TOP STORY
Body Heat: Sweden's New Green Energy Source. (video at link)
It's 7:30 a.m. on a wintry morning in downtown Stockholm and a sea of Swedes are flooding Central Station to catch a train to work. The station is toasty thanks to the busy shops and restaurants and the body heat being generated by the 250,000 commuters who crowd Scandinavia's busiest travel hub each day. This heat used to be lost by the end of the morning rush hour... .
Using excess body heat to warm a building is not a new concept — the Mall of America in Minneapolis recycles the heat generated from shoppers' bodies to help regulate the temperature of the massive complex during Minnesota's dreadful winters. But Stockholm has taken the idea a step further by successfully transferring excess body heat from one building to another.
Did you watch 2012? Vivos is building underground shelters for survival of a "global catastrophe (caused by terrorism, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, pole shift, Iran, "social anarchy", solar flare)," nuclear war, or collision with an asteroid. A place to sustain people "when the earth no longer can" --- sounds like climate change impacts could be added to their list of disasters triggering underground life.
Rich? Don't worry about climate change impacts – Ultimate underground shelter for those with bunker mentality and $50,000 for a space in the bunker.
Vivos is building 20 underground "assurance of life" resorts across the US, capable of sustaining up to 4,000 people for a year when the earth no longer can. The cost? A little over £32,000 a head, plus a demeaning-sounding screening test that determines whether you are able to offer meaningful contribution to the continuation of the human race.Company literature posits, gently, that "Vivos may prove to be the next Genesis", and they are understandably reluctant to flub the responsibility.
Should you have the credentials and the cash, the rewards of a berth in a Vivos shelter seem high. Each staffed complex has a decontamination shower and a jogging machine; a refrigerated vault for human DNA and a conference room with wheely chairs. There are TVs and radios, flat-screen computers, a hospital ward, even a dentist's surgery ready to serve those who forgot to pack a toothbrush in the hurry. "Virtually any meal" can be cooked from a stockpile of ingredients that includes "baked potato soup" but, strangely, no fish, tinned or otherwise. Framed pictures of mountain ranges should help ease the loss of a world left behind.
Vivos says it has already received 1,000 applications.
CLIMATE CHANGE & ENERGY
- State Dept. says tar sands project will have "limited adverse environmental impacts."
In the report, the government cites an increasing demand for crude oil matched with the importance of moving away from "unstable foreign oil supplies" as justification for the project.
...A 2008 study by the Rand Corporation found that carbon dioxide emissions from the production and use of tar sands oil are about 20 percent higher than those for conventional petroleum.
See also, BP shrugs off anti-tar sands shareholder resolution.
- Cost of climate change not just environmental.
This year, the cost of global warming worldwide could be as high as $371 billion, he said. And over the next 40 years, the cost could rise as high as $7.5 trillion, said Goodstein, director of the Center for Environmental Policy at Bard, in Annandale-on-Hudson.
...The high price tag being placed on global warming, he said, is the result of the loss of agriculture and property stemming from rising sea temperatures and sea levels that will affect both crops and land, as well as the cost of responding to diseases that could follow.
- FedEx launches new electric truck initiative, adding the "first all-electric parcel delivery trucks to its U.S. fleet in June.
CLIMATE CHANGE POLITICS
- Benefits of eco activism: Cracking Big Coal.
A decade ago, the coal and utility industries began to push for the construction of a new generation of coal-fired power plants. Since then, 232 plants have been proposed. The environmental justice movement has defeated 127 of them. Not a single coal-fired plant was built in 2009. This past March, following several modest moves toward greater scrutiny of mountaintop removal permits in the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was moving to block authorization of the largest mountaintop removal site in West Virginia, held by Arch Coal, an industry leader. Then, on April 1, the EPA proposed new water quality regulations for future mountaintop removal permits--imposing standards that very few, if any, mountaintop removal proposals would meet, as EPA head Lisa Jackson noted.
These victories have seriously set back--if not yet vanquished--an industry that accounts for nearly 40 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions and powers roughly half of US energy production. It's as if the antiwar movement had brought the military's recruitment efforts to a grinding halt.
Naked protests
NATURAL RESOURCES & WILDLIFE
- Global warming changing saltiness of oceans: The "supercharging of Earth's water cycle by global warming is already making some parts of Earth's oceans much saltier while others parts are getting fresher."
- Ice cap thaw may awaken Icelandic volcanoes.
A thaw of Iceland's ice caps in coming decades caused by climate change may trigger more volcanic eruptions by removing a vast weight and freeing magma from deep below ground, scientists said on Friday.
- Is this the end of migration?
At a recent high-level congress attended by 200 migration experts, leading Spanish ornithologist Miguel Ferrer estimated that 20 billion birds have changed their migrating habits in the last few decades. The biggest single identifiable reason behind such a massive behavioural shift, involving 70 per cent of the world's migrating birds is – surprise, surprise – climate change.
- Mountaintop removal mining adds to coal's GHG emissions. What's your connection to MTR? Enter your zip code at this handy tool to find out.
If your home or business is on the electric grid, chances are you are connected to mountaintop removal in the Appalachian Mountains. Find out how -- and then find out what you can do about it.
FOOD & HEALTH
ECO JUSTICE & HUMAN RIGHTS
- Rush for REDD could undermine local forest rights: Cash-strapped governments have allowed local communities to manage the forests, which has been "shown to boost forest carbon storage" and incomes. However, REDD, or reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, may provide valuable carbon offsets. Monetizing forest carbon would increase the market value of forests and thus governments may increase control.
This is a problem because customary laws of respecting ancestors protect forest better than government does, according to a study.
In Defence of Pachamama (Mother Earth).
Through their ancestral knowledge and traditions, indigenous peoples will make a unique and invaluable contribution to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which begins Monday, Apr. 19 in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba.
Julio Quette of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB) told IPS that the 74 different indigenous groups who inhabit South America’s Amazon region "have traditionally coexisted with nature and the forests," and that it is up to the industrialised countries to halt the pollution and destruction of the planet.
SUSTAINABILITY & CONSUMPTION
- New Zealand's Plant Room is a prefabricated 'clip-on' garden shed/greenhouse designed for high-rise apartment buildings and condos..
The Plant Room, conceived by a Wellington, New Zealand-based design team and entered into that country’s Sustainable Habitat Challenge, is a "prefabricated room that bolts-on to a variety of existing apartment types, improving the quality of living, reducing energy and water use, and generally making the building more sustainable."
...A Plant Room provides hot water for one occupant and a healthy growing space for herbs, fruit and vegetables all year round. It also offers a worm farm, a rainwater tank, an outdoor space and an enclosed room.
It shades the apartment to avoid summer overheating and collects hot air to circulate warmth in the winter. It is designed to improve the quality of apartment living while reducing the energy and water use of its occupants. It could also be a suitable solution to office retro-fits.