Monthly Archives: September 2006

California Sues Car Companies for Health Damage

thanks yahooThis is big news! Maybe this will have the same impact that suing tobacco companies had. The state charges that car companies have damaged people’s health because of the emissions of their products.

“California filed a global warming lawsuit on Wednesday against Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and three other automakers, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have cost the state millions of dollars.

State Attorney General Bill Lockyer said the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California was the first of its kind to seek to hold manufacturers liable for the damages caused by their vehicles’ emissions.

The lawsuit also names Chrysler Motors Corp., the U.S. arm of Germany’s DaimlerChrysler AG, and the North American units of Japan’s Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. Ltd..

The lawsuit charges that vehicle emissions have contributed significantly to global warming and harmed the resources, infrastructure and environmental health of the most populous state in the United States.”

Library on the Moon

moon David McKa, a (rocket?) scientist, is arguing that the Moon can be used as the best time capsule and a digital store hose for human history. Essentially it would be modern day Library of Alexandria – but this won’t burn down.

Astronauts would setup a digital store house and could update it with future voyages to the Moon.

Storing things on the moon means no worries about oxygen eroding materials. Other environmental concerns that damage books and other materials on Earth wouldn’t be a problem in outer space. The Moon is also the only place that humans have yet to pillage, and should stay that a way for awhile to come.

Golden (Gate) Power

In the USA municipalities are doing exactly what the Bush administration despises – trying to use sustainable energy. San Francisco is one such city that is trying to be kind to the environment and they have a really cool idea of using tidal power under the Golden Gate Bridge.

They are investing $150,000 in a feasibility study to use tidal waves to power upwards of 40,000 homes! Officials note the obvious connection between current energy use and climate change and proclaim this project to be a needed step in the development of their city.

“Ultimately, city officials hope that turbines below the bridge will capture tidal energy from the powerful flow that circulates in and out of the mouth of the bay and generate as much as 38 megawatts of power, or enough to power 38,000 homes.

The tides at the Golden Gate offer one of the best locations on the western coast of North America to generate that power, according to a study released this summer by the Electric Power Research Institute and backed by the city’s public utilities agency.”

“Invisible” Wind Turbines

Good form of power- windResearchers at MIT have found a way to get wind turbines out of shallow water. Currently wind turbines in the ocean can only handle a depth of about 15 meters or less. Which means that people living on the shore have their view obstructed by them. This new wind turbine structure from MIT will allow turbines to be located far away from shore.

Paul D. Sclavounos, a professor of mechanical engineering and naval architecture, has spent decades designing and analyzing large floating structures for deep-sea oil and gas exploration. Observing the wind-farm controversies, he thought, “Wait a minute. Why can’t we simply take those windmills and put them on floaters and move them farther offshore, where there’s plenty of space and lots of wind?”

In 2004, he and his MIT colleagues teamed up with wind-turbine experts from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to integrate a wind turbine with a floater. Their design calls for a tension leg platform (TLP), a system in which long steel cables, or “tethers,” connect the corners of the platform to a concrete-block or other mooring system on the ocean floor. The platform and turbine are thus supported not by an expensive tower but by buoyancy. “And you don’t pay anything to be buoyant,” said Sclavounos.

According to their analyses, the floater-mounted turbines could work in water depths ranging from 30 to 200 meters. In the Northeast, for example, they could be 50 to 150 kilometers from shore. And the turbine atop each platform could be big–an economic advantage in the wind-farm business. The MIT-NREL design assumes a 5.0 megawatt (MW) experimental turbine now being developed by industry. (Onshore units are 1.5 MW, conventional offshore units, 3.6 MW.)

The tethers allow the floating platforms to move from side to side but not up and down–a remarkably stable arrangement. According to computer simulations, in hurricane conditions the floating platforms–each about 30 meters in diameter–would shift by one to two meters, and the bottom of the turbine blades would remain well above the peak of even the highest wave. The researchers are hoping to reduce the sideways motion still further by installing specially designed dampers similar to those used to steady the sway of skyscrapers during high winds and earthquakes.

Israel to Pull Troops From Lebanon

Israel has agreed to withdraw it’s troops from Lebanon by the weekend. About 80 percent of the Israeli force has already left after the 34 day war with a Lebanese Hizbollah guerilla group, but Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz said that Israel wanted the troops home by Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) which begins on Friday. The French have also deployed their peace keeping force, increasing the number of troops to 4950. The UN feels that a force of 5 000 is sufficient to enforce the August 14 truce between the two countries. The peace keeping force will aid the 10 000 Lebanese troops already deployed in Southern Lebanon.