Thursday, December 31, 2009
Kuwait Declaration
dec09newsp03.pdf (application/pdf Object) The World Federation of Engineering Organizations conference at Kuwait on alternative energy, November 01-06, 2009.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Monday, December 28, 2009
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Friday, December 25, 2009
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
A Fuel-Efficient Stove to prevent Rape and Murder of Women
Xinhua reports from Copenhagen the launch by the U. N. on Wednesday, December 16, 09, of a pilot project to provide fuel-efficient cooking stoves to millions of women in Sudan, Uganda and other 36 nations. The Safe Access to Firewood and Alternative Energy (SAFE) stoves are expected to cut the risks of murder, rape, and other violence girls and women face in gathering firewood to cook food for their families. U N Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the occasion that thanks to technology the SAFE stoves will provide environmental protection, improved safety for women, access to clean energy for the poor, and enhanced climate security. World Food Programme (WFP) and other U N agencies are funding this project which is expected to roll out the stove by next year. Indeed, a small step for technology, but a big boost for women and environment!
(Source: The Hindu, December 18, 2009)
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
India's energy compulsions and carbon footprint
It is not uncommon for households and industries in India to keep backups for energy supply. After all, load shedding has been a regular menace even in metro and urban areas. As per World Bank, in 2008, India faced a 16.6% shortfall of electricity during hours of peak consumption. This was on the back of a 9.9% gap in energy generation. Coal is seen as the key solution to India's power shortage, a daunting barrier to the country's development. Primarily because people in semi urban and rural areas cannot afford costly electricity produced from renewable sources.
India has 10% of the world's coal reserves. India's reserves are the biggest after the US, Russia and China. However, it had to import about 70 m tonnes of high grade coal in FY09, mostly for making steel. The country plans to add 78.7 gigawatts of power generation during the five years ending March 2012. Most of it will be from coal, which now accounts for about 60% of India's energy mix. Even if India is on track with its renewable energy plans, coal will still account for about 55% of its power supply by 2030.
The emerging economies have often insisted that rich nations have caused global warming. The developed ones that are done with their industrial growth are happy to comply with emission norms. Renewable energy is steadily gaining ground in the West. However, looking at the high cost of solar and wind energy, the questions that arises is - can India afford them? India, the world's fourth largest greenhouse gas emitter is still very low on per-capita emission. The country's industrial electricity tariffs are amongst the highest in the world, a measure aimed at deterring wastage. Nevertheless, it is under pressure to cut pollution to battle climate change. This is at a time when the nation's demand for power is rising with more Indian middle class buying houses and electronic items.
India has committed to contributing towards reducing "carbon intensity". It has set a goal to rein the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted per unit of economic output by 20 - 25% until 2020. However, what is the price that the nation will have to pay? Does this mean that India's future will once again be pushed into 'darkness'?
The 5 minute wrap-up, December 7, 09
Last, best chance: UN climate conference opens
Last, best chance: UN climate conference opens
By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer
36 mins ago
COPENHAGEN – The largest and most important U.N. climate change conference in history opened Monday, with organizers warning diplomats from 192 nations that this could be the best, last chance for a deal to protect the world from calamitous global warming.
The two-week conference, the climax of two years of contentious negotiations, convened in an upbeat mood after a series of promises by rich and emerging economies to curb their greenhouse gases, but with major issues yet to be resolved.
Conference president Connie Hedegaard said the key to an agreement is finding a way to raise and channel public and private financing to poor countries for years to come to help them fight the effects of climate change.
Hedegaard — Denmark's former climate minister — said if governments miss their chance at the Copenhagen summit, a better opportunity may never come.
"This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we got a new and better one. If we ever do," she said.
Denmark's prime minister said 110 heads of state and government will attend the final days of the conference. President Barack Obama's decision to attend the end of the conference, not the middle, was taken as a signal that an agreement was getting closer.
The conference opened with video clips of children from around the globe urging delegates to help them grow up in a world without catastrophic warming. On the sidelines, climate activists competed for attention to their campaigns on deforestation, clean energy and low-carbon growth.
Mohamad Shinaz, an activist from the Maldives, plunged feet-first into a tank with nearly 200 gallons (750 liters) of frigid water to illustrate what rising sea levels were doing to his island nation.
"I want people to know that this is happening," Shinaz said, the water reaching up to his chest. "We have to stop global warming."
