There is a great interview over at TreeHugger.com with Andy Kunz, an urban designer and town planner, and the director of the websites www.NewUrbanism.org and www.NewTrains.org. A veteran member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Kunz's work
focuses on the importance of green transportation and trains as a
solution to climate change and peak oil.
I knew that I had heard James Howard Kuntzler "rail" (har, har) about the poor state of our our national rail system but had not read much more about any plans to do anything about it. Looks like Kunz and his team have been very busy indeed. Now we just need to find and rally the political willpower to redirect our resources away from roads/highways/airports to national/regional/local railways. Read the full interview at TreeHugger.com.
Well my last post was all Doom and Gloom regarding the Subprime Mortgage Debacle and its effect on the Global Economy. Well I'm proud to see I'm feeling much better. As I was viewing some cute Ads on AdPerk.com (in order to get a free subscription to Ode Magazine) I came across GreenEnergyTV.com which has helped restore my faith in the potential of humans to engineer ourselves a technologically advanced yet sustainable future. Clearly I crave the future of small, walkable intentional communities where the citizens create and maintain a strong community infrastructure built on local and regional economies. And I don't mind timesharing a small economical non-polluting vehicle powered by compressed air and/or algae-based fuels. But dammit I still want my Internet.
Subprime Mortgage Losses Could Rise to $400 Billion
As usual, it appears that the bad news from the subprime mortgage fiasco in the USA is much, much worse than we have been lead to believe. Just listen.
"Speaking after the meeting of Group of Seven finance leaders, Peer
Steinbrück, German finance minister, said the G7 now feared that
write-offs of losses on securities linked to US subprime mortgages
could reach $400bn.
This
is sharply higher than the $120bn credit losses that Wall Street banks
and other institutions have revealed in recent weeks – and also far
bigger than the US Federal Reserve’s estimates for subprime losses last
year of $100bn-$150bn.
But G7 finance ministers admitted that it
remained unclear where much of this subprime pain would eventually
emerge, not least because the path of the credit crunch was still
uncertain. Mr Steinbrück and other ministers appealed to financial
institutions to provide “prompt and full disclosure’’ of losses, to
restore confidence."
And to top it all off:
"The finance ministers said they stood braced for individual and
collective action to ensure financial stability and avoid recession.
They conceded that growth was likely to slow in all their economies,
since the world was facing what Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary,
called a “challenging and uncertain environment”, due to tighter
credit, a deterioration of the US housing market, higher oil prices and
rising inflation."
Aerogenerator Horizontal Turbine - Up To 9 MW of Electricity
Check out this new style horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) developed by Windpower in Blyth, UK. This new HAWT is designed to address some of the flaws and limitations associated with vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT). Specifically, VAWT require gearing mechanisms to ensure they are always facing into the wind and the generators and gearboxes tend to be in an inaccessible position at the top of the structure's tower. By contrast, vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) can harness the wind
from any direction, allowing them to run more efficiently without the
need for such mechanisms.Also a VAWT turbine becomes unstable above a certain height. The biggest
HAWTs are capable of producing 6MW of power and stand just short of
200m tall, but if you try to make them any bigger they start to become
less efficient.
With this new design the center of gravity is at the bottom making the structure much more stable. And no matter how high the two main structures are made it is relatively
simple to make them bottom heavy. Because of this the technology lends
itself to large engineering projects, which is precisely what is needed
with wind power. Also VAWT's can also be deployed on a smaller scale. A Wyoming-based firm,
TMA, has spent the past 12 years developing a cylindrical version and
plans to build generators in sizes from 2kW domestic models up to 525kW
for wind farms. Windpower is also interested in small-scale versions and says it should
have a 30m high community scale 50kW version available within about
two years.
I had no idea that there was even such as thing as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex". But there it is. Believed to hold almost 100m tons of flotsam, this vast "plastic
soup" stretches 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, past
Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
"The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands
of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches.
About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs
and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil
platforms. The rest comes from land."
How has humankind come to this? And what would be considered the most pressing issue facing us at this time? Global Warming and Climate Change? The health of our forests? The state of our fresh water aquifers? Or 100 million tons of plastic soup taking up an area of the Pacific Ocean larger than the continental United States? Scary stuff.
