·:[ Environmental News Bits ]:·
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Read the full post from David Pogue.

“Vampire power” has been bugging me ever since I first heard of it.

It’s the juice consumed by electronic gadgets even when they’re turned off (also called phantom loads, standby power or leaking electricity). They just sit there, plugged in, sucking electricity, at a cost to you and to the environment. According to the Energy Department, vampire gadgets account for about 25 percent of total residential electricity consumption in the U.S.

Read the full story at News.com.

Back and forth, back and forth. That’s the idea behind WaveRoller.

The company, based in Espoo, Finland, says it has devised a way to generate electricity from waves without buoys or other floating devices, the mainstay of other wave power companies.

Read the full story in The Guardian.

The horticultural industry has its own overpackaging problem – common or garden plant pots, spewing out of sheds and littering paths until they eventually get chucked into landfill. We get through some 500m each year in the UK.

It’s an inglorious secret for a supposedly green industry. RHS environmental advisor Rebecca Matthews-Joyce points out that ‘from an environmental perspective, the true beauty of a plant is its ability to replenish itself without a scrap of waste being generated … Gardeners, however, are piling up a problem for the future, a plastic-pot mountain that won’t rot away.’

Read the full story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

An estimated 1.35 billion gallons of gasoline could be conserved annually if every U.S. worker with the ability to telecommute did so 1.6 days per week, according to a report released today by the American Electronics Association.

Read the full story in Foreign Affairs.

Thanks to high oil prices and hefty subsidies, corn-based ethanol is now all the rage in the United States. But it takes so much supply to keep ethanol production going that the price of corn — and those of other food staples — is shooting up around the world. To stop this trend, and prevent even more people from going hungry, Washington must conserve more and diversify ethanol’s production inputs.

Read the full post at U.S. News and World Report.

In a way, the TV news producer was looking for the same thing we all are looking for. She was considering having me come on air to talk about our new cover story, “Why America Needs an Energy Diet.” But she wanted to hear tips for the home that were unusual — something that people haven’t heard before.

That’s the thing about energy efficiency. We’ve heard before — time and again — that we could use a lot less electricity — but we keep using more.

Read the full commentary in the Christian Science Monitor.

The success of the environmental movement in calling attention to the dangers of global warming has led to an ironic outcome: It’s become easier for the public to adopt a passive approach as we wait on world leaders to sign emissions treaties or huge corporations to “go green.” This Earth Day, stop waiting! There are new ways for you to fight climate change in your own backyard.

Read the full story in The Atlantic.

Forty years ago, the steel mills and factories south of Chicago were known for their sooty smokestacks, plumes of steam, and throngs of workers. Clean-air laws have since gotten rid of the smoke, and labor-productivity initiatives have eliminated most of the workers. What remains is the steam, billowing up into the sky day after day, just as it did a generation ago.

The U.S. economy wastes 55 percent of the energy it consumes, and while American companies have ruthlessly wrung out other forms of inefficiency, that figure hasn’t changed much in recent decades. The amount lost by electric utilities alone could power all of Japan.

A 2005 report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that U.S. industry could profitably recycle enough waste energy—including steam, furnace gases, heat, and pressure—to reduce the country’s fossil-fuel use (and greenhouse-gas emissions) by nearly a fifth. A 2007 study by the Mc­Kinsey Global Institute sounded largely the same note; it concluded that domestic industry could use 19 percent less energy than it does today—and make more money as a result.

Publisher Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., US, has announced free online access to the new journal, Sustainability: The Journal of Record, in recognition of Earth Day 2008. The premier issue is available free online as well as the table of contents for the second issue.

A bimonthly publication, Sustainability: The Journal of Record brings together educators, administrators, policy makers, economists, technologists, researchers, and executives at all levels of business that have a commitment to implementing sustainability programmes and advancing the efforts toward the preservation and sustainability of global resources.

The Journal seeks to be the central forum for academic institutions, the business community, foundations, government agencies, and leaders of green-collar endeavors to learn about each another’s progress and programmes and foster collaborations for attaining mutually supportive objectives. Coverage includes sustainability in higher education; implementing corporate sustainability programmes; integration of environmental, social, human, and economic goals; sustainable products, food, and agriculture; design, construction, and operation of high-performance green buildings; development of laws and policy; government and nonprofit initiatives; and new collaborations and opportunities.

In addition, the publisher is set to launch another new journal, Environmental Justice, in May 2008. The new quarterly peer-reviewed journal will explore the adverse and disparate environmental burden impacting marginalised populations and communities all over the world.

This journal is available to UIUC faculty, staff, and students through the UIUC Library.

Read the press release.

