Environment Memo

LED traffic lights are great and save a lot of energy, but are causing some problems.  Because they don’t heat up, ice and snow doesn’t melt off of them, so people can’t see if a traffic light is red, green, or yellow; as recounted here.

This is an interesting recounting, by Stewart Brand himself, of how he got NASA to point the cameras at earth when we went moonward. Brand was roundly suspected of insurrection for this, but a nice photograph of earth ended up on the Whole Earth Catalog. Here’s some of his tale of revelation about the photograph: [...]

I can’t understand how it’s possible for anyone to believe anything substantive could get done among one-hundred plus countries when more than 46,000 (!) people are involved at a meeting. Geoffrey Lean writes in The Telegraph that the Danish government and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change …. accredited 46,000 people I’m not sure [...]

Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFOs) and other outfits will benefit substantially if this idea takes off.  After all, pigs are supposed to be smart. As reported around the world, including here by World News Australia, in Taiwan

The Times has an extensive article today on problems with the nation’s drinking water, entitled “That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy.” The article has a number of thrusts.  One is that, in recent  recent years, the quantity of pollutants entering our waters has substantially increased, and that drinking water regulations have not [...]

As noted by Propublica on November 11, 2009  (here), Congress has asked EPA to revisit effects of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water supplies: As part of the $32 billion Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill recently signed by President Barack Obama, lawmakers asked the EPA to revisit hydraulic fracturing, the process where copious amounts of water [...]

Time Magazine has an article on what may be a big surge in composting toilets. As stated in the article, Wastewater treatment is much more energy-intensive than composting, which needs little more than time (about a year) for complete decomposition and pathogen elimination. This statement is basically true in terms of energy use, but pathogen [...]

Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and overall remarkable guy, has a very perceptive opinion piece in the NY Times, detailing a taxonomy of four types of climate change viewpoints.  In a nice description, Brand notes that we seem to have in Copenhagen a two-sided debate between alarmists and skeptics but that in [...]

ProPublica has a new article, “Underused Drilling Practices Could Avoid Pollution,” discussing possible best management practices and less use of hazardous (and unnecessary, as discussed here) materials for hydraulic fracturing. This article reflects a certain amount of gas industry PR, but it has useful information, as well.  We’ve seen PR in the recent past, such [...]

Forbes has a short piece with calculations of the payback period for the extra cost of a new hybrid car, pointing out that as far as buying a hybrid goes, Don’t do it to save money. At $3 a gallon for gas, it takes a long time for a hybrid car to pay back its [...]