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2017’s Greenest Cities in the U.S.

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Anchorage, Alaska, has more green space than any city in the country, while Lubbock, Texas, has the worst air quality. Residents of Honolulu, Hawaii, have access to the most farmers markets per capita, while walking is hardly an option in Chesapeake, Virginia. How do all of these factors — and many more — play into the United States’ greenest cities?

WalletHub looked at the country’s 100 largest cities across 22 indicators of environmental friendliness in four dimensions: environment, transportation, energy sources, and lifestyle and policy. After crunching the numbers on everything from water quality to miles of bicycle lanes to community garden plots, here are the cities that came out on top:

  1. San Francisco, CA
  2. San Diego, CA
  3. Fremont, CA
  4. Honolulu, HI
  5. San Jose, CA
  6. Washington, D.C.
  7. Sacramento, CA
  8. Irvine, CA
  9. Portland, OR
  10. Oakland, CA

Source:

WalletHub

On the other end of the spectrum, some cities didn’t so so well on the green rankings. Here are the country’s worst performers:

100. Corpus Christi, TX
99. Baton Rouge, LA
98. Jacksonville, FL
97. Louisville, KY
96. St. Petersburg, FL
95. Tulsa, OK
94. Toledo, OH
93. Lexington-Fayette, KY
92. Cleveland, OH
91. Oklahoma City, OK

One key component that’s missing from the rankings? Recycling services. According to WalletHub:

Although recycling is vital to the sustainability efforts of each city, the types and sizes of recycling facilities vary widely by city. We therefore were unable to include — due to the lack of comparable city-level data — metrics that either measure the availability of recycling programs or the amount of waste recycled in each city.

What do you think? Does anything on the greenest cities list surprise you? Can Corpus Christi change its ways? Does California deserve seven of the top 10 spots? Check out the full results, along with opinions from experts, here.

Feature image courtesy of Adobe

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2017’s Greenest Cities in the U.S.

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Can This Awesome Solar-Powered Plane Make It Across the Pacific?

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Wired and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Later this week, a single-seat, solar-powered plane with a wingspan longer than that of a Boeing 747 will take off from Nanjing, China, headed for Honolulu. For a normal passenger jet, that’s about a 12-hour flight. Solar Impulse 2, the 5,000-pound plane powered by nothing but sunshine, will take five days.

This is by far the hardest part of the plane’s journey around the world, which started in Abu Dhabi last month, and should finish there in August. Swiss pilots Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg have been working up to this for 12 years, and they’re fully aware of how trying it will be.

“If we are optimistic, we will say that we’ve done six legs out of 12,” Piccard says. “And if we are pessimistic, we will say have have traveled 8,000 kilometers out of 35,000.”

Which is to say, things are going according to plan, but there’s much left to do, including the flight to Honolulu, then a 3,000-mile leap over the rest of the Pacific to Phoenix, Arizona.

The trick to staying aloft for days at a time is straightforward. The solar panels that cover the wings and fuselage of Solar Impulse 2 charge four extra-efficient batteries, which power the 17.4-horsepower motors. You charge up when the sun’s out and cruise at up to 28,000 feet. At night, you drop to about 5,000 feet, converting altitude into distance.

There are two factors that make the Pacific crossing especially challenging: The ocean’s size and the pokey speed of the plane (try 20 to 90 mph) mean each pilot will need to spend four or five days and nights aloft to reach land, in a cockpit that resembles a tube hotel in miniature. The second problem is the weather: Solar Impulse 2 needs pretty specific conditions to takeoff, cruise, and land—and that all needs to be planned out five days in advance.

André Borschberg has spent 72 hours at a time in a simulator to prepare for this flight. Niels Ackermann/Rezo.ch/Solar Impulse

Borschberg is scheduled to take off from Nanjin on May 7, at the earliest. If the flight goes as expected, he will take five days to make the trip to Honolulu. Then Piccard will make the four-day trip to Phoenix.

Pilot Preparation

It doesn’t sound like much fun: There’s no walking around, or even standing up in, the 135-cubic foot cockpit. The cabin is neither heated nor pressurized, though it is insulated.

To get used to the cramped conditions, the pilots have spent long stretches in a simulator. They use meditation, breathing exercises, and whatever yoga they can manage to keep their bodies and minds feeling as fresh as possible.

Piccard and Borschberg will sleep in 20 minute stretches (the aircraft has autopilot functions and there’s not much to collide with over the Pacific), six to eight times a day. It’s hardly a good night’s rest, but it’s enough to get by, and the seat fully reclines. They have an alarm set to wake them up, but their bodies have gotten used to the routine, and don’t really need it, Piccard says. “It’s very interesting how the human mind can adapt to this type of new situation.”

The grub sounds pretty good, especially for air travel: Nestlé made special meals that can survive temperatures from -4 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s mushroom risotto, chicken with rice, and potatoes with cream and cheese. “It’s very nice,” Piccard says. The toilet, FYI, is built into the seat.

