Environment – Page 79 – Things Are Good

The Hanging Gardens of Singapore

The Hanging Gardens of Ancient Babylon was known for it’s amazing vertical garden and to this day it’s not clear how the gardens functioned (or how it was built). That hasn’t stopped enterprising architects in Singapore from creating a modern version of the hanging gardens in skyscraper form!

Designed byÂ WOHA, the block-long â€œhotel and office in a garden” sits on a narrow plot that opens onto Singaporeâ€™s central business core and is situated across from a verdant parkland and near the riverbank. Slab-like towers, which echo those rising in downtown just in the distance, are suspended above a green zone of tangled flora and palm trees that thrive in the tropical climate. The vegetation is rooted to curved terraces that are themselves fixed to the towersâ€™ glass facades. â€œThe project is a study of how we can not only conserve our greenery in a built-up high-rise city centre but multiply it in a manner that is architecturally striking, integrated and sustainable,” the architects say.

Rest of World to Canada: Stop Risking The Future

COP 19 ends this week and there is at least one clear message coming from the meeting: Canada is risking the wellbeing of future generations. While most countries agree that climate change needs to be dealt with and carbon output needs to be curtailed, Canada is refusing to budge on its pro-tar sands stance while keeping an ineffiecent resource-based economy running.

Hopefully Canadians will be able to notice the rest of the world is concerned about more than just Rob “Crack Mayor” Ford. Other countries are clearly thinking into the future and let’s hope Canada can do the same.

Good on the forward-thinking participants of COP 19!

â€œHow can Canadians not see that their grandchildren will share the world with nine billion other people (by 2050)? And I have no certainty at all that it will be a livable world.”
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â€œWeâ€™re not, I think, a stupid race. I know that political timescales can be very short. But I believe that these next two years – 2014, we have to change course, and 2015, when we need sustainable development goals and a robust, fair climate agreement – we can still do it.

â€œWe need a forward-looking leadership, and that wonâ€™t come from Canadian politicians unless it comes from the Canadian people.”

Carbon Output Shrinking as Economies Grow

Some odd people think that environmental policies and mandated efficiencies ruin economies, well, now there is another reason why those people are wrong. A report just released will hopefully have an impact on the climate talks in Poland happening this month shows the disconnect between economic growth and destroying the planet. Their findings buck the trend of wastefulness being associated with economic growth, which means that in all likelihood pro-environemnt polices of the past decade are having a very positive effect!

“The small increase in emissions [of 2012]… may be the first sign of a more permanent slowdown in the increase of global CO2 emissions, and ultimately of declining global emissions,” declares the Trends in Global CO2 Emissions: 2013 Report, published by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) last week. It analyses the latest emissions data, right up to 2012.
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The data show that global carbon dioxide emissions rose by 1.4 per cent in 2012. Allowing for it being a leap year, the underlying increase was just 1.1 per cent, says the report, compared with an average of 2.9 per cent since 2000.

Importantly, the emissions rise is considerably less than the increase in global GDP of 3.5 per cent. “We see a decoupling of CO2 emissions from global economic growth,” says Greet Janssens-Maenhout of the JRC in Ispra, Italy, a co-author on the report.

Carbon-Negative Energy Generation

All Power Labs sells a device that converts biomass into electric energy. Their machine, which is based on technology over 60 years old, can produce insanely cheap energy while making use of plant matter. They have units that produce 10 kW and 20 kW respectively while the wait for approval for a 100 kW version.

The company even built an experimental unit for a car that ran for quite a distance using only walnut shells. This instantly made me think of the modified Delorean in Back to the Future.

All Power Labs makes machines that use an ancient process called gasification to turn out not only carbon-neutral energy, but also a carbon-rich charcoal by-product that just happens to be a fertilizer so efficient that Tom Price, the company’s director of strategic initiatives, calls it “plant crack.”

Gasification, in which dense biomass smoldering — but not combusting — in a low-oxygen environment is converted to hydrogen gas, is nothing new. Price said that ancient cultures used it to enrich their soils, and during World War II, a million vehicles utilized the technology. But after the war, it more or less vanished from the planet, for reasons unknown. Until Mason needed a way to power his flamethrowers, that is.

All Power Labs has taken gasification and combined it with two of the Bay Area’s most valuable commodities — a rich maker culture and cutting-edge programming skills — to produce what are called PowerPallets. Feed a bunch of walnut shells or wood chips into these $27,000 machines and you get fully clean energy at less than 10 cents a kilowatt hour, a fraction of what other green power sources can cost.

India Bans Shark Finning

Chinese demand for the fins of sharks (I have no idea what they are good for) has gone up over the past couple years. India is one of the largest exports of shark parts to China and the Indian government has decided to ban the act of removing fins from sharks.

Worldwide, sharks are in sharp decline, with some species’ numbers now 10 per cent of what they were three decades ago. Their demise threatens the health of ocean ecosystems, experts say, as the top predators are key to keeping fish and turtle populations in check. Tens of millions are caught every year.
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Conservationists applauded the ministry’s move as key to ending a cruel practice threatening to push some shark populations to the brink.

“Given the perilous status of many shark species, we urge the state governments to act quickly and work to enforce the policy,” said Belinda Wright of the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

More at the CBC.