photo by 3dom

Mining sets off earthquake in west Germany

Mining in west Germany has caused dozens of small tremors in the past year.

“A police spokesman in the Saarlouis region on the French border said the earthquake measured 4.0 on the Richter scale, the strongest on record in the area, and had knocked over chimneys and caused electricity outages. Roughly 1,000 demonstrators gathered near the epicenter in Saarwellingen, police said, to demand an end to mining work which has sparked dozens of small tremors this year alone.” Reuters

Countdown to Last Paper Ticket – 100 days until 100% ET

Paper air flight tickets will soon be a thing of the past. On June 1, 2008 the IATA will achieve 100% electronic ticketing, according to Giovanni Bisignani, IATA’s Director General and CEO.

Bisignani: “E-ticketing is the flagship project of Simplifying the Business. While a paper ticket costs US$10 to process, e-ticketing reduces that cost to US$1. The industry will save over US$3 billion each year by offering the passenger a better service. There is no better win-win proposition.”

E-tickets also, obviously, cut down on the amount of trees harvested and waste generated by paper tickets. Before Simplifying the Business started in June 2004, 28 million paper tickets were issued each month. That number has been reduced to less than 3 million a month. Soon zero a month. Keep up the good work, IATA!

see also: IATA/Solar Impulse Partnership
]]> http://revolutionontherise.wordpress.com/2008/02/24/make-way-for-e-tickets/feed/ 0 thegreenpirate These ARE the tickets you’re looking for http://revolutionontherise.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/2011-could-see-first-solar-plane-circle-the-globe/ http://revolutionontherise.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/2011-could-see-first-solar-plane-circle-the-globe/#comments Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:57:16 +0000 thegreenpirate http://revolutionontherise.wordpress.com/?p=26 ]]>

Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss adventurer and the first person to circle the globe non-stop in a hot air balloon, is looking for more funding to build his “SolarImpulse” plane, which he believes can fly day and night with no fuel or emissions. A partnership has been announced between the Solar Impulse project and the International Air Transport Association (IATA). IATA, which represents about 240 airlines, has set a target of achieving the technology to fly with zero carbon emissions within the next 50 years.

MSNBC: “The craft will have a wingspan of 262.5 feet — slightly wider than that of the giant new Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger plane. The large wings will provide maximum surface area for the solar cells that will power the craft.”

links:

Solar Impulse

Adventurer seeks more solar plane funds

IATA’s Carbon Free Vision (pdf)

Phonemag:” “remade” has a casing made from recycled aluminium cans, a chassis formed from plastic previously used for drink bottles, and rubber keys made from old car tires. Inside, printed electronics are more environmentally friendly to manufacture than traditional circuit-boards, and even the display graphics have been selected to save energy.”

The Green Pirate would love one…

GreenPrint: “GreenPrint eliminates wasteful pages in any printout automatically, saving you time and money, and maybe more importantly, saving trees, reducing greenhouse gasses, and decreasing waste.

GreenPrint’s patent-pending technology does this by analyzing each page of every document sent to the printer and looking for typical waste characteristics (like that last page with just a URL, banner ad, logo, or legal jargon).

GreenPrint also incorporates an easy to use PDF writer, a fantastic print preview called GreenView, and a reporting feature which keeps track of the number of pages and the amount of money you have saved.

Our product line includes two options for home users: Greenprint World, our free version of the software, and GreenPrint Home Premium. For companies of any size, GreenPrint’s Enterprise Edition provides insight into waste reduction through a company wide printing overview, as well as tracking the number of trees saved and the CO2 reduction. It also provides an easy way to reuse paper that has already been printed on one side before recycling it.”

links:
http://www.printgreener.com/

http://www.printgreener.com/earthday.html (some interesting printing related facts)

GlobeSt.com’s Tech Toolbox

The Green Pirate does not support trawling!

links:

http://www.mcbi.org/what/AAASsymposia.htm#Dragnet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhWhfC3fgVE&rel=1

Committee chairman, former Defense Secretary William Perry: “We chose engineering challenges that we feel can, through creativity and commitment, be realistically met, most of them early in this century. Some can be, and should be, achieved as soon as possible.”

