surreal estate

What Antarctica would look like without all that ice.

cycle

Michael J. Churchman, Executive Director of the Alabama Environmental Council, has sent out the following call to arms. Call your rep!

At last week's Environmental Management Commission, we learned that House Bill 395 has made it out of committee and will be voted on this week. Please contact your representative and let them know that you support recycling and ask them to support this needed legislation. You can call 334-242-7600 or use the following link to contact your representative's office. http://www.legislature.state.al.us/misc/zipsearch.html

Rep. Frank McDaniel of Albertville introduced House Bill 395, the Solid Wastes and Recyclable Materials Act. This legislation will require a $1 a ton tipping fee on solid waste which would create a fund to develop and enhance recycling programs, to identify and cleanup illegal dumpsites, and assist the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) in regulating solid waste.

Presently, Alabama is one of the last states in the country without a comprehensive recycling program. Only 81 out of the Alabama's 460 municipalities provide some kind of recycling program or service. Of the counties, 26 of 67 have recycling programs.

the next step

Introducing the Air Car. It runs on a hybrid engine that compresses air for acceleration. At speeds greater than 35 mph it uses a small amount of fuel to heat the air for greater power. The result is a car that emits little more than clean air and gets over 100 mpg. Get yours in 2010.

waterfill

It was with increasing horror and dread that I read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch last night. A massive eddy in the Pacific Ocean known as the North Pacific Gyre sits there drawing material into itself. The result is an immense accumulation of trash and debris. There's no official measurement of the cloud of filth, but by some estimates it could be twice the size of Texas. Oh dear.

no, really. oh dear.

on that note, I present the poem of the day:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- WB Yeats, The Second Coming

one day my neighborhood will look like this

water, water everywhere

Speaking of water (see post below), it turns out that scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.

Here comes the sun

Nanosolar Powersheet is very cool stuff. Or very hot. It won Innovation of the Year of 2007 from Popular Science magazine, and is destined to change the world.

It's a paper-thin solar energy collector. The PowerSheet solar cells are created on printing-press-style machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute. It's inexpensive mainly because no silicon is used. Which means that it could be used to cover entire roofs or building exteriors, producing significant amounts of efficient energy.

Be sure and watch the slideshow and animation. This stuff is the real deal, folks.

fo realz

All I got to say is that Georgia better back off with a quickness.

the virtue of weeds

Since using corn to make ethanol seems to get people worried, why not try a different plant?

oh really

FYI: The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that the EPA has the statutory authority to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles. Apparently the EPA had offered "no reasoned explanation" for refusing to regulate carbon dioxide and other harmful gas emissions from cars. Gee, I wonder why they couldn't come up with an explanation? Could it be that they are the ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY? Granted, the argument was over whether carbon dioxide is actually a pollutant as defined by law, because some say it's not. But it is alarming to note that the EPA was backed by four motor trade associations, two coalitions of utility companies and 10 states with car-making facilities. Considering the EPA's ostensible promotion of strategies to reduce transportation greenhouse gas emissions and save fuel, this is an odd alliance.