At stake is a deal that aims to wean the world away from fossil fuels and other pollutants to greener sources of energy, and to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from rich to poor countries every year over decades to help them adapt to climate change.
Scientists say without such an agreement, the Earth will face the consequences of ever-rising temperatures, leading to the extinction of plant and animal species, the flooding of coastal cities, more extreme weather events, drought and the spread of diseases.
"The evidence is now overwhelming" that the world needs early action to combat global warming, said Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an U.N. expert panel.
He defended climate research in the face of a controversy over e-mails pilfered from a British university, which global warming skeptics say show scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence that doesn't fit their theories.
"The recent incident of stealing the e-mails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC," he told the conference.
Negotiations have dragged on for two years, only recently showing signs of breakthroughs with new commitments from The United States, China and India to control greenhouse gas emissions.
The first week of the conference will focus on refining the complex text of a draft treaty. But major decisions will await the arrival next week of environment ministers and the heads of state in the final days of the conference, which ends Dec. 18.
"The time for formal statements is over. The time for restating well-known positions is past," said the U.N.'s top climate official, Yvo de Boer. "Copenhagen will only be a success it delivers significant and immediate action."
Among those decisions is a proposed fund of $10 billion each year for the next three years to help poor countries create climate change strategies. After that, hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed every year to set the world on a new energy path and adapt to new climates.
"The deal that we invite leaders to sign up on will be one that affects all aspects of society, just as the changing climate does," said Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen. "Negotiators cannot do this alone, nor can politicians. The ultimate responsibility rests with the citizens of the world, who will ultimately bear the fatal consequences if we fail to act."
A study released by the U.N. Environment Program on Sunday indicated that pledges by industrial countries and major emerging nations fall just short of the reductions of greenhouse gas emissions that scientists have said are needed to keep average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C (3.6 F).
___
Associated Press writer Karl Ritter contributed to this report.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE — Find behind-the-scenes information, blog posts and discussion about the Copenhagen climate conference at http://www.facebook.com/theclimatepool, a Facebook page run by AP and an array of international news agencies. Follow coverage and blogging of the event on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/AP_ClimatePool.
COPENHAGEN: Seize the chance
Today The Climate Change conference of 192 nations is starting at Copenhagen. In an unprecedented manner, 56 newspapers of 45 countries are publishing a common editorial with the above title. A gist of the main points of this editorial is given below.
1. Today the question is no longer whether the humans are to blame for the climate change, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage.
2. May the representatives of the 192 countries not hesitate, not fall into dispute, not blame each other, but seize the opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics.
3. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rise to 2o C, which will require global emissions to peak and begin to fall within the next 5-10 years.
4. Few believe that Copenhagen can produce a fully polished treaty, but the politicians can and must agree upon the essential elements of a fair and effective deal, and a firm time table for turning it into a treaty.
5. Three quarters of all the carbon dioxide emitted since 1850 originated from the rich world. However, the numerically large populations in countries like China and India necessitates that these and other developing countries properly share the burden of limiting the additional trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.
6. Social justice demands that the industrialized world dig deep into their pockets to help poorer countries to adapt to climate change and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without increasing their emissions.
7. To overcome climate change, people everywhere will have to change their life styles and kick their ‘carbon habits’. For the next few decades world will require a feat of engineering and innovation that will match or surpass those for splitting the atom or putting a man on the moon. Let this spurt of innovation be in a spirit of cooperation and goodwill and not out of greed or competition as in the past.
8. Let the Copenhagen meeting reveal the triumph of optimism over pessimism, and vision over short sightedness. Let history judge this generation as one that saw a challenge and rose to it, and not as one so stupid that saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it.
(Source: The Hindu, December 7, 2009)
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
India Government on Climate change.
After being adamant on not caving in to the demands of the developed nations especially when it came to the prickly issue of climate change, the Indian government has agreed to soften its stance. The government has said that it was willing to extend more concessions if the rest of the world could arrive at a fair and equitable climate change agreement in Copenhagen. As reported in a leading business daily, the government has pledged a 20-25% cut in emissions intensity per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020. This is what the environment minister Jairam Ramesh had to say, "India has not caused global warming, but the country will try and make sure that it is part of the solution." Earlier, the stance adopted by India was that cuts should be distributed on the basis of per capita carbon emissions. According to this measure, India is well below the global average and the two lead polluters, China and the US. The fact that the environment minister has chosen to adopt a different approach and also that he was well supported in Parliament means that the country is ready to consider climate change as an important issue and accept moral responsibility.