Today, EPA announced a new specification for boxes that deliver television and video content, also called set-top boxes. Effective Jan. 1, 2009, new cable, satellite, and telecom set-top boxes that carry the Energy Star will be at least 30 percent more efficient than conventional models. The new specification is expected to prevent greenhouse gas emissions while allowing consumers to continue to enjoy high-quality content.

Read the full story in the Washington Post.

More than half the Environmental Protection Agency scientists who responded to an independent survey made public yesterday said that they had witnessed political interference in scientific decisions at the agency during the past five years.

See also: “Hundreds of EPA Scientists Report Political Interference Over Last Five Years” from the Union of  Concerned Scientists, which includes a link to the full UCS report and links to the EPA survey summary.

Via Librarians’ Internet Index.

Information about buying carbon offsets to neutralize carbon dioxide emissions created by individual air travel. Features a consumer handout on “flying green,” report on voluntary offsets for air travel carbon emissions, a paper with an overview of international climate change policies and the current carbon market, description of offset project types, list of carbon offset companies, a glossary, and more. A joint project of Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and Tufts Climate Initiative (TCI).
URL: http://www.tufts.edu/tie/tci/carbonoffsets/

Read the full commentary in the New York Times.

Biofuels are suddenly being blamed for every global ill. Most of this, to borrow a farm image, is hogwash and bilge.

Read the full post at Environmental Capital.

Has Earth Day gone milquetoast?

Our EC colleague Jeff Ball asks today in the WSJ if Earth Day is actually bad for the earth. Feel-good environmental gestures have become so mainstream that they threaten the push for deeper changes that might lend some oomph to the proceedings.

Read the full post at Environmental Capital.

This Earth Day, a high-flying reminder from the Green Continent that what’s environmental is ultimately about what’s economic.

The world’s aviation industry says it’s taking climate change seriously, though it’s probably the bottom line that caught its attention. Either way, at the Third annual Aviation and Environment Summit in Geneva, airlines, airports, and aircraft makers all pledged for the first time to cut emissions.

Read the full story in Technology Review.

It’s possible today to chemi­cally capture carbon dioxide emitted by smokestacks. But the process is expensive and energy intensive, and it can inflate the cost of electricity produced from coal by 80 to 90 percent.

A new material could reduce that cost significantly. A group led by Omar Yaghi, a chemist at University of California, Los Angeles, combined organic molecules and metal atoms to form highly porous crystals whose structure resembles that of industrial materials called zeolites. A liter of the UCLA crystals stores up to 80 liters of carbon dioxide. Yaghi’s materials, which can be custom-made with different pore sizes and internal structures, have an electrostatic attraction to carbon dioxide, selectively trapping molecules of the gas inside their pores. The carbon dioxide can be released by a mere drop in pressure. Then it could be compressed and stored underground indefinitely, never entering the atmosphere.

Read the press release.

“A Greener Cleaner Choice,” a film by Hampton High School seniors Ben Kepner, Dylan Morris and Benjamin Swanson and freshman Andrew Benton, was awarded with the top honor – the Grand Prize – in tonight’s fourth annual C.A.U.S.E. Challenge High School Film Festival, presented by Bayer Corporation, Carnegie Science Center’s SciTech Initiative and Pittsburgh Filmmakers. C.A.U.S.E. stands for Creating Awareness and Understanding of our Surrounding Environment.

Read the full story in Occupational Health and Safety.

A new analysis by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) indicates that European nations are investing nearly twice as much as America in research primarily aimed at addressing the potential risks of nanotechnology. The analysis, announced April 19, also highlights a substantial over-inflation of the federal government’s nanotechnology risk-research investment figures for the United States. For fiscal year 2006, the assessment found that while the U.S. investment in highly risk-relevant projects totaled $13 million, European countries invested nearly $24 million.

Read the full story at News.com.

Amyris, a rapidly growing biotech company that coaxes genetically enhanced microbes to produce fuel and medicine, has signed a deal with two Brazilian companies to come out with a sugar-cane-based diesel and other fuels by 2010.

Read the full story at News.com.

The organizers of the Solar Decathlon are hosting an event in Second Life on Thursday where people can attend a virtual conference and then get a virtual walk-through of a house designed to be powered entirely by the sun.

Read the full story in Consulting-Specifying Engineer.

A study performed by the New Buildings Institute (NBI) found that, on average, LEED-NC buildings are delivering anticipated savings. LEED energy use is similar to predictions—25% to 30% better than the national average. Average savings increase for the higher LEED levels, with Gold/Platinum buildings approaching the interim goal of Architecture 2030. Results for individual buildings, of course, continue to vary, which calls for further research and areas of improvement for LEED.

Read the full story in Consulting-Specifying Engineer.

A new study by CoStar Group has found that sustainable “green” buildings outperform their non-green peer assets in key areas such as occupancy, sale price and rental rates, sometimes by wide margins.