According to The Writer’s Almanac, it’s the anniversary of “Black Sunday” in 1935, the day on which the Great Plains region experienced one of the largest dust storms in American history. It’s an important reminder of what happens when farm land is misused, which, of course, is happening every day at some level.
Let’s begin with the article mentioned above: (more…)
Learn how municipalities can speed up clean energy projects by thinking outside the box. With sustainable initiatives sprouting around the globe, municipalities are looking for crowdlending platforms to engage their communities while achieving environmental outcomes. Here are three sustainable development examples that were launched by municipal councils and financed through crowdlending platforms, such as ECrowd!. (more…)
Even since the advent of large-scale commercial wind energy in the 1990s, there has been a certain interest in airborne wind, as illustrated here. In principle, it offers all the benefits of offshore wind, on steroids. It’s less visible than onshore wind, which some people find offensive to the eye. More importantly, it’s situated in places of more stable and higher velocity wind currents. (more…)
As we learned in the early 20th Century, depending on the circumstance, light can behave either as a particle or a wave. Want to see the wave nature of light? Set up a double slit experiment (see photo on left) and notice that particles would not produce these interference patterns. Want to see light behave as a particle? Consider solar PV, and notice that particles of a certain energy can dislodge electrons in the semiconductor substrate materials. (more…)
Here’s a conversation on Facebook that presents my viewpoint.
Liz McCleney He (Spicer) misspoke (about Hitler’s not using chemical weapons), he apologized; move on. (more…)
Here’s eminent climate scientist James Hansen’s recent Ted Talk on global warming. I’m not sure there’s anything new here in terms of the data themselves: the imbalance of the Earth’s heat energy is 0.6 Watts/square meter, 20 times the rate of energy consumption by all 7.4 billion of us, the equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima atom bombs exploding every day, 365 days per year. (more…)
Here’s an article on how the IoT applies to smart buildings, in this case, greenhouses for cannabis–yet another sign that “the times they are a’changing.”
Cannabis clearly has medical value, both in pain relief generally and in the treatment of certain conditions, e.g. glaucoma and a range of emotional disorders. (more…)
The data is in and it’s definitely not good. Our planet is running out of fresh water at an alarming rate, because our reserves are being depleted before they’ve had time to replenish themselves.
This information is coming directly from NASA satellites that have discovered nearly two-thirds of our largest underground aquifers are in trouble. (more…)
If you’re looking for more evidence that public opinion and law-making have identically zero to do with one other, here’s a case in point: Bernie Sanders is the most popular senator in the U.S. Congress, and Mitch McConnell is the least. But check out Mitch’s voting record, and you’ll see that he’s gotten pretty much everything he’s asked for recently.
Of many examples we could name, take the approval of climate denier and avowed EPA opponent Scott Pruitt to run the EPA. What percentage of Americans want environmental restrictions removed and the EPA effectively dismantled? Damn few.
The industrial sector is the subset of the U.S. economy that requires the most energy. U.S. industry uses 30 Quadrillion Btu of energy each year — about a third of all the energy used across the country.
That number’s not surprising since industry produces everything we use in our daily lives. It includes manufacturing, agriculture, construction, mining and water and wastewater treatment. Manufacturing uses the most energy of any industry subdivision — about 85% of industrial energy use. (more…)
