Category Archives: sustainable energy

Toxic masculinity is probably destroying the planet.

It started with the cinematic, widely serenaded death of spunky little spacebot Cassini, closing out a 13-year mission to Saturn with a headlong dive into the planet’s gaseous atmosphere.

Meanwhile, back on a more familiar planet, an orbiting satellite named DMSP F19 quietly blinked out. The DMSP weather-tracking satellites have meticulously recorded Arctic sea ice coverage since 1978, which makes them one of our longest-running climate observations. But in 2015, Congress voted to mothball the last satellite in the series. Now, on the cusp of the biggest planetary shift humans have ever seen, we stand to lose one of our best means for understanding it.

Also this year, I started following LandsatBot, a project by Welsh glaciologist Martin O’Leary that tweets out random satellite views of Earth’s surface hourly. Like a geographic Chat Roulette, LandsatBot scratches the same imaginative itch that high-def images of Saturn’s rings do, but its alien views are all terrestrial. From satellite height, every landscape looks like an abstract painting, all fractal rivers and impressionist daubs of cloud.

These days, amidst an unending torrent of Game of Thrones gifs, signs of the end of democracy, and variations on that distracted boyfriend meme, I sometimes come across a Landsat image dropped without comment into the clutter. I stop and stare. Whether it’s an astroturf-green wedge of land somewhere in the Indonesian archipelago or the Crest-colored swirl of icy Antarctic seas, I try to imagine the world down there: A place I will probably never go, without landmarks or footprints, but irrevocably changed by us. Whether you recognize it or not, it’s home.

Amelia Urry is an associate editor at Grist.

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Toxic masculinity is probably destroying the planet.

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Urban hunters are pretty delighted by the coyote takeover.

It started with the cinematic, widely serenaded death of spunky little spacebot Cassini, closing out a 13-year mission to Saturn with a headlong dive into the planet’s gaseous atmosphere.

Meanwhile, back on a more familiar planet, an orbiting satellite named DMSP F19 quietly blinked out. The DMSP weather-tracking satellites have meticulously recorded Arctic sea ice coverage since 1978, which makes them one of our longest-running climate observations. But in 2015, Congress voted to mothball the last satellite in the series. Now, on the cusp of the biggest planetary shift humans have ever seen, we stand to lose one of our best means for understanding it.

Also this year, I started following LandsatBot, a project by Welsh glaciologist Martin O’Leary that tweets out random satellite views of Earth’s surface hourly. Like a geographic Chat Roulette, LandsatBot scratches the same imaginative itch that high-def images of Saturn’s rings do, but its alien views are all terrestrial. From satellite height, every landscape looks like an abstract painting, all fractal rivers and impressionist daubs of cloud.

These days, amidst an unending torrent of Game of Thrones gifs, signs of the end of democracy, and variations on that distracted boyfriend meme, I sometimes come across a Landsat image dropped without comment into the clutter. I stop and stare. Whether it’s an astroturf-green wedge of land somewhere in the Indonesian archipelago or the Crest-colored swirl of icy Antarctic seas, I try to imagine the world down there: A place I will probably never go, without landmarks or footprints, but irrevocably changed by us. Whether you recognize it or not, it’s home.

Amelia Urry is an associate editor at Grist.

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Urban hunters are pretty delighted by the coyote takeover.

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Superfund sites are in danger of flooding, putting millions of Americans at risk.

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Superfund sites are in danger of flooding, putting millions of Americans at risk.

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Georgia could have put an end to nuclear plant construction in the U.S., but it didn’t.

Growing up in the ’90s, some of my favorite people in the world were Bill Nye, Cookie Monster, and Wishbone. That definitely did NOT make me one of the cooler kids at school, who got to chat about cable TV shows I knew nothing about.

But hey, my buddy Bill gave me the crazy idea that science was fun. Wishbone instilled in me a love of reading. And Sesame Street legit taught me, a new immigrant kid from the Philippines, how to speak English.

Now I write about the environment, with a special focus on all the nerdy, science-y, but supremely important environmental stuff that impacts kids in marginalized communities. Those are the kids who might rely on things like public broadcasting to close educational gaps — just like I did. It helped me get to where I am today.

So when Bill Nye resurfaced in 2017 in a big way — with a new series on Netflix and in a new documentary about the man behind the bow tie, I was obsessed. In the film, he meets YouTubers taking the torch when it comes to making fun, open-to-anyone educational videos. It’s all part of his quest to protect science education and keep it accessible to kids. And what makes the documentary even cooler for me? It’s on PBS.

Justine Calma is a Grist fellow.

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Georgia could have put an end to nuclear plant construction in the U.S., but it didn’t.

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As global temperatures rise, more refugees will flee to Europe.

