Green Environment

Read the rest of Off-Grid Nomad Shelters Provide Relief from the Sun for Tourists in Italy Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | digg Post tags: "sustainable architecture", beach architecture, coastal architecture, eco design, Filippo Taidelli Architetto, green architecture, Green Building, green design, italy, nomad shelter, nomad structure, off grid nomad structure, off grid structure, pop-up shelter, sardinia, shelter, solar powered shelter, solar powered structure, Sustainable Building, sustainable design, temporary architecture, temporary pavilion, temporary shelter, Zero energy

In what will likely prove as meaningless a vote as the 37th repeal vote of Obamacare, on Wednesday night 241 members of the House of Representatives voted to approve the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. H.R. 3 would give Congress the power to approve the pipeline and allow TransCanada to build the northern leg without a cross-border permit. These legislators support the oil industry’s push for the pipeline, even though it would create far fewer jobs than its supporters claim, would do nothing to make the country more energy independent, and would facilitate a dramatic increase in the production of high carbon polluting tar sands oil. The 241 members who voted for the bill have taken a collective $39,150,812 in career contributions from the oil and gas industry, compared to $5,094,217 for those who voted no. Even more starkly, in the last election cycle, that split widens to $11,529,335 versus $742,125. Only 19 Democrats voted for the bill, less than a third of the number (69) who supported a similar bill in April 2012. Even some supporters of the pipeline couldn’t vote for tonight’s bill, such as Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV): “Last Congress, I voted for every piece of pro-Keystone pipeline legislation that was brought before this body… Something’s happened along the way between then and now. And that something is called a hijacking of this bill by the right wing.” This is the eighth time Republicans pushed a bill promoting Keystone, and the fifth time it voted to speed up the approval process. A White House statement made clear that President Obama would veto the bill because it “conflicts with long-standing Executive branch procedures.” While some conservatives may claim the pipeline would create tens of thousands of jobs, the most recent State Department draft environmental impact statement found that the pipeline would directly create only “3,900″ temporary construction jobs. After construction is complete, the operation of the pipeline would only support 35 permanent and 15 temporary jobs, with “negligible socioeconomic impacts.” Moreover, only 10 percent of the total workforce would be hired locally. For perspective, the U.S. had 3.4 million green energy jobs in 2011 and it was the fastest-growing industry in the country. The State Department’s report also made clear that at least some of the Keystone oil will be refined and exported in response to “lower domestic gasoline demand and continued higher demand and prices in overseas markets.” This means the pipeline will add nothing to U.S. energy security, a key talking point used by proponents. An amendment offered by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) would have required oil transported by the pipeline to be kept in the U.S. unless it is in the national interest to export it — however the amendment failed 162-255. The pipeline is simply a way for the oil industry to sell refined fuel at higher prices available in other countries, including China and Venezuela. Proponents have made the case that Keystone will have no impact on carbon pollution and climate change due to the fact that Canada’s tar sands will be developed regardless of the pipeline and transported by rail. However, Canadian government’s top Keystone cheerleader admitted that rail would not be an effective alternative to the pipeline. In fact, the addition of the pipeline would more than double the production of tar sands by 2025, leading to an increase in greenhouse gases by an equivalent of adding nearly 8 million cars on the road every year. The EPA submitted a public comment on the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, finding that, among other things, State needs to make revisions on the true impact of the project’s carbon emissions and about how dirty tar sands oil truly is. Without the pipeline, tar sands production is expected to fall flat by 2020. Congress has wasted taxpayers’ time and money, holding almost a dozen hea

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform — the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions — we are left defenseless against corporate power. via Rise Up or Die | Perspectives, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com.

In 2007, France officially banned Lasso from use in the country in accordance with a European Union EU directive enacted in 2006 prohibiting the chemical from further use on crops in any member countries. But despite all the evidence proving that alachlor can disrupt hormonal balance, induce reproductive or developmental problems, and cause cancer, the chemical is still being used on conventional crops throughout the U.S. to this very day. http://www.pesticideinfo.org via Monsanto Found Guilty of Chemical Poisoning in Landmark Case | REALfarmacy.com | Healthy News and Information.

