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The Super Rich Have a Super Nice Pledge

- Adam Clare 3 Comments

Thirty-eight US billionaires have pledged to give at least half of their total wealth to charity during their life or after their death. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates (who have previously donated very large sums of money) have made an impression on other extremely wealth individuals in the USA with their new organization The Giving Pledge.

The campaign was started in June to convince US billionaires to give away at least half of their fortunes either during their lifetimes or after their deaths.

“We’ve really just started but already we’ve had a terrific response,” Mr Buffett said in a statement.

He added: “The Giving Pledge is about asking wealthy families to have important conversations about their wealth and how it will be used.”

Those who pledge their money to “philanthropic causes and charitable organisations” must publicly state their intention through a letter of explanation.

Read more at the BBC.

Solar Power for the Masses

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

A chain of department stores in the USA has begun selling solar panels off the shelf. This is a great sign that the market for solar panels is growing and this increased production will only make the panels cheaper in the long run.

Lowe’s has begun stocking solar panels at its California stores and plans to roll them out across the country next year.
This shows how far the highest of the high-tech alternative energy technologies has come. Solar power is now accessible to anyone with a ladder, a power drill, and the gumption to climb up on a roof and install the panels themselves.
For Lowe’s, it’s an opening into a new and potentially lucrative DIY business.
“There’s definitely a growing market for this with the number of people moving toward energy efficient homes,” spokesman Steven Salazar said.

Keep reading the article.

North American Governments Agree to Protect Wilderness

- Fono

With so many reports of Canada and the US flouting international agreements on environmental reform, it’s nice to see that we care about something. Canada, America and Mexico have just drafted a memorandum of understanding on protecting wilderness areas in the three countries.

The three nations have long cooperated on wilderness management – programs have straddle the U.S.-Canadian border since 1910 and the U.S.-Mexican border since the 1930s. Yet the memorandum of understanding is the first multinational agreement on wilderness protection, according to Vance Martin, president of the Wild Foundation.

“It’s not very easy to do anything internationally, even when the countries are neighbors,” Martin said.

With the agreement, wildlife officials said, ecological monitoring efforts such as migratory species tracking, air and water quality tests, and staff training will be better managed across the seven agencies responsible for such tasks in North America.

Read more at Worldchanging

Brownfields Good for Green Energy

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Brownfields are spaces that were used for some industrial production which have left the ground useless for nearly everything – even nature. Gas stations, refineries, and other chemical-intensive buildings tend to ruin the ground beneath their buildings once they close. The fields tend to have too high a concentration of heavy metals or other hazards to humans, plants, and animals.

The Obama administration has proposed that brownfields across the USA be turned into places that house green energy production. Since people don’t like cutting down trees for windmills why not put the windmills where the trees can’t grow?

Read more about it at The Daily Climate.

“In the next decade there’s going to be a lot of renewable energy built, and all that has to go somewhere,” said Jessica Goad, an energy and climate change policy fellow for The Wilderness Society. “We don’t want to see these industrial facilities placed on land that’s pristine. We love the idea of brownfields for renewable energy development because it relieves the (development) pressure on undisturbed places.”

There are many contaminated sites nationwide to choose from.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have identified nearly 4,100 contaminated sites deemed economically suitable for wind and solar power development, as well as biomass. Similar maps are expected to be released this month for contaminated sites with geothermal-power potential.

Included in the 4,100 sites are 5 million acres suitable for photovoltaic or concentrated solar power development, and 500,000 acres for wind power. These sites, if fully developed, have the potential to produce 950,000 megawatts – more than the country’s total power needs in 2007, according to EPA data.

Bike Parking Can Change America

- Adam Clare

Cars have been dominating the USA (and all of North America) for decades now, and we know all too well what makes a good city for cars. Now climate change and other factors are forcing North Americans to address the problems of their oil-guzzling death machines running amok through cities. The solution is rather simple: apply what we know about car commuters to create more bicycle commuters.

Why do these measures matter? Because parking helps make commuters—a lesson long ago learned with cars. Studies in New York found that a surprisingly large percentage of vehicles coming into lower Manhattan were government employees or others who had an assured parking spot. Other studies have shown the presence of a guaranteed parking spot at home—required in new residential developments—is what turns a New Yorker into a car commuter.

On the flip side, people would be much less likely to drive into Manhattan if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking. Surveys have shown that the leading deterrent to potential bicycle commuters is lack of a safe, secure parking spot on the other end. (In England, for example, it’s been estimated that a bicycle is stolen every 71 seconds.)

A number of American cities are now waking up to the fact that providing bicycle parking makes sense. Philadelphia, for example, recently amended its zoning requirements to mandate that certain new developments provide bicycle parking; Pittsburgh’s planning department is weighing requiring one bicycle parking space for every 20,000 square feet of development* (admittedly modest compared with the not-uncommon car equation of one parking space per 250 square feet); even the car-centric enclave of Orange County, Calif., is getting in on the act, with Santa Ana’s City Council unanimously passing a bill requiring proportional bicycle parking when car parking is provided. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities, pilot projects are investigating turning car-parking meters—once semireliable bike-parking spots, now rendered obsolete by “smart meter” payment systems—into bike parking infrastructure.

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