Growing up in the ’90s, some of my favorite people in the world were Bill Nye, Cookie Monster, and Wishbone. That definitely did NOT make me one of the cooler kids at school, who got to chat about cable TV shows I knew nothing about.

But hey, my buddy Bill gave me the crazy idea that science was fun. Wishbone instilled in me a love of reading. And Sesame Street legit taught me, a new immigrant kid from the Philippines, how to speak English.

Now I write about the environment, with a special focus on all the nerdy, science-y, but supremely important environmental stuff that impacts kids in marginalized communities. Those are the kids who might rely on things like public broadcasting to close educational gaps — just like I did. It helped me get to where I am today.

So when Bill Nye resurfaced in 2017 in a big way — with a new series on Netflix and in a new documentary about the man behind the bow tie, I was obsessed. In the film, he meets YouTubers taking the torch when it comes to making fun, open-to-anyone educational videos. It’s all part of his quest to protect science education and keep it accessible to kids. And what makes the documentary even cooler for me? It’s on PBS.

Justine Calma is a Grist fellow.

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As global temperatures rise, more refugees will flee to Europe.

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Sanders endorses Clinton to lead the fight against climate change

heartbern

Sanders endorses Clinton to lead the fight against climate change

By on Jul 12, 2016Share

Bernie Sanders officially threw in the towel on Tuesday in New Hampshire by endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. Hitting on the themes his campaign has stressed throughout the primaries, Sanders laid out what this election is really about. One of his themes has been climate change, which featured heavily in his speech:

This election is about climate change, the greatest environmental crisis facing our planet, and the need to leave this world in a way that is healthy and habitable for our kids and future generations.

Hillary Clinton is listening to the scientists who tell us that if we do not act boldly in the very near future there will be more drought, more floods, more acidification of the oceans, more rising sea levels. She understands that we must work with countries around the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy — and that when we do that we can create a whole lot of good paying jobs.

Donald Trump: Well, like most Republicans, he chooses to reject science — something no presidential candidate should do. He believes that climate change is a hoax. In fact, he wants to expand the use of fossil fuel. That would be a disaster for our country and our planet.

The endorsement rally was kicked off by climate activist (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben. “Secretary Clinton, we wish you Godspeed in the fight that now looms,” McKibben said.

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Sanders endorses Clinton to lead the fight against climate change

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Bernie Sanders lays out what Democrats should do next

Feelin’ the bern

Bernie Sanders lays out what Democrats should do next

By on Jun 23, 2016Share

The race for the Democratic nomination may be more or less over for Bernie Sanders. The natural question is: What does he do next? The Vermont senator insists that’s the wrong question, in an op-ed published in the Washington Post. Instead, it’s about “what the 12 million Americans who voted for a political revolution want.”

Those 12 million, according to Sanders, want to see his major platform points — a just economy, overturning Citizens United, criminal justice reform, and action on climate change — come to fruition. He writes on climate change:

If present trends continue, scientists tell us the planet will be 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by the end of the century — which means more droughts, floods, extreme weather disturbances, rising sea levels and acidification of the oceans. This is a planetary crisis of extraordinary magnitude.

What do we want? We want the United States to lead the world in pushing our energy system away from fossil fuel and toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We want a tax on carbon, the end of fracking and massive investment in wind, solar, geothermal and other sustainable technologies.

Sanders’ supporters last week pushed the Democratic National Committee to embrace many of these points in its party platform, including calls for a nationwide fracking ban and a carbon tax. While Sanders and Clinton mostly agree on the science and dangers of climate change, his rival never endorsed either of these proposals.

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Bernie Sanders lays out what Democrats should do next

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These tiles harness electricity from your footsteps

Something’s afoot

These tiles harness electricity from your footsteps

By on Jun 20, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As Fitbit users like to point out, walking burns a lot of calories. But the energy you expend doing it ceases to be useful after your sneakers hit pavement. That’s where Pavegen CEO and founder Laurence Kemball-Cook saw room to create a new kind of sustainable energy technology. His company’s Pavegen floor tiles generate electricity by harnessing the power of footsteps.

The tiles are a kind of kinetic energy recovery system. We’ve seen these before in race cars and buses — but where recovery systems in automobiles convert the kinetic energy normally lost in braking to electrical energy, Pavegen tiles are all about capturing the spring in your step. Tread on a tile and the surface depresses up to one centimeter (Kemball-Cook compares the sensation to walking in a children’s play-area). The downward force drives an energy-storing flywheel inside the tile, which spins to convert kinetic energy into electrical energy through electromagnetic induction. It’s like a generator — only instead of spinning a turbine with wind, water, or coal, it’s spinning a flywheel with footsteps.

