Düsseldorf plans to replace about 10,000 of gas lamps with LEDs

Düsseldorf city has 17,000 or so gas lamps. This German city’s municipal power utility plans to replace about 10,000 of them with a technology that is cheaper to operate but so modern that only a handful of cities have begun to use it: light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

So far, only two dozen experimental LED street lamps have been put up in Dusseldorf. Although LEDs can initially be more expensive, they are a lot more reliable and they can last longer than conventional light bulbs.

But LEDs do have drawbacks. The utility reckons that in terms of the total amount of light produced from a watt of electricity, LEDs still do not match fluorescent or sodium lamps. But that will change in coming years as LEDs improve. Anyway, the light from LEDs can be used more efficiently than that from conventional lamps, from the South Westfalia University of Applied Sciences, which developed the Dusseldorf lamps. “You can direct LED light very well,” he says. So instead of casting light all around—often over places that do not need to be illuminated, each LED is directed much like a spotlight.

- from www.economist.com

Water-guzzling multimillionaire

Amid a worsening drought that’s sucked Florida dry for the past two years, the pop legend Celine Dion used 6.5 million gallons of water last year at her home on Jupiter Island, Fla., according to a study done by the Palm Beach Post.

That’s nearly 18,000 gallons of water a day, about 100 times more than the 170-gallons-per-day the average resident uses every day, according to the Florida-based U.S. Water Institute. Dion’s annual water usage could fill more than 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

And she doesn’t even live there.

A 9,800-square-foot home is under construction at the South Florida address. Dion’s publicist did not return phone calls for comment.

South Florida has a whole host of water-related issues. Experts estimate that at least 50 percent of Florida’s water is used for landscaping. Martin says consumers need to return to using native plants, instead of water-guzzling plants that are popular.

Jupiter Island city officials, however, defended Dion’s water use, saying that the songstress needed lots of vegetation to maintain her privacy.

By ASHLEY PHILLIPS
- from abcnews.go.com

These celebrities are becoming a real problem. They are unnecessarily rich. Actually the money the have is from public. The new media technologies allowing them to loot public. If somebody share their work they are called pirates.
If you care about environment please don’t pay for these people. Always share or download their works.

Reject Digital Restrictions Management(DRM).

End of Flat World

Tom Friedman wrote “The World is Flat”, suggesting that globalization had leveled the playing field between industrial and emerging countries. Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets suggests that this is perhaps changing because of the cost of fuel.

The cost of shipping a 40 foot container from Shanghai to the east coast of North America has gone from $3,000 in 2000 to $8,000 because of the cost of fuel, and for many products, the Asian cost advantage has virtually disappeared.

“In a world of triple-digit oil prices, distance costs money,” write Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets. “And while trade liberalization and technology may have flattened the world, rising transport prices will once again make it rounder.”

Heavy commodity items like steel that are not particularly labour intensive are the first to be hit; Chinese steel exports have fallen by 20% in the last year. The Chinese were bringing iron or from faraway places like Brazil and shipping it back to the USA; now American mills actually have a price advantage.

Shipping costs to and from Asia have risen so much that they have eclipsed tariffs as a barrier to global trade, Mr. Rubin and Mr. Tal say, calling the cost of moving goods “the largest barrier to global trade today.”

“In fact,” they say, “in tariff-equivalent terms, the explosion in global transport costs has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

When oil was $20 a barrel, transport costs were equivalent to a 3-per-cent tariff rate; now it’s above 9 per cent.

Aggravating the problem is the fact that modern new container ships travel faster than old bulk carriers and so use up more fuel, doubling fuel consumption per unit of freight over the past 15 years.

- by Lloyd Alter

The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power

Nuclear power generates approximately 20 percent of all U.S. electricity. And because it is a low-carbon source of around-the-clock power, it has received renewed interest as concern grows over the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our climate.

