Month: October 2007

More About Wonderful Algae

- Adam Clare

I love how algae can be used for almost anything. If the future is covered in algae, well, I’ll be the first to say that that’s a good thing.

Inhabitat has a post about how algae is being converted into crude biofuel.

The scientists involved in the LiveFuels project are focusing on specialized aspects of the algae-to-biocrude process. Some are breeding algae to find the best high-fat strains, others are refining the fat and oil extraction process and others still are developing cost-effective harvesting techniques. The biggest challenge is to make algae biocrude within a fraction of the time that nature’s biomass decomposition occurs and to do it economically, for less than $60 a barrel.

More Efficient Jet Travel

- Adam Clare

Princeton University is looking into the details of using biofuels in jet airplanes. The research team will examine what fuel mixture provides the best efficiency and how engines can be designed to better burn the fuels that they are bound to create.

Alternative energy sources, if designed appropriately, also could significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses released in creating and burning jet fuel. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, aviation is responsible for around 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation in the nation, or roughly 2.7 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The second research program, supported by NetJets, augments Dryer’s fundamental MURI work and brings in additional expertise from the Princeton Environmental Institute to develop “greener” alternative fuels.

Greenpeace Tracking Whale Tails

- Adam Clare

Greenpeace is tracking the movement of whales to monitor their safety and help science. You can track the whales online using Google maps. From the Greenpeace whale tracking announcement:

Today we launched the Great Whale Trail, following the migration of humpback whales from the warm tropical waters of the South Pacific, where they breed, to the icy Southern Ocean around Antarctica, where they feed. And we’re doing it via satellite tracking and Google Maps. Nifty.

Video: The Great Whale Trail: meeting the tag team

A Good Yarn for the Environment

- Adam Clare

No, this isn’t a long rambiling post kind of yarn, as the OED says that yarn can mean “a long or rambling story, esp. one that is implausible.” I mean yarn as in “a spun thread used for knitting, weaving, or sewing.”

Yes, that’s right, today’s Blog Action Day post is about yarn and how people who are into spinning thread can help the environement too.

The Hook and I blog has a list of ten things that yarn enthusiasts can do, here’s number nine:

9) Use your stash. Not buying new materials is probably the best way to reduce our environmental impact. It’s hard for me to say this–I love yarn companies and the people involved, many of them have strong environmental missions themselves, but it can’t be avoided that lack of consumption is better than consumption when it comes to the environment.

Consumers Can Make a Difference

- Adam Clare

Continuing this week’s focus on the successful Blog Action Day is an editorial from LifeHack. Dustin Wax waxes ecstatic about how the best solution for the environment is for us to buy less, just stop consuming. I agree with his conclusion, but how he gets there is not something I will blindly support. It’s a good read though and I encourage to go read it (and also to buy less).

For most of us, simply dropping out, growing our own food and living off our own labor, is not an option and is hardly desirable even if it were an option. The answer to the dreadful over-consumption that fills our landfills with completely unnecessary crap, pollutes our water sources, kills off species after species (something like 40 a day!), and leaves us in a world of ever-diminishing beauty and diversity can’t be to drop out of consumption entirely, because it’s simply not an option.

But we can change the way we consume, and more importantly lessen the demands we place on consumption to complete us as individuals. This means developing a higher sense of self-reflexivity about what we do buy, and replacing our identities as consumers with identities as part of our families and communities — and maybe even as producers, once again.

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