Month: August 2009

Least developed nations call for climate action

It is no news if you have been reading this blog as China – alongside with other nations – has been calling the richest nations to cut drastically their GHG emissions by 2020 in order to prevent the worse from occurring. Now the 49 least developed countries are calling the G8 to cut their greenhouse …

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Can natural gas be an alternative to coal ?

I read in The Daily Green an article on how natural gas could be a solution to environmental and energy issues in the United States as it emits half the carbon dioxide of coal and roughly 25 percent less than oil. Another advantage of this fossil fuel is that there are ample reserves in America …

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Floating wind turbine may be a game changer

Offshore wind energy may soon change thanks to a new kind of turbines that literally floats on water. The first 2.3 MW prototype was installed 10 kilometers off the Norwegian coasts on June 8th. Developed jointly by Siemens and StatoilHydro the Hywind windmill can be located where seas depths reach from 120 to 700 meters, …

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NASA brings more facts and figures on space junk

I wrote in February about how Mankind polluted space near our beautiful planet. I was then quoting the European Space Agency (ESA) which believed that there are 13,200 trackable objects larger than ten centimeters; Now comes the NASA estimates that there are no less than 19,000 objects larger than ten centimeters in outer space, and …

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World CO2 emissions rose by nearly 2% in 2008

We have seen last year that CO2 emissions rose by 3.1 percent in 2007. According to the International Economic Platform for Renewable Energies (IWR) they rose in 2008 by 1.94 percent to reach no less than 31.5 billion metric tons. The document released by this institution in interesting as it provides data by country. This …

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Asian nations working on reforestation

India is known for planting thousands of trees in single days but it seems that Pakistan is also working on massive afforestation projects as it planted no less than 541,176 trees in 24 hours. Meanwhile, Bangladesh is ready to invest billions in environmental protection and received $19 million from Germany and the United States for …

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350 new species discovered in Eastern Himalayas

We have seen it before, biodiversity is impressively rich in places where Mankind isn’t too much present. Indeed, the WWF wrote in December 2008 that the Greater Mekong is a biodiversity treasure. Now the organization notes : Over 350 new species including the world’s smallest deer, a “flying frog” and a 100 million-year old gecko …

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Local populations don’t profit from deforestation

Science Magazine published an interesting article on how deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest provides only a temporary increase of living conditions to local populations. To the article: (…) on the basis of an assessment of 286 municipalities in different stages of deforestation, we found a boom-and-bust pattern in levels of human development across the …

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China’s huge high speed rail project

Last week, Fortune Magazine published a most interesting article on the Chinese high speed rail project. By 2020 over 25,000 km (16,000 miles) of new tracks will be built for a cost of $300 billion (210 billion €). The People’s Republic government launches this huge project to answer to it’s citizens’ needs of alternative to …

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The end of urban sprawl ?

Urban sprawl poses many problems in terms of infrastructures to maintain, increased energy consumption and last but not least important health and environmental issues. With the economic downturn and high energy prices, people are sometimes returning to the urban cores. This leaves empty houses and even districts. In some cases these suburbs are litterally bulldozed …

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