Green News

[johnriley1uk]

Imagine there is an egg on the accelerator and you don't want to break it! (Odd that one)

It might seems odd, but watch the instant fuel comsumption value in my car sometime. It can vary from 80mpg to 12mpg by the lightest acceleration. Being so gentle so as not to break an egg could work wonders if we had the patience!

[mr_e]

I was wondering about the "no coasting in neutral" rule, but the article explained it pretty nicely.

Strangely enough, I think I was taught to block change gears, not shift down progressively. May be time to revise that one, if I ever drive again anytime soon.

[Mike]

This is a strange story about the arrogance of Experts. The story is about an island that was discovered in 1810. The seals and penguins were destroyed very quickly for their fur and blubber. The visiting ships started accidentally leaving rats, rats that ate all the islands food! The cats were introduced to get the rats. The rats died down but the cats then needed a source of food and ate two rare species of flightless bird and rabbits who had been introduced to the island to give ship wreaked sailors a source of food.

Between the rabbits, cats and rats the island was very damaged with the two rare species of bird gone and vegitation being destroyed en-masse by the rabbits. So we spent £1m in removing the cats. The rabbit population soared and has severely damaged the vegitation on the island. Now we are going to spend £11m to solve our own problem.

The solution? Eliminate ALL the rabbits, cats, mice and rats on the island. Genocide on a huge scale. Do we not learn?!

[BarcelonAl]

In which order do you eradicate the rabbits, mice and rats? It's like one of those logic puzzles!

[stimpsonslostson]

its not genocide. its eradicating a (common elsewhere) pest species which has been accidentally introduced- grey squirrels are an example close to home- its illegal to release one should you capture one, you MUST kill it!
Its the problem with island ecology that species get specialised for life in the absence of other species and one accidental introduction can have catastrophic consequences.

Prof. E Wilson has often said that if leaf cutting ants ever made it to africa then they would cause the extinction of giraffe, elephant and black rhino. (he should know- he's a GENIUS! )

[Mike]

Space Based solar power stations are closer to becoming a reality as a new company looks into setting a stable financial platform to investigate and implement them. Nice idea, I wonder how they will get across beaming electricity through the air and I hope they don't develop a dangerous weapon by accident.

I have heard of small items being able to transmit wireless energy. Kettles, phones and portable devices. They needed a special fabric to be able to tranmit the energy though.

[Mike]

Solar Panel manufacture has now reached the mythical $1/watt making the system more affordable and efficient. I wonder when we will start seeing large scale adoption of renewable technology on houses? I suppose that since the main manufacture is in California it won't be any time soon.

[Mike]

British made full electric racing bike. Nicely done chaps. They claim it is Zero CO2 but lets be honest, you need to charge the damned thing somehow!

[mr_e]

It reminds me of the electric super-car they had on Top Gear. It ran through the power in the batteries like nobodies business, but the performance was decent.

Zero CO2 basically means that the CO2's just being generated somewhere else, but I like to think they'd at least use green energy providers.

[Mike]

China wants the developed nations who import thier goods to pay for the carbon emissions. Although this is a great idea in principle I don't see how it would be enacted unless we had control of how they manufactured their goods - and it we had control, why don't we manufacture them here? It would create massive amouts of work for people. The downside of this is that the prices of stuff would go up massively (thus making it cheaper to make in the UK!)

In fact its a great idea China - we will now make all our stuff in the UK. End of.

[Mike]

Actually the easy way to do the payments would be for China to impose an Export Tax where the profits would be used to combat their carbon emissions. It would mean that the price of our goods would go up and therefore be indirectly paying for the carbon emissions. . . . unless of course they imposed an export tax and then just used the money for some other purpose.

[mr_e]

I can sort of see China's logic on this one, but they're arguing that it's the consumer's fault entirely: they ignore the fact the sale of goods is beneficial to them, otherwise they would presumably not be doing it.

It highlights the fact that it's pretty much everyone's issue, so everyone needs to be part of the solution.

[Mike]

Remote that uses no batteries by creating electricity by compressing a liquid crystal to generate an electricity pulse. The interesting part of the article is the fact the Japan is currently investigating to see if this liquid crystal technology can be integrated into pavements and used to generate sufficient electricity to help power the grid.

This is similar to the news article about Sainsbury installing speedbumps of the stuff to power their tills.

[Mike]

Stored wind enegy is on the cards in the Midwest. The compressed air is stored in abandoned mines during low energy times and then reconverted back into energy by releasing through turbines. Very clever and efficient. The technology for this system was first used in 1991, however, reduction in equipment costs are making it a more commercially viable solution.