Strong Climate Change Law Passes in Mexico

Of the three countries in NAFTA, Mexico seems to care the most about the environment. The country just passed a strong law that will product the environment and aim to cut carbon emissions.

The new law contains many sweeping provisions to mitigate climate change, including a mandate to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 30% below business-as-usual levels by 2020, and by 50% below 2000 levels by 2050.

Furthermore, it stipulates that 35% of the country’s electricity should come from renewable sources by 2024, and requires mandatory emissions reporting by the country’s largest polluters. The act also establishes a commission to oversee implementation, and encourages development of a carbon-trading scheme. Although there was initial resistance from Mexico’s steel and cement industries, the bill passed with bipartisan support.

Read more in Nature.

Get Fourth Wall on Tour and Online

Dave Meslin is a Toronto based awesome dude that wants to make Toronto a better place, and now he and the Fourth Wall team want to bring something cool to your town. The Fourth Wall exhibit was a project that looked at ways to get people more engaged in their local civic life. It was really great and puts on display some easy low-resistance ways that cities can get people better involved in improving the city.

Here’s a TEDx talk that Meslin gave that explores his inspiration for Fourth Wall:

For three months in 2011, “The Fourth Wall” exhibit explored 36 ideas about how to make city politics more accessible, inviting, relevant & participatory.

The response to the show was overwhelming.  Now the the exhibit is on tour, and we need funds for transportation and installations!  The exhibit also needs an online home complete with downloadable PDFs, videos, tour schedule, media links, scorecard, photo gallery etc,

Contribute at RocketHub

Manila Uses Paint That Cleans the Air

This is groovy, a paint is being used on the walls of Manila that cleans the air.

In the Philippine capital Manila, which is one of the most polluted cities in the world, a paint which it is claimed can purify the air is being used.

A local company has come up with the paint and in partnership with the government it is trying to use it to clean up one of the city’s most smog-choked roads.

Watch the video at the BBC.

Japan’s Largest Solar Power Plant: 70MW

Japan is about to build a new solar power plant and it’ll their largest one to date. The country is trying to improve their power grid and make it more sustainable after the nuclear disaster last year. Great to see progress!

The new plant, which will be called the Kagoshima Nanatsujima Mega-Solar Power Plant, is expected to take up approximately 314 acres, though drawings show most of that space will be over water, either by constructing a floating barge or building up the seabed below. Once completed, the plant is expected to produce 70MW of electricity (enough to power 22,000 homes) which would make it Japan’s largest such facility, and perhaps more tellingly, would amount to 40% of Japan’s total current solar electrical output.

Read more.

Eat Fruit to Judge Intelligence

Meat eaters are really good at denying the intelligence of other living beings according to a new study. When people were told to eat fruit their assessment of an animal’s intelligence was higher, with meat eating people they denied that the animal could be intelligent.

In a study that excluded vegetarians, psychologist Brock Bastian of the University of Queensland in Australia and his colleagues first asked par­ticipants to commit to eating either meat slices or apple wedges. Before eating, everyone wrote an essay describing the full life cycle of a butchered animal and then rated the mental faculties of a cow or a sheep. Participants who knew that they would have to eat meat later in the study made much more conservative assessments of the animal mind, on average, denying that it could think and feel enough to suffer. The study was published last October in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“People engage in the denial of mind in animals to allow them to engage in the behavior of eating animals with less negative effect,” Bastian says. The re­searchers argue that although humans have the ability to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes—or hooves—doing so is not always helpful. People living in carnivorous cultures may have developed this strategy of denial to better align their morals with their traditions so they may continue to consume meat without being consumed by guilt.

Read some more here.