Please welcome today’s guest poster, Jamison.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidg/2168751427/lightbox/

Let me tell you a very odd story from our friends in China. China was having a problem in their poor farmland areas. They were losing massive amounts of forests and decided they had to take some sort of corrective action. So they decided to reintroduce biodigester technology – the process of converting organic waste into renewable sources of energy — to the countryside. They built a design that cost about $450 and started installing them for farmers. A third of that cost was covered with government subsidies.

The farmers were expected to provide the labor (digging the hole for the system) for the project, but basically it’s a large underground tank, a bit larger than the average American septic tank. As waste from humans and livestock flows into the tank, it breaks down and produces methane, as all organic waste does, and these biodigesters make it possible to produce more than enough biogas to run their households without need of additional fuels.

The effects have been staggering — most farmers who have the systems have managed to move their incomes from below the poverty line to incomes two or three times above it. Women have been freed up from the painful task of hunting for firewood. The forests around the farming villages have started to replenish themselves. The farmers have the byproduct of the biogas, which is a very effective fertilizer that can then be used to help improve their plant growth to increase their yields.  Read more…

Please welcome today’s guest poster, Amanda Kidd.

Do you want to make an efficient use of water, energy and other valuable resources? Do you want to protect your health and thereby improve productivity? Can you control pollution and environmental degradation to some extent? If the answer to these questions is yes, then why not think about going green? Invest in a green building and help yourself naturally. A green building, also referred to as a sustainable building or a green construction, is an environmentally friendly structure that is designed, built, maintained, operated, renovated, and demolished or reused in a resource-efficient way for the entire life cycle of the building.  Read more…

I’m going to have to do some tiptoeing in this post, but let’s get one thing straight right from the get-go: In no way am I rooting for the ruin of the human race. As a matter of fact and despite scattered claims to the contrary I am a human, so any argument I might make against my own kind would be obviously disingenuous. I even like some people, and I wouldn’t want anything bad to befall any of them. Or myself.

So I don’t hate people, got it?

But here’s the thing: I don’t think you can trump an argument simply by claiming the welfare of X number of people is at stake. Read more…

Please welcome today’s guest poster, Jamison.

If you live in the concrete and asphalt jungles of the United States, you’ve probably gotten used to the concept of heat islands without even realizing it. Cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside. When you live in the city, you probably don’t even realize that just a few miles away, the temperature is probably 5 degrees or so cooler. Cities absorb more of the heat of the sun than the surrounding areas and, as a result, retain that heat for longer. Of course this starts a nasty loop of a warmer city requiring more air conditioning, which is more inefficient because the city itself is just so hot. The question becomes: How do we get ourselves out of the mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into?  Read more…

This past Tuesday, you may have heard that the US House of Representatives voted to uphold new standards for light bulb efficiency, set to be enacted next year. If by chance you didn’t, it’s probably because you’re too busy running around town stockpiling every last incandescent bulb you can find before the government sticks it’s nose in your business once again to tell you what you can and can’t buy. You’ll probably store them next to the lawn darts on a shelf above your extra barrels of DDT. Read more…

Please welcome today’s guest poster, Jamison.

Image credit: http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-3157251517

I know, but I can’t resist the urge to use incendiary language when it comes to topics like this one. If you read the title and are bewildered by the fact that you have no idea what on Earth a Maunder Minimum is, don’t worry. I went to school to be a literal rocket scientist, so I have a focus a little further afar than things just happening on Earth. I promise to explain myself to the best of my ability in simple language.

You may have noticed this bright glowing orb that we circle around on a yearly basis. The Sun is the G-Class star that provides us the glorious warmth and protection that made the little mud ball we live upon so wonderful. What you probably don’t know is the Sun goes through cycles of activity, which last about 11 years or so. Basically it becomes more active in the form a sunspots, which reach a maximum (called the Solar Maximum) and they decrease to none for a short time, which we refer to as the Solar Minimum. For literally centuries, since the invention of the telescope, humanity has been keeping track of the number and size of the sunspots on the surface of the Sun (and people think we waste time on our hobbies these days!)

So now you’re probably asking yourself: Well, you’ve bored me with a bunch of celestial mechanics information that might help me on Jeopardy someday, but what on Earth does this have to do with the death nail of environmentalism? Well that’s where the Maunder Minimum comes in.  Read more…

Look: No one likes paying a small fortune every time they need to fill up their vehicle. When I see prices approaching $4 per gallon, I’m right there with you, grumbling about the evil oil companies gouging us out of our hard-earned money.

But once I’ve complained enough, I like to remind myself that there’s a silver lining to that cloud. When gas prices rise, the environment — in some ways — wins.  Read more…

Please welcome today’s guest poster, Jamison.

On the surface, when you hear me say “green manufacturing,” your first instinct is probably to dismiss this article as not applying to you. Inside your head you’re probably thinking, “I’m not Ford or GM, Jamison, I’m just a normal person happily buying my stuff from the store like everyone else.” But in reality, you’ve already started down the path to green manufacturing, and you don’t even realize it yet.  Read more…

Please welcome today’s guest poster, Brady Daniels.

It requires a great deal of energy, namely fossil fuels, to power the world’s modes of transportation. Most of us realize that the pollution created by our vehicles damage the environment and cause health problems. Promising new technologies may be the cure, but for now, the world’s population can help out by using the most environmentally-friendly modes of transportation available.  Read more…

I’m a bit of a hypochondriac.  So you can see why I might be the kind of person to get freaked out by all the headlines this week citing the World Health Organization “verdict” on cell phones and cancer.  Reading the headlines on major media websites, tweets and Facebook statuses, it seemed like the WHO had proclaimed a hard and fast connection between cell phone use and brain tumors.  And, as someone who probably wouldn’t notice if my cell phone did actually fuse to my hand, because I use it so much, I started to feel a little queasy.  Which, of course, means I have a cell phone-induced brain tumor, right?  I didn’t even want to read the articles.  I knew they would only make me feel worse.

So, even though I’ve asked J over and over and over again to reassure me that my cell phone wasn’t going to make me glow in the dark or sprout horns, I asked him again, because I’d read the headlines, and this time, it wasn’t coming from a fringe group with a vested interest in scaring the crud out of the cell phone using population.  It was coming from the World Health Organization.

Instead of going through and skimming headlines like I did, J went to the actual WHO report, and then to a Cancer Research UK post that gives a solid and non-flashy explanation of the report, and also notes: “A recent English study concluded that “the increased use of mobile phones between 1985 and 2003 has not led to a noticeable change in the incidence of brain cancer in England between 1998 and 2007.”

Further more, many of the studies that appear to have shown a link have issues with bias, rapid change in technology, and relying on patient memory to provide data. That’s not to say there’s absolutely positively no link between cancer and cell phones and there never ever will be (some of the studies that don’t show a connection have some of the same issues).  But it’s also not saying there is a clear link, which is contrary to what the big splashy headlines this week would lead us to believe. Read more…