Boulder County is looking at some kind of county-wide sustainability program, with an associated tax which will be on the ballot this fall. The City of Boulder is revising its Climate Action Plan, looking toward a goal of climate neutrality in 2050. An extension of the tax which supports our climate work will also be on the ballot in the fall. One thing that none of that money should go toward? Urban farming.
An aerial/telephoto exploration of the Canadian Oil Sands operations. Two trillion barrels of oil in the ground. Pyramids of sulfur and coke. Lakes of oil stretching to the horizon. At $200k/yr, it’s easy to understand how one might get roped in, gold rush style.
Conservative thinktanks step up attacks against Obama’s clean energy strategy, as revealed by ALEC bills and other PR documents. This morning at the World Renewable Energy Forum, in response to a (long winded) question about how we might re-frame the energy discussion in light of the unfortunate hay which was made from Solyndra’s failure, US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu re-iterated that clean energy should not be a political issue — that it’s just common sense. That may be true, but it doesn’t mean it will remain apolitical. As Pericles once said… “Just because you do not take an interest in politics, does not mean that politics will not take an interest in you.” Clean energy is political, as is climate change. Yes, it’s stupid, but that’s the way it is. We have to deal with it. Though, I have to admit, if prices keep dropping like they have been, it will be fun to watch the right-wing culture warriors backpedal, as massive renewable deployments become profitable without subsidies of any kind in the next decade.
A look at the increasingly outsourced world of underground pharma. Domestic black-market chemists handle R&D and distribution, and the actual manufacturing is done in China. Seems that way with everything.
Essess is doing drive-by thermal imaging in high density urban areas across the US, hoping to target possible building energy efficiency opportunities. Another company is using urban satellite imagery to choose the best rooftops for solar energy siting. Big Brother may be watching you… but at least occasionally he’s got the right idea.
Peer to peer carshare cars are killing people, because cars of any kind kill people… not because they’re shared. They’re big and heavy and fast, and they get operated in densely populated areas. Anybody who thought this wouldn’t come up when they started setting up these services was delusional. The thing I don’t really get is why on earth is the owner of the car liable for an accident involving it? Assuming the car didn’t spontaneously explode due to poor maintenance, I presume the death and destruction is a consequence of bad driving, texting, drinking, poor road engineering, etc. Just like all the other 40,000 people who get killed by cars in the US every year. The problem that needs to be fixed here isn’t intrinsic to car sharing, it’s a problem with the way we assign liability in automobile accidents.
A character sketch of Paolo di Lauro, one of the Neapolitan Camorra’s former leaders. Southern Italy it seems, like some parts of Mexico, operates with more than one quasi-state organization governing in parallel. A tacit negotiation between the official and unofficial systems, which sometimes erupts into violence — ironically, at those times when the so-called “criminal” organizations have become weak.
Migrating city fleets to car-sharing has been able to reduce the size of those fleets by 50-75%, and increase vehicle utilization from 30 to 70%, which means way less in the way of city capital costs dedicated to cars. It also means a lot of policymakers getting much more familiar with the sharing economy.
There’s a secret society underneath Paris. Two thousand years worth of tunnels and passageways ready to explore.
There’s a cool experimental Mozilla plugin called Collusion which lets you see what other sites are being told about your web browsing habits as you surf around. Even with ad-blocking and do-not-track and a host of other privacy enhancing features turned on, the list of notified trackers grows pretty darned quickly!