Environment

Organic Farming Better Than Factory Farming

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

There are still a lot of people who think that congenital factory farming is the most efficient way to produce crops, well those people get proven wrong – a lot! The good news is that organic farming is good for the crops, the planet, and the farmer’s profitability.

Check it out:

So, in yield terms, both of the organic rotations featuring corn beat the Adair County average and came close to the conventional patch. Two of the three organic rotations featuring soybeans beat both the county average and the conventional patch; and both of the organic rotations featuring oats trounced the county average. In short, Borlaug’s claim of huge yield advantages for the chemical-intensive agriculture he championed just don’t pan out in the field.

And in terms of economic returns to farmers—market price for crops minus costs—the contest isn’t even close. Organic crops draw a higher price in the market and don’t require expenditures for pricy inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides.

Read more at Mother Jones.

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.

Climate Vulnerable Forum Starts Soon

- Adam Clare

The Climate Vulnerable Forum is a group of countries that are particularly sensitive to climate change and rising sea levels. Every year they meet to find ways to make humanity as a whole more sustainable and more respectful of the environment. Their next meeting is November 13-14.

The Forum’s Dhaka ministerial meeting, at the threshold of the Durban climate change talks, will provide a significant platform for the growing activities of the participant states, with global powers including China, the US and the UN taking part as observers. The Dhaka meeting aims to lay the path for what will become a series of regular interactions for raising awareness on the dangers of climate change and expressing the shared concerns of vulnerable countries in all relevant global forums.

The group intends to maintain concerted pressure for enhanced low-carbon leadership among industrialized countries, and external support for adapting to climate stresses and for pursuing independent green development through a combination of finance, capacity building and technology transfer – none of which have been adequately forthcoming from 16 previous annual conferences on climate change since parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) first met in Berlin in 1995.

The Climate Vulnerable Forum’s official website

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