Yet nuclear power’s own myriad limitations will constrain its growth

* Prohibitively high, and escalating, capital costs
* Production bottlenecks in key components needed to build plants
* Very long construction times
* Concerns about uranium supplies and importation issues
* Unresolved problems with the availability and security of waste storage
* Large-scale water use amid shortages
* High electricity prices from new plants

Nuclear power is therefore unlikely to play a dominant—greater than 10 percent—role in the national or global effort to prevent the global temperatures from rising by more than 2°C above preindustrial levels.

The carbon-free power technologies that the nation and the world should focus on deploying right now at large scale are efficiency, wind power, geothermal power, and solar power. They are the lower-cost carbon-free strategies with minimal societal effects and the fewest production bottlenecks. They could easily meet all of U.S. demand for the next quarter -century, while substituting for some existing fossil fuel plants. In the medium-term (post-2020), other technologies, such as coal with carbon capture and storage or advanced geothermal, could be significant players, but only with a far greater development effort over the next decade.

Progressives must also focus on the issue of nuclear subsidies, or nuclear pork. Conservative politicians such as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other nuclear power advocates continue to insist that new climate legislation must include yet more large subsidies for nuclear power. Since nuclear power is a mature electricity generation technology with a large market share and is the beneficiary of some $100 billion in direct and indirect subsidies since 1948, it neither requires nor deserves significant subsidies in any future climate law.

By Joseph Romm

If US has concerns about Nuclear power then why Indian PM Manmohan Singh is getting too much attraction from US Nuclear power? He is ready to suicide his cabinet for Nuclear power which country depends only for 3%.
Who’s interests is he protecting?

Evil Palm oil

Whether palm oil is used as an additive in soap, cosmetics or food, or processed into a biofuel, palm oil is one of the worst culprits in the climate crisis. Most of it comes from the disappearing, ultra-carbon-rich rain forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, of which a whopping 25,000 square miles have been cleared and burned to make way for palm oil plantations.

That burning releases enough carbon dioxide into the air to rank Indonesia as the No. 3 such polluter in the world. It also destroys the last remaining habitat for orangutans, Sumatran rhinos, tigers and other endangered wildlife.

several products containing palm oil: Burt’s Bees soap, chocolate truffles from Trader Joe’s, Kashi breakfast bars, Whole Foods water crackers and many others.

Probably the worst offenders were Entenmann’s chocolate-covered doughnuts, which actually list palm oil as the first ingredient — and palm kernel oil as the second. Lots of other products, some of them marketed as “green,” contain this rhino-killer too: Oreos, Chewy Chips Ahoy!, Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn, Hershey’s Kisses “Hugs,” Twix and many other processed foods. Even some Girl Scout cookies have it, which is why this spring, 12-year-old Girl Scouts Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen of Ann Arbor, Mich., refused to sell the cookies and have encouraged the organization to drop the ingredient.

The great tragedy of all this palm oil use (about 30 million tons globally every year) is that it’s so easily replaced by healthier vegetable oils, like canola, [coconut oil] that come from significantly less-ecologically sensitive areas.

Unfortunately, most of the food and cosmetics conglomerates are more interested in covering up the environmental destruction than replacing the problem ingredient. Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods, Unilever, Nestle, Procter & Gamble and others (including the Girl Scouts) assure the public that such environmental concerns don’t apply to them because they (or their suppliers) are members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an industry group (with a handful of environmental members) that sets guidelines on growing and selling palm oil.

Unfortunately, as a recent Greenpeace report revealed, the Round- table’s standards are almost meaningless because they don’t include inspections of the palm oil tree plantations. The Roundtable plans to address this problem in the next few months by certifying a small amount of oil that it says has been verifiably produced according to some sustainable standards. But even Roundtable Vice President Darrel Webber admits that the process “isn’t perfect,” in part because liquid oils are easy to mix and nearly impossible to track.

So how can we keep dead orangutans out of our hair, out of our food and out of our gas tanks? Consumers should scan ingredient labels for palm oil and palm kernel oil (and derivatives such as palmitic acid) and choose brands that don’t contain them. Wall Street should divest from this ecologically sub-prime market, not only because it’s the right thing to do but because its high carbon footprint means that palm oil producers and buyers are likely to be penalized in any scheme to reduce global warming.

But governments must act too. The European Union, for instance, is considering a ban on palm oil and other tropical biofuels.