A new generation of gardeners are interested in growing their own food, and The Patch, a new self-watering planter, helps guide newbies through the process. The planter, which is designed for urban gardeners, solves the most common challenge for novice gardeners: over-watering. The Patch Planter is an easy, self-watering and flat-packable planter that addresses this issue by providing the plant with the perfect amount of water at all times — yielding more nutritious and delicious food. The planter is currently in the beta stage, but Let’s Patch is raising funds through Kickstarter to take its manufacturing process to the next level. + Let’s Patch + Let’s Patch on Kickstarter The article above was submitted to us by an Inhabitat reader. Want to see your story on Inhabitat? Send us a tip by following this link. Remember to follow our instructions carefully to boost your chances of being chosen for publishing! Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | digg Post tags: herbs, kickstarter, Let's Patch, Patch planters, self-watering planter, The Patch, vancouver, vegetables

On Sunday, I wrote about the real scandal of the century that the media is ignoring or misreporting — unchecked global warming (see “Worse Than Watergate“). Now I have a name for this growing scandal — No-Water-Gate. It is increasingly clear that the gravest climate threat to the most people in the coming decades will be Dust-Bowlification and the impact that has on food security (see Oxfam: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World). As I wrote in my 2011 Nature article, “The next dust bowl,” which reviewed some of the vast literature on the growing threat of prolonged warming-driven drought, “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.” You’d think that a New York Times front page story on our current return to Dust Bowl conditions — and how farmers need to adapt — would discuss some of this vast literature. Or at least mention climate change. Once. You’d be wrong. And so this NY Times story is one of the inspirations for naming the greatest scandal of our time No-Water-Gate: The failure to discuss climate change renders the piece less than useless — it is scandalously misleading. The article focuses on how the drought has accelerated the depletion of the High Plains Aquifer by Kansas and Texas farmers: Kansas agriculture will survive the slow draining of the aquifer — even now, less than a fifth of the state’s farmland is irrigated in any given year — but the economic impact nevertheless will be outsized. In the last federal agriculture census of Kansas, in 2007, an average acre of irrigated land produced nearly twice as many bushels of corn, two-thirds more soybeans and three-fifths more wheat than did dry land. Farmers will take a hit as well. Raising crops without irrigation is far cheaper, but yields are far lower. Drought is a constant threat: the last two dry-land harvests were all but wiped out by poor rains. In the end, most farmers will adapt to farming without water, said Bill Golden, an agriculture economist at Kansas State University. No, no, a thousand times no: Farmers aren’t going to “adapt to farming without water”! Farmers might adapt to farming without water from the aquifer for irrigation — but only if the climate is not changing for the worse! An important, if under-reported, 2012 study from the The National Center for Atmospheric Research “strengthened the case” that, unless we reverse emissions trends soon, we risk having a situation by the end of the century where ”most of southern Europe and about half of the United States is gripped by extreme drought” a great deal of the time: [Author Aiguo] Dai’s new work stresses that the drying effect of human-produced greenhouse gases should overwhelm natural variability by later this century. “The U.S. may never again return to the relatively wet conditions experienced from 1977 to 1999,” he says. How will farmers adapt to no aquifer water and dwindling precipitation and rising temperatures (see We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming.) Worse, how will they adapt to no aquifer water and dwindling precipitation and rising temperatures – and the media and other opinion-makers ignoring the latter two irreversible (but not unstoppable) trends? The No-Water-Gate scandal is that the nation and the world has chosen not to heed decades of warning by climate scientists that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases would cause ever-worsening droughts. A 1990 Journal of Geophysical Research study, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century. Ai

