Upbeat green

Positive spin on environment

The UN Conference on Climate Change opens in Copenhagen tomorrow. Tony Abbot played Brutus to Turnbull's Caesar because he could not abide his party's decision to reach consensus with the government on the emissions trading scheme. What with one thing and another, we could do with some more upbeat news about the environment. Here's a selection.

Reuse the waste

Eric Loewen is a General Electric evangelist for a totally new kind of nuclear power generator. Staggeringly, this thing does not create the piles of radioactive waste of conventional nuclear power stations — on the contrary, it eats that stuff as its fuel source. Right now we have enough of that stuff stockpiled to last the entire human race for tens of thousands of years of power generation with this new alternative, "sodium-cooled nuclear reactors". They're small (under 7m diameter), you can build them 'flat pack' and locate them near the existing waste stores (read 'fuel supplies'), they omit zero CO2, and in a malfunction they shut down gracefully instead of melt down. What's not to love? For sure, they need more manufacturing capital and the political will to try some change. But Eric seems like the right guy. And these things are lot simpler to build and deploy than all the battleships they rolled out for WWII. Did it then, could do it now — if we wanted to. Or had to. At the very least, worth thinking about. Read more at http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/nuclear-waste-disposal-1209

NBC a green leader

NBC Universal is mostly known for its TV, movie, and web businesses. But they've appointed a Vice President of Green to make sure "We're walking the talk." And they've put together Green Production Guides for movies and TV covering the most amazing detail, down to the kinds of inks in printers! Just one example: for Zac Efron's latest movie, Charlie St. Cloud, due out next year, they did away with all bottled water on the set. "Moving to 5-gallon jugs and filtration systems over a 50-day production schedule,"  says the VP-Green,

PHOTO: ECLECTICO63 AT WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

By eliminating bottled water on NBCU's 29 TV shows going forward, she expects to keep 1.5 million water bottles a year out of landfills. Neat.

And they're also providing the rest of us with a great little website of green advice. Check out http://www.nbc.com/green/

Collaboration

The United States, Mexico and Canada have forged an agreement to collaboratively identify and address wilderness protection priorities across North America. They will share information and pool resources on habitat protection, fire hazard management, and climate change, among other issues. Hey, it's a small thing, maybe, but any sign of governments acting together in this space is encouraging. From http://www.worldwatch.org/node/ 6316?emc=el&m=321949&l=4&v= 526c3b60b0

Pay attention

The government of Nepal just met in the base camp 5,300m up Mt Everest to draw attention to the threat of glaciers melting into lakes that are about to flood villages. In October the Maldives cabinet met in a lagoon to highlight that their entire nation faces being submerged Real Soon Now.

PHOTO: 350.ORG ON FLICKR

Blowing in the wind

The UK is really ramping up its renewables investment. They've just brought online a 30-turbine wind farm off England's Essex coast, bringing them to four gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity from wind. That's enough electricity to power 2.3 million homes — half of England, or the whole of Scotland, or all of London south of the river.

PHOTO: ANTHONY UPTON AT NPOWER RENEWALS VIA BWEA

"We are on track to hit the target of 10 percent of energy in the UK coming from renewables by 2010," British Wind Energy Association chief executive Maria McCafferty said. "And with the very large capacity offshore schemes coming in from 2015, we should get to the target of 30 GW of wind by 2020." More at http://www.bwea.com/index.html

Just maybe?

This one is a cross-your-fingers job. The whisper is that a secretive Texan company is about to release an ultra-capacitor. A capacitor is is like a little watering can of electricity. You fill it up and the electricity trickles out again. Build one big enough — an ultra-capacitor — and the 'trickle out' is enough to power an electric car for hundreds of miles;

PHOTO: ZENNCARS.COM

Stop the leaks

Most of us have heard that carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas. Methane is another, and it traps about 25 times as much heat as CO2. The upside is that it only hangs around in the atmosphere for about a decade, rather than a century. Now, it turns out that we're spewing about three trillions tons of methane a year from just one cause (no, it's not cattle) — leaking natural gas wells! Luckily, one Texan gas producer has shown that it's not hard to fix. Using an infrared camera, they identified huge plumes of leaking gas — so they just patched the leaks. Job's done. If only all the other gas producers would go and do thou likewise, we should see a significant fall in atmospheric methane about ten years later.

Sourced from tonic.com