Month: November 2011

United Republic: Creative Organization Grows from OWS

- Adam Clare

Democracy takes time, and it’s rough and tedious work, so it’s amazing that in the two short months since the Occupy Movement began an organization has sprung up that will help the movement. United Republic aims to support the Occupy Movement by championing the idea that political decisions should be based on reality and not on the claims of lobbyists.

Lawrence Lessig Welcomes Rootstrikers to United Republic from Rootstrikers on Vimeo.

We aim to transform our nation’s outrage over corruption, gridlock, and cronyism into a powerful political force that can demand and deliver lasting change. We will hold politicians accountable; expose how corporate lobbyists hurt ordinary Americans; build a coalition of supporters from left, right and center; and provide financial support to the best people and organizations working on solving the problem.

Already our coalition is growing. In the fall of 2011, we joined forces with Rootstrikers, a group founded by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig that shares the goal of ending the domination of Big Money over the political process. The group’s name is inspired by the Henry David Thoreau quote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” And we’ve recently merged with the Get Money Out campaign, an effort started by MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan that shares similar goals.

Via bOing

Make Your Daily Glass of Wine a Little Easier on the Planet

- Dan Harrison

The forward thinking company GreenBottle has been producing and selling a paper-based milk bottle for the past few years, but has recently toyed with making a paper wine bottle! We all know wine is delicious, but it often comes from far away places (South Africa, Australia, South America, Europe) and is shipped in very heavy glass bottles. And even though these bottles can be reused and recycled, many still end up in landfill. GreenBottle has a great solution that is part recyclable, and part compostable:

The revolutionary packaging is made of paper with a thin plastic lining. The paper outer shell is compostable and biodegradable. It will break down naturally when disposed of on a compost heap and can be recycled up to seven times. On the compost heap, it will only take a few weeks to decompose.

The inner liner is made of recycled plastic. It can be recycled along with other plastics in the weekly recycling collection. It takes up less than 0.5% of the space of a plastic bottle if dumped in a landfill.

Although the GreenBottle wine bottle isn’t quite at production stage, you can still make more sustainable choices at the beer or liquor store: choose locally produced craft beers and wine made from locally grown grapes. There are even some good wines sold in Tetra Packs (like this one) that have many of the same benefits of the GreenBottle wine bottle – don’t let the conventions of glass bottles deter you from trying something new!

Read the rest of the article on TreeHugger.

China Pushes Green Technology Forward

- Adam Clare

China has to confront a lot of environmental problems brought forth by its own quick development, and when China confronts an issue they go all out! Renewable Energy World has a quick write up comparing and contrasting China and the USA in how they support green technologies.

The China Development Bank (CDB) is being relentless in its funding of clean-tech concerns. While American politicians battle it out over Solyndra’s collapse and potential loss to the government of $528 million, the Chinese are pumping billions into their clean-tech concerns, knowing full well that some of them will fail. The CDB put more than $30 billion in credit into its burgeoning solar companies in 2010, including Suntech Power, Trina, and Yingli. It recently announced financial commitments to ensure that its fledgling wind industry can join the ranks of GE, Vestas, and Siemens, allocating at least $15 billion in state-backed credit to China’s biggest windmill makers Sinovel Wind Group and Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology. And China has plans to invest some $45 billion in smart-grid companies and technologies alone over the next five years.

These investments haven’t gone unnoticed in the U.S., and have been front and center in recent complaints that have claimed that China’s solar industry, for example, has an unfair trade advantage.

Wind Power Is Getting Even Better…

- Dan Harrison

A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance has shown that wind power will keep coming down in price until it becomes cheaper than coal, gas, nuclear, and cheap natural gas power generation. Wind power is already competitive (or even better than traditional energy sources) in the long run when emissions, natural resource mining, and health side effects are taken into consideration but this study suggests that the new price parity expected in 2016 will be independent of externalities.

After analyzing the cost curve for wind projects since the mid-1980s, BNEF researchers showed that the cost of wind-generated electricity has fallen 14 percent for every doubling of installation capacity. These cost reductions are due to a number of factors: more sophisticated manufacturing, better materials, larger turbines, and more experience with plant operations and maintenance. Those improvements, combined with an oversupply of turbines on the global market, will bring the average cost of wind electricity down another 12 percent by 2016.

Read a summary of the Bloomberg report at Grist.org.

New Way to Examine Consciousness in Comatose Patients

- Adam Clare

There are a lot of ethical issues about what to do with a person in a vegetative state in a hospital, and sometimes pulling the plug (so to speak) isn’t the best course of action. Thanks to some smart researchers we can now tell which patients are still thinking and which patients have no activity in their brain.

“You spend a week with one of these patients and at no point does it seem at all they know what you are saying when you are talking to them. Then you do this experiment and find it’s the exact opposite — they do know what’s going on,” said Damian Cruse, a postdoctoral neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada who helped conduct the research. “That’s quite a profound feeling.”

The results and similar findings could also provide crucial insights into human consciousness — one of the most perplexing scientific puzzles — and lead to ways to better provide diagnoses and possibly rehabilitate brain-injury patients, the researchers said.

Read the rest of the article.

Scroll To Top