The 5 Minute Wrap-Up, December 4, 09
Can Captured Carbon save coal? Biello, David .
Scientific American Earth (2009/06/10)
Capturing carbon dioxide may be the only hope to avoid a climate change catastrophe from burning fossil fuels.
OXYFUEL: In September 2007 the oxyfuel combustion chamber is lifted into place at the Schwarze Pumpe power plant in Germany--one of the first power plants in the world to capture carbon dioxide. Courtesy of Vattenfall
Like all big coal-fired power plants, the 1,600-megawatt-capacity Schwarze Pumpe plant in Spremberg, Germany, is undeniably dirty. Yet a small addition to the facility-a tiny boiler that pipes 30 MW worth of steam to local industrial customers-represents a hope for salvation from the global climate-changing consequences of burning fossil fuel.
To heat that boiler, the damp, crumbly brown coal known as lignite-which is even more polluting than the harder black anthracite variety-burns in the presence of pure oxygen, a process known as oxyfuel, releasing as waste both water vapor and that more notorious greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2). By condensing the water in a simple pipe, Vattenfall, the Swedish utility that owns the power plant, captures and isolates nearly 95 percent of the CO2 in a 99.7 percent pure form.
That CO2 is then compressed into a liquid and given to another company, Linde, for sale; potential users range from the makers of carbonated beverages, such as Coca-Cola, to oil firms that use it to squeeze more petroleum out of declining deposits. In principle, however, the CO2 could also be pumped deep underground and locked safely away in specific rock formations for millennia.
From the International Energy Agency to the United Nations-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such carbon capture and storage (CCS), particularly for coal-fired power plants, has been identified as a technology critical to enabling deep, rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. After all, coal burning is responsible for 40 percent of the 30 billion metric tons of CO2 emitted by human activity every year.
"There is the potential for the U.S. and other countries to continue to rely on coal as a source of energy while at the same time protecting the climate from the massive greenhouse gas emissions associated with coal," says Steve Caldwell, coordinator for regional climate change policy at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a Washington, D.C. think tank.
Even President Barack Obama has labeled the technology as important for "energy independence" and included $3.4 billion in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for "clean coal" power.
Today three types of technology can capture CO2 at a power plant. One, as at Schwarze Pumpe, involves the oxyfuel process: burning coal in pure oxygen to produce a stream of CO2-rich emissions. The second uses various forms of chemistry-in the form of amine scrubbers, special membranes or ionic liquids-to pull carbon dioxide out of a more mixed set of exhaust gases. The third is gasification, in which liquid or solid fuels are first turned into synthetic natural gas; CO2 from the conversion of the gas can be siphoned off.
Some U.S. utilities have already built or upgraded plants to capture CO2, which they either store or sell. The 180-MW Warrior Run coal-fired power plant in Cumberland, Md., already captures 96 percent of its CO2 emissions to sell for use as a fire extinguisher or dry ice. The Kingsport power plant in Kingsport, Tenn., has been capturing CO2 since 1984 to sell to carbonated beverage makers.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has invested more than $3 billion since 2001 to fund multiple CCS projects being conducted by seven regional partnerships, including demonstrations of ammonia capture technology at the massive coal-fired Pleasant Prairie power plant in Kenosha County, Wisc., and the R. E. Burger plant in Shadyside, Ohio. The Obama administration may even resurrect the FutureGen project-a 275-MW IGCC power plant that would capture 90 percent of its emissions; the Bush administration had canceled it because of spiraling costs (which may have been miscalculated). And the DoE has offered at least $8 billion in loan guarantees for coal-fired power plants with CCS.
Australia and China have demonstrated that postcombustion capture is possible in pilot plants. At Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria, a pilot plant run by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) will capture 1,000 metric tons of CO2 a year; the Australian research organization has also collaborated with China's Huaneng Group to use an amine scrubber to capture CO2 from a co-generation power plant in Beijing and then sell it.
But although multiple projects around the world examine or test aspects of CCS, few of them have been connected to a full-size power plant: one producing on average 500 MW and upward of 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a day-the core of the emissions problem. And the few that have been are either venting the CO2 after capturing it or selling it, instead of taking the next step and storing the greenhouse gas underground.
