2009

India rejects carbon reduction plans

According to the Financial Times : ” India on Sunday night rebuffed an appeal (…) to embrace a low-carbon future in which the two countries would work together to devise new ways of consuming and producing energy. “ This puzzles me as I am sure the world’s largest democracy could with the proper government incentives […]

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Towards sustainability: going solar

For the seventh part of this series – and after having tackled heating, electricity, water, transport, food and waste – I guess it is time for us to see how solar energies can benefit our lives. I mention solar energies as there are three possibilities : passive solar applications, which are the most basic, solar

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Latest news from the Arctic

It has been a while I haven’t written anything on the Arctic. According to Bloomberg: “A Manhattan-sized chunk of ice may break away from a glacier in northwestern Greenland and fall into the sea within about two months.” Furthermore, to Reuters a US governmental agency released hundreds of highly detailed pictures of the Arctic quickly

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Green concrete made of rice husks

If you are an early reader of this blog you perhaps remember my article on how aerogel, a fantastic material could be made of rice husks. Now comes another great use of this by-product of the most consumed cereal. To Discovery Channel: A new way of processing rice husks for use in concrete could lead

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The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan

The United Kingdom may soon become a climate change model for Europe and other developed nations as it plans to cut by 34 percent its greenhouse gases emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels. Yes, over a third less, this is exactly what the IPCC has been advocating in 2007. These brilliant goals will be reached

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The deforestation of the Amazon in pictures

Images are worth thousands of words. So when I found on VeoVerde a series of photographs from the NASA depicting the deforestation of the Amazonian rain forest I thought I should share them with you. The picture on the left (0.4 Mo ; 465*3000 px) is a collage of  nine photographs and shows the horrifying

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A great project for US high speed rail

I previously noted that the United States have a plan of creating ten high speed rail corridors by 2020. Even if this is a good idea, it isn’t enough as it won’t enable Americans to travel from coast to coast. This might be done by 2030 according to the US High Speed Rail Network which advocates

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The G8 meeting in L’Aquila: a missed opportunity

A few months before the Copenhagen meeting which will decide of the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the countries who met in Italy this week missed another opportunity to agree on climate change mitigation. After Hokkaido in July 2008, this G8 meeting was another failure of our elected representatives to seriously act on the defining

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