care about something. Canada, America and Mexico have just drafted a memorandum of understanding on protecting wilderness areas in the three countries.
The three nations have long cooperated on wilderness management – programs have straddle the U.S.-Canadian border since 1910 and the U.S.-Mexican border since the 1930s. Yet the memorandum of understanding is the first multinational agreement on wilderness protection, according to Vance Martin, president of the Wild Foundation.
“It’s not very easy to do anything internationally, even when the countries are neighbors,” Martin said.
With the agreement, wildlife officials said, ecological monitoring efforts such as migratory species tracking, air and water quality tests, and staff training will be better managed across the seven agencies responsible for such tasks in North America.
Mexico is firing up the largest wind farm in Latin America. It’s great to see so many countries using renewable energy!
According to Spanish energy company Acciona Energia who has been assigned the project, the farm will produce enough energy to power a city of 500,000 people, while reducing carbon monoxide emissions by 600,000 metric tons each year.
The new, $550 million project is in a region so breezy that the main town is named La Ventosa, or “Windy.” It’s on the narrow isthmus between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, where winds blow at 15 mph to 22 mph, a near-ideal rate for turbines. Gusts have been known to topple tractor trailers.
A study has been released (2mb PDF) by Commission for Environmental Cooperation; and Celsias has put up a nice summery for us. They note that a simple way for us to lower our impact on the environment is to change how we construct buildings in North America.
Existing building techniques can be used to improve efficiency of our buildings.
In Canada, buildings are responsible for:
- 33 % of all energy used;
- 50 % of natural resources consumed;
- 12 % of non-industrial water used;
- 25 % of landfill waste generated;
- 10 % of airborne particulates produced; and
- 35 % of greenhouse gases emitted.
In Mexico, buildings are responsible for:
- 17 % of all energy used;
- 25 % of all electricity used;
- 20 % of all carbon dioxide emissions;
- 5 % of potable water consumption; and
- 20 % of the waste generated.
To most people it looks like leaders in North America keep forgetting about global warming, well this isn’t all true. Brush the Bush and Harper conservative agendas aside and you’ll find other political leaders trying to save the planet. In Mexico, aboriginal leaders are looking into the ways of that their ancestors lived to help us slow global warming today.
More than 200 leaders from 71 American Indian nations in Mexico, the United States and Canada came together in this Mexican jungle to find indigenous solutions to pollution and ecological problems threatening the planet.
“Our Mother Earth is being polluted at an alarming rate, and our elders say that she is dying,” said Raymond Sensmeier, a Tlingit leader from Yakutat, Alaska. “The way the weather is around the world … a cleansing is needed.”
The conference began with a pre-dawn ceremony that included fire, copal incense, chants in Lacandon Maya and blasts from a conch shell.