It may seem difficult to stay focused when you’ve seen nothing but ocean for days on end, but it’s not a major concern to the pilots. “There’s quite a lot of things to do,” Borschberg says. More importantly, they’ve been working up to this for more than a decade. They’re jazzed.

Of course, they’ve got to be ready for things to go wrong. In the event of a sudden catastrophe, like an engine or battery fire, they’ve trained for bailing. If cloudy weather stops the panels from charging the batteries adequately, Piccard and Borschberg will take their time putting on the dry suit, preparing the parachute, alerting mission control, and switching on an emergency beacon. “You get out very peacefully,” Piccard says.

The cockpit of Solar Impulse 2 resembles a tube hotel, in miniature. Solar Impulse/Pizzolante

They key in any situation is getting away from the plane—there’s a serious risk of electrocution when you fly a pile of electronics and batteries into the ocean. Then you settle into your life raft, because you’re thousands of miles from land, and major shipping lanes, it may take two or three days to be picked up.

The Weather Game

There’s a lot to take into account, says team meteorologist Luc Trullemans. Routes are decided using radar and satellite data, and flight simulations. Equipment from engineering consultancy Altran and a team mathematician lend a hand. Cloudy skies mean the solar panels can’t recharge the batteries. Wind conditions are crucial: Tailwinds are best, and the team will tolerate cross tailwinds up to 45 degrees (90 degrees would be blow fully sideways). Headwinds are a problem for a plane with limited power: Between Myanmar and Chongqing, China, Piccard found himself flying backwards at one point.

The six legs of the Solar Impulse 2 journey already completed have been relatively short affairs, between 15 and 20 hours. That’s not so tricky to plan, because at the time of takeoff, you have an excellent idea of what the weather will look like for the whole flight.

All that gets way more difficult now, because the team can’t predict the weather with the accuracy it wants more than three days in advance. “We must be 100 percent certain with our weather forecasts for the first three days of the flight and of course, the takeoff conditions,” says Trullemans. After that, the route can always be changed … on the fly … but major deviations are best avoided. The plan is to keep a sharp eye on coming conditions. The pilot can fly to the north or south to avoid a cold front, for example.

Beyond that, you hope for the best: Tailwinds, clear skies, and no need to inflate that life raft.

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Can This Awesome Solar-Powered Plane Make It Across the Pacific?

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This Pacific island has so much plastic pollution it might become a Superfund site

This Pacific island has so much plastic pollution it might become a Superfund site

Forest and Kim Starr

There’s so much plastic crap floating in the Pacific Ocean and washing up on shorelines that one atoll in the midst of the mess could be declared a Superfund site.

Tern Island is the largest island in the French Frigate Shoals, a coral archipelago 550 miles northwest of Honolulu, part of the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge. Replete with lagoons, wildlife, and alluring white sands, the island could be a paradise on Earth. But it’s not. Plastic pollution there is so bad that a year ago the Center for Biological Diversity asked the feds to consider adding Tern Island and the rest of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, plus a part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that’s in federal waters, to its Superfund list — a list of the nation’s most polluted places. From the petition [PDF]:

The reefs and shores of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands are littered with hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic garbage. Derelict fishing gear and debris entangles innumerable fish, sea birds, and marine mammals, often resulting in injury and death. Plastic pollution harms wildlife via entanglement, ingestion, and toxic contamination, causes substantial economic impacts, and is a principal threat to the quality of the environment.

A Superfund designation would help mobilize federal efforts to clean up the area. But it would be unprecedented — out of the hundreds of sites on the Superfund list, none was put there because of plastic pollution. “It’s not really common for people to make petitions like this,” an EPA spokesman said after the petition was filed.

But after giving the unusual request some consideration, the feds are on board with a preliminary study that will help decide whether such a listing is warranted.

Well, they’re kind of on board.

The EPA and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service don’t plan to study the whole region as requested, but they have committed to assessing whether Tern Island, which at 25 acres is the area’s biggest island, should be added to the Superfund list. From Honolulu Civil Beat:

[W]hat has distinguished Tern Island from the other islands, and piqued the EPA’s interest, is that the island’s monk seals are showing elevated levels of PCB’s. The toxic, cancer-causing chemicals may be entering the marine food chain through tiny plastics, said Dean Higuchi, a spokesman for the EPA. …

The environmental study will focus on whether toxic substances are entering the marine food chain through micro-plastics and potentially accumulating at increasing levels, as well as the general effects of micro-plastics on marine creatures and wildlife.

The EPA is also concerned about old landfill sites with buried electrical equipment on the island, which may be releasing PCBs and other hazardous contaminants. Tern Island was the site of a U.S. Naval Station during World War II. 

The federal study could ultimately affect an area larger than the 25-acre island. Improving the government’s understanding of micro-plastics in the environment could lead to more stringent controls on pollution from storm-water drains and water-treatment plants.


Source
Plastic Debris Could Make Remote Pacific Island a Superfund Site, Honolulu Civil Beat

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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This Pacific island has so much plastic pollution it might become a Superfund site

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