Read: http://www.theproblemwithpalmoil.org/

- by Glenn Hurowitz

Wasted Food

billions of dollars’ worth of food is dumped each year because of retailers’ inefficiency.
It is difficult to gauge quite how much waste—known as “shrink” in the industry’s jargon—there is. Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, puts the figure at 8-10% of total “perishable” goods in America. The Food Marketing Institute, an industry body, says such sales totalled $196 billion in 2006. That means food worth nearly $20 billion was dumped by retailers. In a report published on May 14th, the United Nations estimated that retailers and consumers in America throw away food worth $48 billion each year, and called upon governments everywhere to halve food wastage by 2025.

Laudable though this is, it raises the question of why so much food is going to waste in the first place. After all, American supermarket chains have spent the past ten years or so installing inventory-management software, cold-storage systems and other supply-chain paraphernalia. Yet their shrink rates are still twice as big as those of European retailers.

One reason for this is structural, reckons Leigh Sparks of Stirling University in Britain. Food in America travels farther, increasing the risk it will rot in transit. Another reason is that American firms are less adept at capturing and using customer data to predict demand. And many American store managers believe high shrinkage is inevitable, given their enthusiasm for huge displays and the widest possible range of produce. “This feeds a vicious circle of more and more choice,” says Matthew Isotta of Oliver Wyman. And it can backfire if displays disguise rotten food or too much choice overwhelms customers.

- - from www.economist.com

Solar land use

People say complaints about solar power’s land use. They say that solar power uses more land. “Nevada Solar One” takes up about 400 acres, mostly for mirrors and heat engines. But to run a coal based power plant require a mine about 5,300 acres size to produce same amount of electricity.

The 400-acre Nevada Solar One produces around 134,000,000 kWh per year. About three quarters of this is mirrors and heat engines, the rest support services and access.

This pencils out to 7.69 kWh per square foot per year, or slightly less than 154 kWh over the course of 20 years.

According to the EIA, one ton of coal produces about 2,000 kWh of electricity. Per acre yields for coal vary a lot, but in Appalachia it appears that mountaintop removal produces about 10,000 tons of coal per acre. So a coal plant produces around 11.5 kWh of electricity per square foot consumed in a single year. And then you need to consume a second square foot the next year. So producing the 154 kWh per square foot that Solar One produces over the course of 20 years would require mining 13.4 square feet.

Ignoring everything after the decimal point (this kind of calculation is not that precise, in any case), for coal to produce the same electricity Nevada Solar One will provide over the course of 20 years would require 13 times that 400 acres, or 5,300 acres.

- from grist

Need for energy efficient buildings

Data from the US Energy Information Administration illustrates that buildings are responsible for almost half (48%) of all energy consumption and GHG emissions annually; globally the percentage is even greater. Seventy-six percent (76%) of all power plant-generated electricity is used just to operate buildings. Clearly, immediate action in the Building Sector is essential if we are to avoid hazardous climate change.

US Electricity consumption

Buildings (operations)	76%
Industry	23%
Transportation	1%

US Energy consumption

Buildings	48%
Transportation	27%
Industry	25%

US Energy consumption

Industry	35%
Transportation	27%
Residential	21%
Commercial	17%

- from architecture2030.org

Good news: Americans driving less

The FHWA’s “Traffic Volume Trends” report, produced monthly since 1942, shows that estimated vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on all U.S. public roads for March 2008 fell 4.3 percent as compared with March 2007 travel. This is the first time estimated March travel on public roads fell since 1979. At 11 billion miles less in March 2008 than in the previous March, this is the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history.

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Transportation estimated that greenhouse gas emissions fell by an estimated 9 million metric tons for the first quarter of 2008.
- from FHWA

Vast cracks appear in Arctic ice

Scientists travelling with the Canadian troops found major new fractures during an assessment of the state of giant ice shelves in Canada’s far north.

The team found a network of cracks that stretched for more than 10 miles (16km) on Ward Hunt, the area’s largest shelf.

The fate of the vast ice blocks is seen as a key indicator of climate change.

- from BBC