One of my favorite dirty little pleasures is taking a nice warm bath with a good book. Preferably a book about the environment that inspires me. The best book I recently read and highly recommend is Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment. I only wish it was waterproof. Well now it is with Durabook! They’re not much more expensive than regular books and, even better, they’re completely tree-free and 100% perpetually recyclable. The book lasts as long as you need it to, doesn’t use trees, isn’t too expensive, and can be melted down and reused perpetually. Wondrous!
Author: Cam Proctor
A dime a day keeps junk mail away
A concept B corporation, Greendimes will keep you off junk-mail lists while planting one tree every month for each of its subscribers at a cost of $3 per month. There are free junk mail removal services, but none that provide active protection and they definetly dont plant any trees.
Think of how many people get junk mail. Total those people and plant one tree for every person. Using a one to one ratio and dividing by the average tree density, my cookie monster calculator tells me an area about the size of the golden horseshoe could be saved in Canada alone.
Bigger Lithium ion batteries ….with no explosion
According to Moore’s law the processing power of a microchip doubles every 18 months. If we extend this line of reasoning to include all technologies electricity storage technology (batteries) could enable huge advances in computers and electric cars. However lithium ion battries have reached their limit of their capacity per kilogram at one hundred fifty watt-hours per kilogram.
Thin film lithium ion batteries are certainly something new. The batteries are actually composed of flat layers of pure lithium electrodes and an electrolyte bonded to a glassy surface. The batteries never lose charge, can withstand extremes of heat and cold, can charge quickly and discharge slowly or quickly an infinite number of times, can pack a ton of power into a small space, and will not explode in your lap if you dent them.
More Distributed Goodness
As I sit typing this post, I’m listening to the Tragically Hip, downloading a 24 lecture series on Science to my iPod and I just listened to an inspiring speech by William McDonough (I highly recommend him as THE resource for environmental design). So I cant help but think of all the positive changes computers have brought around.
To add one more to the list check out climateprediction.net. Its a distributed software that uses idle computing capacity to predict the climate in the 21st centuary.
Germany Crushes Competition in Solar Market
There really isnt much more to this story than what the title title says. Germany has heavily embraced renewable energy, especially solar power, in every appliciable measure.
Lets see how….
Germany generates enough power from the sun’s rays to meet the needs of households in a city of 590 000, according to the Solar Energy Association BSW.
Last week, a solar electric power plant, billed by its operators as the world’s biggest, went into service in the southern German state of Bavaria. More than 1 400 movable solar modules will collect the sun’s rays and harness them into energy for around 3 500 homes.
Germany accounts for 60% of the world market in solar energy, with some 5 000 firms exporting one-quarter of their products in a sector that employs 45 000
Germans last year invested €3.7bn in solar energy, one of the fastest growing sources of renewable energy along with wind power and biomass. Solar energy accounts for less than 1% of the country’s energy needs, but the figure is expected to grow to more than 5% by 2020, according to the BSW.