Gas

Biofuel is cool. Britain is planning on blending 5% biodiesel with their gasoline and diesel fuel (which is a small enough amount that ordinary engines won't require modification) by 2010, a strategy also endorsed by the American truckers, and various Midwest governors are touting their alternative-fuel vehicles.

Unhappily, conventional agriculture uses lots of petroleum in its own right, so it's not clear how much less fossil fuel we're actually burning; earlier this year, a study by David Pimentel and colleagues, focusing on corn alcohol, was the latest to find no savings at all for the cases they examined.

Pickings

The newest Utne Reader arrived yesterday. I can't understand why magazines feel compelled to revise their perfectly adequate typography every few years - in this case it was to a ghastly razor-thin font with almost double spacing, and fancy but distracting graphical motifs that left the impression that the whole magazine was one of the advertising inserts that the tourism ministries of small tropical countries like to commission. Still, they summarized a few good articles: National Street Playing Day is slowing down cars in the Netherlands, and a Vancouver couple found that subsisting on food from within a 100-mile radius was an effective weight-loss method in some seasons.

Bright idea

WorldChanging mentions a new, simpler approach to making white-light (as opposed to single-wavelength) LEDs using very small (smaller than the wavelength of light!) cadmium selenide crystals. Similar crystals could also be used to absorb sunlight in photovoltaic systems. According to Vanderbilt's press release: The white-light quantum dots, by contrast, produce a smoother distribution of wavelengths in the visible spectrum with a slightly warmer, slightly more yellow tint, reports Michael Bowers, the graduate student who made the quantum dots and discovered their unusual property. As a result, the light produced by the quantum dots looks more nearly like the “full spectrum” reading lights now on the market which produce a light spectrum closer to that of sunlight than normal fluorescent tubes or light bulbs.

Map madness

Check out PlaceOpedia, a site which aims to annotate Google Maps with links to correponding Wikipedia articles. It should be helpful for finding local sights like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which would be a good place for replicating Lemuria. It would help to also have map links from the Wikipedia articles.

Storm

I couldn't believe this morning's news headline that the hurricane in the Caribbean is now the most intense Atlantic storm ever measured - but it turns out to be true. In fact, this year saw three of the five most intense Atlantic hurricanes ever, all in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. If this level of storminess continues over the next few years, the entire Gulf coast is likely to become depopulated, and the remaining houses will be built on stilts, like in pictures of certain Neolithic villages. For now, south Floridians should be watching out.

Also, Greenpeace is protesting European plywood imports from China, which gets timber from rainforests in Papua and elsewhere. The London Independent puts the story in the perspective of China's increasing dominance of world manufacturing.

China banned logging in large areas of its own natural forest in 1998 after catastrophic floods, themselves a direct result of deforestation, killed thousands of people. "This ban, coupled with massive growth in Chinese timber processing capacity and a liberalisation of trade barriers, led China to look overseas in its hunger for timber," says the Greenpeace report.

Keeping warm

As our rainy season starts, the NY Times covers New Yorkers' reactions to sharp increases in natural gas and heating oil costs in an article entitled "Reaching for Blanket, Not Thermostat, as Days Cool and Oil Costs Rise". It advises: "At these oil prices, cashmere was starting to look affordable."

For the coffee drinkers out there, green LA girl is doing an extended series on fair-trade coffee (or lack thereof) at California Starbucks shops.

Consumerism

Heard a talk today about the multitude of nasty chemicals that leach out of plastic, and I'm running off to upgrade my water bottles to glass.

At Grist, arch- research associate Umbra patiently explains why eating meat requires more water, land and energy than eating soy. And GoTo Reviews covers a sleek-looking if not completely necessary pasta cooker.

Play to win

WorldChanging has a review of some recent multiplayer climate-policy games. The European Climate Forum is quoted as explaining:

Climate games may make the difference when communicating highly complex issues of climate change because they introduce a rather simple but very important element into communication: having fun. As known from the science of learning, having fun catalyses learning processes remarkably and makes people interested in subjects they would not make inquiries into otherwise.

WorldChanging also looked at the green chemistry angle of this year's Nobel. And while we're at that time of year, the LA Times has an amusing article titled The Nobel Prize for Creativity about the efforts of universities to link themselves, however tenuously, to as many Nobel laureates as possible. David Baltimore, Caltech's president, opines: "It is sort of a game, and you might as well play it by whatever rules you want, like solitaire".

Save plastic

The NY Times has discovered the joys of de-diapering:

Ingrid Bauer, author of "Diaper Free! The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene" (Natural Wisdom Press, 2001), believes it is easiest to begin toilet training in the first six months. To start, parents are taught to hold the baby by the thighs in a seated position against their stomachs and to make an encouraging hiss or grunt. With practice, parents learn their child's rhythms...

For families who practice the technique, the advantages are many: savings in the cost of diapers, which can reach $3,000 a child; less guilt about contributing to the 22 billion disposable diapers that end up in landfills every year; no diaper rash, and a nursery that doesn't reek of diaper pail. They also note that age 2, a common age for toilet training, is a time of notorious willfulness and a terrible age to start teaching any child anything.

World's largest seawater desalination plant opens in Israel

According to a Dow press release, the reverse osomosis plant on the Mediterranean coast "will provide approximately 15% of the total household water consumption in Israel". It's good to hear that Israel is diversifying its water supply. Santa Barbara, on the tail end of the canals from the Colorado River and the Sierras, has built a smallish desalination plant years ago, which is hardly use, but southern California is a veritable rice paddy compared with the Mideast, and with a few fewer English ornamental plants new water supplies shouldn't be necessary.

Hat tip: HG.

Economy

It's encouraging that even in America, gasoline demand has some price elasticity. Bicycle sales are rising, car sales are down, and gas consumption is a couple percent lower than last year. The screaming headline in today's LA Daily News is "Downsizing vehicles", and the story has even made it to Israel (with commenters noting that telecommuting likely to gain acceptance as another good way to save gas). Our ever-adaptable American car companies are innovating in their usual perceptive way: according to Newsweek, "GM is counting on a new crop of full-bodied SUVs arriving next year to drive its comeback. And though the models are still big, GM designers burnished the edges to make them look smaller."

Gathering

I went to the International Carbon Dioxide Conference, held at a plush hotel between a strip mall and a vast expanse of golf course outside Denver, to present some of my work. The conference was dedicated to the memeory of Dave Keeling, who had started the first regular measurements of rising carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa in Hawai'i almost fifty years ago and who died last summer. The oceanographer Ken Caldeira, now at the Carnegie Institute, gave an opening overview, focusing on the changing chemical state of the oceans (carbon dioxide makes them more acid) and also arguing quite reasonably that unchecked fossil-fuel burning will radically change Earth's climate and probably lead to all the ice sheets melting within a few thousand years. People were pessimistic that much will be done soon to reduce energy requirements and switch to other fuels, though some scientists suggested starting or becoming involved in local groups such as the Boulder Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Working Group.