The beauty of these tiles is that they can conceivably go anywhere there’s floorspace and foot traffic — think airport terminals, sidewalks, and playing fields. That idea has attracted support from companies as big as Shell and celebrities as diverse as Al Gore and Akon (yes, that Akon) — but backers were hard to come by when Kemball-Cook started out. He began developing the technology while studying design at Loughborough University, and developed the first prototype in all of 15 hours. “I just hacked it together. There was wood in it, and it was held together by duct tape. I went to 150 venture capitalists, and they all said no. The government said, ‘It would never work, we can’t help you.’”

That was seven years ago. Pavegen tiles have since been used to help light soccer pitches in Brazil and Nigeria, a hallway in Heathrow Airport, and offices and shopping centers in London. And that was all with less-efficient technology. Earlier versions of tiles were rectangular, and only produced power when someone’s foot fell in the center of a tile. The latest generation of Pavegen tile, V3, is triangular, which allows them to include a generator in each corner. That means the whole tile pivots toward a generator no matter where you step. The V3 generates 5 continuous watts of power as you walk across it — that’s more than 200 times more efficient than Kemball-Cook’s first prototype.

The new tile design accommodates three separate generators to maximize the power of your steps. Pavegen

Granted, five watts isn’t a ton, and not everyone is convinced that the world will ever run on Pavegen. For the 2013 Paris Marathon, Pavegen laid down a 25-meter strip of the last generation of tiles, and they ended up generating 4.7 kilowatt hours of energy — enough to keep an LED bulb burning for over a month, but nowhere near enough to power your home. “The very basic physics of it is pressure times the deformation of the material,” says David Horsley, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at UC Davis. “You’re not going to get very much for a step, considering you can get 100 watts from a square meter of solar paneling. But for small wearable electronics like watches, or maybe even your phone, this kind of energy harvesting makes sense.”

So it’s not going to put big oil out of business, and you may need to take a lot of steps to make them worth it. Good thing they’re durable as hell. “The floor is one of the harshest environments known to man,” Kemball-Cook says. “You have to be able to withstand environment challenges, water, vandalism. You need good test equipment. We have a footfall rig with four pneumatic drivers that’s being going nonstop for four years, running analytics and just trying to destroy the product.”

With the V3, Kemball-Cook thinks he’s finally reached the point where lower costs and higher efficiency will allow him to scale. Other people think so, too, with installations slated for locations like Oxford Street, London’s bustling shopping thoroughfare, and walkways outside the White House. Tribal Planet, a mobile analytics and activism company, thinks the V3’s new data-tracking abilities could help people forge more personal conceptual models of energy production and consumption. “Energy hasn’t really been a consumer product. Even utilities are a very abstract idea,” says Tribal Planet CEO Jeff Martin, a former Apple executive. “Is my utility getting this energy from nuclear power plant or a wind farm or a coal mine? I have no idea. It’s probably a combination of all that.”

If Pavegen tiles were constantly underfoot — and connected to your phone — you could track how much energy you produced personally. Kemball-Cook likes to think you could even be rewarded for it. “Imagine if you go to get sneakers and you get money off, because you’ve been generating energy for the store,” he says. There’s altruistic potential as well: Kemball-Cook envisions users donating the energy produced by their footsteps to any Pavegen-powered community in the world.

This notion of person-to-person energy accountability excites Pavegen and Tribal’s leadership. They want users to think of their steps almost like “a vote” in favor of a location, an organization, or a policy. “Not wasting your footsteps, or anyone else’s, really starts a conversation around energy that I think is more constructive than abstract concepts, like carbon-offset, that consumers are typically engaged in,” Martin says. “My vision is that this becomes a civic duty, because sustainability and wellness are inextricably connected.”

That’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s highly unlikely that Pavegen’s technology will outshine the promise of solar or wind power. But its unique ability to make the road toward greener energy tangible is what makes it exciting. With Pavegen, whether you can wrap your head around the nuances of wind turbines or carbon accounting or not, doing your part for sustainable energy can literally be your next step.

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These tiles harness electricity from your footsteps

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Our favorite Bernie Sanders moments

Our favorite Bernie Sanders moments

By on Jun 10, 2016Share

He called climate change the greatest threat to our national security. He pulled Hillary Clinton to the left on climate and energy. He did a good amount of yelling. Bernie Sanders almost certainly isn’t going to be the Democratic nominee for president, but here’s a look back at the Vermont senator’s greatest environmental hits.

On taxing carbon: His climate change plan called for a carbon tax that will “tax polluters causing the climate crisis, and return billions of dollars to working families to ensure the fossil fuel companies don’t subject us to unfair rate hikes.” And it aimed for a 40 percent cut in emissions by 2030, compared to 1990 levels — a level of ambition on par with Europe’s.

On offshore drilling: The plan also called for ending offshore drilling, for the sake of energy security and the environment. “If we are serious about moving beyond oil toward energy independence, lowering the cost of energy, combating climate change, and cutting carbon pollution emissions, then we must ban offshore drilling,” it read.