Google co-founder Larry Page: “Tremendous advances in quality of life have come from improved technology in areas such as farming and manufacturing. If we focus our effort on the important grand challenges of our age, we can hugely improve the future.”

The List of 14

• Making solar energy affordable: How do you convert and store the power of sunshine at a cost competitive with fossil fuels?
• Providing energy from fusion: How do you sustain a controlled fusion reaction for commercial power generation?
• Developing carbon sequestration methods: How do you capture the carbon dioxide produced from fossil-fuel burning, and confine that excess carbon underground?
• Managing the nitrogen cycle: How do you develop countermeasures for fertilizer use, internal combustion and other activities that contribute to pollution?
• Providing access to clean water: How do you address the short supply of water for personal use and irrigation in many areas of the world?
• Restoring and improving urban infrastructure: How do you renew aging infrastructure while bringing cities into better ecological balance?
• Advancing health informatics: How do you identify the specific factors behind wellness and illness, and follow through on the promise of personalized medicine?
• Engineering better medicines: How do you find new treatments for age-old scourges such as malaria as well as newly emerging diseases?
• Reverse-engineering the brain: How do you unlock the secrets of brain function, to heal human diseases and advance the field of artificial intelligence?
• Preventing nuclear terror: How do you head off threats from agents who are bent upon bringing ruin to industrial society?
• Securing cyberspace: How do you protect the global information infrastructure from identity theft, viruses and other threats without bogging down the flow of data?
• Enhancing virtual reality: How do you use computer technology to create imaginative environments for education and entertainment?
• Advancing personalized learning: How do you move from a “one-size-fits-all” style of education to more engaging teaching techniques?
• Engineering the tools for scientific discovery: How do you improve our methods for exploring the frontiers of life, the atom and the cosmos?

links:

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23175788/

MSNBC.com, Alan Boyle reports: “The first-ever comprehensive map of our planet’s marine environment shows that human activity has heavily affected 41 percent of the world’s ocean-covered area, with just a tiny percentage left relatively untouched.”

The map will be in the Feb. 15 issue of Science and was shown in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on February 14. It represents impact data for 17 different activities from fishing and commercial shipping to pollution and climate change. The work was conducted at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara and involved 19 scientists from a broad range of universities, NGOs, and government agencies.

The Stats

• Ecosystems affected the most: coral reefs, continental shelves and the deep ocean.
• Biggest human impact was seen in the North Sea, the South and East China Seas, the Caribbean and North America’s East Coast.

Ben Halpern, the study’s lead author: “This project allows us to finally start to see the big picture of how humans are affecting the oceans. Our results show that when these and other individual impacts are summed up, the big picture looks much worse than I imagine most people expected. It was certainly a surprise to me.”

“There is definitely room for hope,” added Halpern. “With targeted efforts to protect the chunks of the ocean that remain relatively pristine, we have a good chance of preserving these areas in good condition.”

David Garrison, biological oceanography program director at NSF: “This research is a critically needed synthesis of the impact of human activity on ocean ecosystems. The effort is likely to be a model for assessing these impacts at local and regional scales.”

links

http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/GlobalMarine

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23155918/

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-02/uoc–srf021108.php

“Cape Wind is proposing America’s first offshore wind farm on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound. Miles from the nearest shore, 130 wind turbines will gracefully harness the wind to produce up to 420 megawatts of clean, renewable energy. In average winds, Cape Wind will provide three quarters of the Cape and Islands electricity needs.” Capewind.org

Doesn’t that sound good?? Three quarters of the Cape’s electricity needs met with beautiful, clean, renewable energy. Who wouldn’t want this?

“This proposal has some very big (and very rich) opponents. The wind farm is slated for Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts and a few property owners in the area are less than thrilled with the idea of having wind turbines dot their multi-million dollar views of the water, despite the turbines being more than five miles away. These outspoken critics have friends in high places that have managed to put the future of America’s first offshore wind farm in jeopardy.” Greenpeace

I think a friendly visit from the Green Pirate might help sway some opinions…

The British Ministry of Defense realized that wind turbines obscure radar and would allow planes to fly undetected above.  Won’t allow wind farms in four locations due to this. Developers had previously been told that there were no defence implications.

Security v. Renewable energy. What will there be left to protect?