Green ... on a screen
Way in advance of the WWF's world's greenest city in Masdar, Abu Dhabi, the initiative for which was
formally announced last month, Greenpeace has unveiled its town powered purely by renewable energy. A turbine on the football stadium feeds into a grid meeting power generated by woodchip biomass plant down the way and wave power. Unfortunately, this city is nothing but a SIMS-like animation up called
Efficiencity (population 124,500). To be fair, nearly all the examples of CHP-powered hospitals and power generating sewage are based on examples in the real world.
The Royal Flow
Prince Charles seems to produce pronouncements occasionally, like a volcano, with intermittent bursts of lava, then a splurge of magma and then a full explosion. Last week
it was all about air tightness, now we have HRH knocking the coal industry, and in a speech to the EU saving the rainforests and even (almost literally)
declaring war against global warming. Oh and
saying that he is to boycott the China Olympics. It is, perhaps, the frequency and amount of his gripes and pronouncements more than the political nature of them - though political they be - that causes people to call his peace of mind into question. And so much fiery liquid hardens into heavy rock sooner or later.
Heart Broken
Talking of over-egging the pudding, Yahoo! Green's Valentine's Day post decided to
inform its gloomy readers that a) child labour is frequently used to farm cacao for choccies, b) that
diamonds are a reminder of poverty and bloodshed as much as love and, c), as far as roses are concerned, "How eco-friendly is it to buy a bunch of hothouse flowers in the dead of winter anyway?" Sigh. Journalist Trystan Bass is reminding surfers of the link between production and consumption after all (sounds quite Marxist put like this ... )and does suggest some rather lame alternatives. And Oxfam
suggested buying your sweety some water well maintenance in Africa. Perhaps the
conflict management courses would be more appropriate.
At last, flying cars!
An idea
this complicated has to be built. I've read it three times and I still don't really understand it, but in the unlikely setting of Detroit (linking Ann Arbour, Michigan), a combination solar and hydrogen-powered MagLev car-carrying superhighway is being built. Apart from transporting cars, it would also carry "serve as public transport system AND distribute electricity, potable water, liquid waste, fiber optics, hydrogen, oxygen, and fuels" according to Inhabit. And solar panels under the rails generate excess power (844,800w per hour), as well. An aside: Lest anyone still think of the New World as the golden land of efficiency and bold projects effectively pursued, it's worth reading up about Boston's
Big Dig, which finally opened at the beginning of the year, was originally costed at $2.8 billion but ended up costing $14.6 billion. America's infrastructure is crumbling in the same way much of ours, so it will be good to see how they handle this project.
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