4 May 2015, Climate News Network: No green light for whitening Arctic’s melting ice. Scientists pour cold water on the idea of preventing ice melt by using geo-technology to keep it white so that it reflects sunlight and stays frozen. Yet another geo-engineering solution to climate change has been proven potentially useless: even if you could paint the Arctic white, the world would still get warmer. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
The winners and losers in Tesla’s battery plan for the home. Tesla’s plans to use its new battery storage system to power homes will provide households with more opportunities to reduce bills. But it will also cause headaches for the electricity distribution companies.The company’s founder, Elon Musk, announced last week that it had developed the Powerwall batteries that could store electricity generated from solar panels. Read More here
3 May 2015, Climate News Network: US braces itself for even worse wildfire season. Years of drought and higher temperatures mean the chance of devastating wildfires in the southwest US is higher than ever − particularly in southern California. The firefighters are primed, hoses at the ready. May and June are often the peak months for forest fires in the southwest of the US, and the outlook for this year is grim. “I wish I could have some hope,” says Dr Wally Covington, director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at North Arizona University. “It’s just a terrible situation in southern California.” Read More here
April 21, 2015, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Caltech student fathers breakthrough in green chemistry. ….The baby in this metaphor is a catalyst that, unlike its cousins that pervade modern industry, is based not on precious metals like gold and platinum, but rather on something you can get out of a banana: potassium. The father (or perhaps more accurately if we ignore the gender problem, the mother) is a Caltech grad student named Anton Toutov, who reports that the delivery was long and difficult….This new technology is already capable of manufacturing chemicals used in pharmaceuticals, agriculture and cosmetics in a much more environmentally friendly way than traditional methods. The catalyst requires little or no processing with petrochemicals and operates at much lower temperatures than standard catalytic methods, both of which keep its carbon footprint tiny. It can reduce air pollution from certain kinds of transportation fuels and, unlike the precious-metal processes it replaces, it produces no toxic waste. But like a baby, its ultimate accomplishments may be yet to come. Read More here