On fracking: Sanders wants to ban fracking on public and private lands. If he didn’t get cooperation from Congress, his campaign told Grist he would take a number of executive actions to more tightly regulate fracking and encourage a shift toward renewables. “We cannot allow our children to be poisoned by toxic drinking water just so a handful of fossil fuel companies can make even more in profits,” he wrote in April.

On climate denial: “The reality is that the fossil fuel industry is to blame for much of the climate change skepticism in America,” Sanders says in his climate plan. In October, he joined those calling for the Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil’s climate obfuscation.

On Donald Trump’s climate denial: “How brilliant can you be?” mocked Sanders in front of a New Hampshire audience in January. “The entire scientific community has concluded that climate change is real and causing major problems, and Trump believes that it’s a hoax created by the Chinese. Surprised it wasn’t the Mexicans.” Trump, for his part, has a history of flip-flopping on climate.

On encountering a climate-denying teenager:Thank you for your question. You’re wrong.”

On climate change as a security threat: In an October debate, Sanders said climate change was the greatest threat to U.S. national security: “The scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change, transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable. That is a major crisis.” In a debate in November, Sanders said that “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.” (PolitiFact later called out the causality here as Mostly False, but there are indeed some linkages between climate change and war.)

On nuclear power: Sanders wants to phase it out. In March, a campaign spokesperson told Grist, “Whether it’s the exceptional destructiveness of uranium mining, the fact that there’s no good way to store nuclear waste or the lingering risk of a tragedy like Fukushima or Chernobyl in the U.S., the truth is: Nuclear power is a cure worse than the disease.” Instead, Sanders calls for “cleaner energy sources like wind and solar” to meet the country’s energy needs.

On the Paris climate agreement: “While this is a step forward it goes nowhere near far enough. The planet is in crisis. We need bold action in the very near future and this does not provide that,” said Sanders in December. Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta later used this statement to argue that Sanders wanted to back out of the Paris Agreement.

On keeping it in the ground: In November, he cosponsored the Keep It in the Ground Act of 2015, which would halt new coal leases on public lands and prohibit drilling on the outer continental shelf.

On the fossil fuel industry:To hell with the fossil fuel industry.”

In March, the Climate Hawks Vote PAC ran a survey asking which candidate it should it endorse, and Sanders got 92 percent of the vote. “We need clean-energy leadership in the White House,” wrote the group it its subsequent endorsement of Sanders. “We need a climate revolution.” But don’t take it from them. Here’s everything you need to know, from a classic Bernie Brief on climate:

We’ll miss you, Mr. Sanders — but you won’t be forgotten. In a changing climate, whole swathes of the world will be feeling the Bern for decades to come.

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Our favorite Bernie Sanders moments

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France Will Require Green Roofs and Solar Panels on New Buildings

France has passed a law that will require all new commercial buildings to be equipped with either green roofs or solar panels, according to The Guardian. The law states that any new building constructed in a commercial space must be covered halfway with either greenery or solar panelsbusinesses can decide which option to choose.

The benefits of green roofs

Green roofs are a solution to many urban and environmental problems and are popular among environmental activists and green-minded city planners alike. Covering a building with plant life insulates the structure, making it more energy efficient. In fact, green roofs can reduce the amount of air conditioning necessary to cool a building by up to 75 percent, according to Greenroofs.org.

Thats not all that these sky-high landscapes can do for cities. Like all plant life, these oases of greenery absorb carbon and keep the air cool, helping to mitigate the Heat Island Effect: a phenomenon that makes urban areas significantly warmer than suburban and rural communities because of human activities. Green roofs also provide sanctuary for birds, bees and other species that need spaces to call home in crowded, dense cities.

Green roof laws: An international trend

France isnt the first country to enact legislation encouraging rooftop greenery. Cities such as Tokyo, Toronto, Zurich and Copenhagen also require new buildings to have some or all of their roofs covered in plants. So far, U.S. cities have opted for tax breaks rather than legislation to address the issue.

Offering incentives such as tax breaks is better than making someone do something, Bradley Rowe of the MSU Green Roof Research Program told Yes Magazine in an interview last year. Building owners forced to put on a green roof may cut corners.

Solar panels as an alternative

Of course, French businesses arent being forced to cover half of their roofs in greenerythey can opt for solar panels instead. Solar panel use has grown rapidly in France, with 2014 figures showing 5,300 MW of solar energy production annually. Its a number that continues to rise as the country shifts toward more sustainable energy policies.

The green roof and solar panel legislation is expected to be a step in the right direction. Though activists had initially wanted mandatory green roof laws for every new building, government officials convinced them to accept the law as it currently stands. The next time you visit France, you may notice a little more plant life on the rooftops!

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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France Will Require Green Roofs and Solar Panels on New Buildings

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