Electric automaker Tesla Motors just announced that it has paid back the nearly half a billion dollars the Department of Energy lent it in 2010. According to a company press release, today’s wire transfer of $451.8 million dollars follows two other payments in the last year and a half. U.S. taxpayers could see a $12 million profit, in addition to a thriving company employing thousands. The loan was offered in 2009 through the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program, which began during the Bush Administration in 2007 and was funded in 2008. The program has resulted in $34.4 billion in loans and the creation of roughly 60,000 jobs. This announcement, hinted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday via Twitter, follows the company’s first profitable quarter and Consumer Reports rating the Model S a 99 out of a possible 100. Tesla also outsold similarly-priced gas-powered cars created by Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi. Tesla’s history has not always been as bright as its future looks now. In 2010, Musk said his investments in Tesla had essentially dried out his personal fortune, stating in a court filing that he “ran out of cash.” Musk also said that “Tesla will do well as long as we make good products…. To say a car company is the best way to get a return on your investment is absurd, though Tesla will do well for its shareholders.” Apart from achieving profitability, the full repayment of Tesla’s loan was made possible by “a portion of the approximately $1 billion in funds raised in last week’s concurrent offerings of common stock and convertible senior notes.” Musk, Tesla’s initial primary investor and CEO, thanked the Energy Department, Congress, and the American taxpayer, saying “I hope we did you proud.”

Scanadu, a startup based at the NASA Ames Research Center, has made the science-fiction of Star Trek a reality by creating a non-invasive tricorder that, within 10 seconds, can gather medical information about a person and then relay it to their smartphone. The device, known as the Scanadu Scout, has been in development for over two years and can measure blood pressure, temperature, ECG, oximetry, heart rate and breathing rate. Read the rest of Scanadu Creates World’s First Star Trek-Style Medical Tricorder Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | digg Post tags: medical device, medical diagnosis, medical tricorder, NASA Ames Research Center, scanadu, scanadu scout, star trek, tricorder, Yves Béhar

Where most people see packing material to be discarded after use, artist Bradley Hart sees a blank canvas waiting to be filled with pops of color. The New York-based Toronto native has been creating astoundingly realistic portraits of celebrities and friends using bubble wrap injected with paint. Besides people, Hart also has depicted some of his favorite places, like a square in Amsterdam, and brought to life more abstract ideas. The painstaking process involves filling each tiny air-filled bubble with acrylic pigment, making it appear as if the finished product is made up of thousands of pixels. On average, it takes the artist about 150 hours to finish each of his works. But even before he approaches his unusual canvas, Hart spends two-three days loading the paint into the 1,200-1,500 syringes needed to complete a single creation. One of his most famous works to date depicts the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. To complete the incredibly lifelike portrait, Hart injected over 16,000 individual bubbles with 89 different hues of paint to spectacular effect. + Bradley Hart Via Cybergazing The article above was submitted to us by an Inhabitat reader. Want to see your story on Inhabitat? Send us a tip by following this link. Remember to follow our instructions carefully to boost your chances of being chosen for publishing! Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | digg Post tags: bradley hart, bubble wrap art, paint injected bubble wrap, pixellated art, pointillism art, recycled materials art

The small New York town of Sanford has enraged environmental groups by prohibiting all discussion of natural gas drilling at town board meetings and is now facing a lawsuit for violating free speech rights. Those opposed to hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” have been unable to discuss their environmental concerns since the ban was implemented in September. To justify barring the environmental talk, the town board alleges that there had already been hours of discussion against gas drilling and that no more was needed. Herbert Kline, an attorney representing Sanford’s decision, told the Associated Press that the board was becoming overwhelmed with residents’ concerns about natural gas drilling, which has been a major political issue in New York state in wake of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s impending decision about lifting a four and a half year suspension of the practice. “People who were against fracking had, in the minds of the town board, monopolized discussion in the public participation portion of prior meetings to the extent that very little other business could be accomplished,” Kline said. via New York town bans fracking discussions — RT USA.