"It makes nine metric tons of CO2 per hour at full load," says Staffan Gortz, Vattenfall's CCS spokesman, of the $100-million CCS demonstration boiler at Schwarze Pumpe. But he acknowledges that "we don't have a storage site yet."
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Bhopal Gas Tragedy- What a shame?
What a shame?
Today, the Indian government is expected to announce broad targets for reducing carbon emissions. It is ironic that this announcement comes on the 25th anniversary of the country's worst industrial disasters. On this day in 1984, poisonous gas leaked from Union Carbide's Bhopal plant affecting over 5 lakh people. Nearly 20,000 people are believed to have died that night. The government's lack of concern to the plight of those affected can be clearly judged. All charges against Union Carbide were dropped. In return, the company paid the government Rs. 7.1 bn as compensation. Of this, Rs. 1.1 bn was to be used towards compensation of livestock. Hence, the compensation worked out to a paltry sum of approximately Rs 12,400 per person. Furthermore, till date the government seems to have done little to protect the environment in this area. Even today, ground water around the affected area contains very high levels of the chemical. The Indian government stands on the world stage today to proclaim its commitment toward protecting the environment. However, it must show commitment to its ideal by appropriate actions.
Source: The 5 minute wrap up, December 3, 09
Futuristic Electric Car Inspired by Owls
It’s dead silent, runs on electricity – and looks totally unlike any other vehicle you’ve ever seen. This bizarre yet kind of awesome electric car by auto designer Ralph Tayler-Webb, called ‘Halcyon’, is made for nature lovers and inspired by owls.
From EcoFriend:
Ralph’s research and development included photographing birds in flight, carving an owl in hardwood and sketching them in charcoal and with water colors. He took a flight in a glider over Dartmoor’s national park, handled and flew living owls and experimented with numerous 15th scale clay models.
More at peace with the natural world, Halcyon embraces naturally quiet electric power and in turn eliminates emissions on the vehicles immediate surroundings. Reducing aerodynamic disturbance to a minimum, covered wheels and a tapering teardrop cabin are assisted by gently twisting surface transitions to coax the air around the body with a mere whisper.
It’s tough to tell from some of the images, but occupants get an unobstructed panoramic view of their surroundings through the gigantic, curving windshield, which is free of window pillars. The body is made from lightweight yet impact-resistant porous aluminum foam, mimicking the hollow bones of an owl.
Sleek, sexy, thoughtful and applicable for real-world use – just the kind of design we love to see for the eco-friendly cars of the future. Our only question is, when do we get a test drive?
Get additional info and more photos at EcoFriend.
Link [EcoFriend]
Futuristic Electric Car Inspired by Owls
It’s dead silent, runs on electricity – and looks totally unlike any other vehicle you’ve ever seen. This bizarre yet kind of awesome electric car by auto designer Ralph Tayler-Webb, called ‘Halcyon’, is made for nature lovers and inspired by owls.
From EcoFriend:
Ralph’s research and development included photographing birds in flight, carving an owl in hardwood and sketching them in charcoal and with water colors. He took a flight in a glider over Dartmoor’s national park, handled and flew living owls and experimented with numerous 15th scale clay models.
More at peace with the natural world, Halcyon embraces naturally quiet electric power and in turn eliminates emissions on the vehicles immediate surroundings. Reducing aerodynamic disturbance to a minimum, covered wheels and a tapering teardrop cabin are assisted by gently twisting surface transitions to coax the air around the body with a mere whisper.
It’s tough to tell from some of the images, but occupants get an unobstructed panoramic view of their surroundings through the gigantic, curving windshield, which is free of window pillars. The body is made from lightweight yet impact-resistant porous aluminum foam, mimicking the hollow bones of an owl.
Sleek, sexy, thoughtful and applicable for real-world use – just the kind of design we love to see for the eco-friendly cars of the future. Our only question is, when do we get a test drive?
Get additional info and more photos at EcoFriend.
Link [EcoFriend]
Related Ways to Take Action:
Open Solar Electric Generator
Create a new Electric Vehicle Classification
Green Power Plants
Powered by Social Actions
Written by Stephanie Rogers • Filed Under Green Gear
Tagged: Cars, Electric Vehicles, green design, Green Gear, Green Technology
Related Posts:
Stackable Electric Paris City Cars Save Energy and Space
Will Consumers Kill the Electric Car?
Car Tires Made from Orange Peel Oil
GreenWheel Transforms Bikes from Pedal-Powered to Electric
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
