Business & Politics

We recently discussed Professor Garnaut’s report on what climate change will mean for Australia: the so called Aussie Stern Report, alluding to the one handed down in the UK during 2006. At the time we neglected to point you to the Garnaut Climate Change Review website, where recently an Issues paper on Transport, Planning and the Built Environment was posted.

Fuel use in transport accounted for 14% of Australia’s emissions in 2005, and is projected increase by 67% over 1990 levels by 2020. Around 80% of Australian adults used a private car to commute to work in 2006 , with emissions from cars creating 54% of Australia’s total domestic transport emissions, and increasing by 40% between 1990 and 2020. The stats for buildings are just as sobering.

Science & Technology

Image courtesy of ricardo.martins via flickr

In light of our ongoing coverage of the melting Arctic ice caps - or, as we like to think of it, the "how low will they go" game - it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to hear that the world's glaciers are now melting at a faster rate than at any prior time since records began. Reporting for The Observer, Juliette Jowit and Robin McKie scrutinize the results of the latest World Glacier Monitoring Service report, which reveals that 30 glaciers around the world lost a record amount of ice in 2006 - a clear sign of global warming's impact, its authors argue (no arguments here).

Recent Comment by Mark Thien : "Hello mr. satan, did you just escape from hell and try to bullshit here?..." [read]

Cars & Transportation

If you're not attempting to reduce your airline's carbon emissions by flying the first all-biofuel jumbo-jet flight, the efficacy of which is in and of itself up for debate, the EU requires your airline to subscribe to a carbon trading *cough* scheme. And that includes you, good old U.S. of Airline, so get scheming. Yesterday the EU transport commissioner Jacques Barrot warned US airlines that they must pay for carbon dioxide emissions or face a curb on flights to the European Union. The operative concept here being to curb flights rather than carbon levels themselves.

Fashion & Beauty

Polished and luminescent, these candy-like danging earrings ($18 a pair) look nothing like the vinyl material from which they're derived. Fusing fashion with her love of music, designer Millie Hilgert (aka "Miss Courageous") carves up old vinyl records and suspends them from sterling-silver earwires by hand in Boise, Idaho. Lickable colors that recall ice-cream sodas, jukeboxes, and poodle skirts include cherry, lemon, cotton candy, and grape.

For the old-school connoisseur, the earrings also come in opaque black. ::BTC Elements

Food & Health

Chris Ramirez for The New York Times

They sure don't look like Murray McLaughlin's farmers- "Straw hats and old dirty hankies; Moppin' a face like a shoe- those are the faces of the new farmers. This is a wonderful trend for so many reasons; young people have been leaving the farms for years, small towns have been devastated and farms grown over; now it is comeback time. According to the New York Times:

"Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms (see the E. coli spinach outbreaks), the perils of relying on petroleum to deliver food over long distances (see global warming) and the beauty of greenmarkets (see the four-times-weekly locavore cornucopia in Union Square), some young urbanites are starting to put their muscles where their pro-environment, antiglobalization mouths are. They are creating small-scale farms near urban areas hungry for quality produce and willing to pay a premium." ::New York Times

Recent Comment by Ernie : "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_land#The_few_who_succeeded" rel="nofo..." [read]

Science & Technology

As the first step in what they hope will eventually become an entrepreneurial version of the successful Doctors Without Borders and Engineers Without Borders models, Beena Sukumaran, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rowan University, and several students have developed a pedal-powered grain crusher. Their aim in building the simple add-on was to create an effective device for people in developing countries to use to process a variety of grains on the cheap. Moreover, it could also help generate income for individuals traveling from village to village.

Still in the development stage, the aluminum grain crusher attaches to any bike mounted on a stand; when a rider begins to pedal, the back wheel turns a pulley that moves plates in the crusher that process the grains from large pieces into smaller ones suitable for cooking.

Cars & Transportation

Norway's THINK Ox 4-door is still just a concept car.

It could be old Swedish-Norwegian rivalries rearing up again. Norway has the electric car maker THINK, which is beginning to roll new THINK city cars off of its production line next month (some of them rolling right over to the Swedish isle of Öland). THINK also showed the four-door, five passenger concept car Ox at the recent Geneva Auto Show.

Meanwhile, Sweden's Volvo and Saab together with the Swedish utility Vattenfall and battery maker ETC are straining to get ahead in hybrid-electric vehicle infrastructure. In a joint project with investments of around 62 million Swedish crowns (just over $US 10 million), a mixed 10-car fleet of Volvo and Saab plug-in hybrids will be road tested in Stockholm. Finnish power company Fortum (which owns Stockholm's electric net) and Toyota are speeding ahead to give Stockholm a good network of available outlets for re-charging - especially in parking lots and adjacent to business districts. Fortum says the problem of how owners will pay for their recharge isn't yet solved, but poses no great technology barrier (hint: how 'bout via SMS?). Currently, costs per 10 kilometers of driving are estimated to be between 1 and 3 crowns ($.16 - $.48). But while Oslo and Stockholm battle it out in Scandinavia, Project Better Place is betting over US$200 million and moving quickly on making Israel the first to have a complete electric recharging infrastructure. Via ::Dagens Industri (Swedish)