of Treehugger has a roundup of solar stoves .
Author Archives: Jon
Australian town plans to be first "solar-only" community by 2010
, Cloncurry, Australia, a
sun-drenched town in Australia’s north hopes to use only solar power in two years after being chosen as the site for a solar thermal power station.
Remote Cloncurry, which boasts recording Australia’s hottest day, would be able to generate electricity on rare cloudy days and at night from the station, which runs off heat stored in graphite blocks.
The Queensland state government said on Sunday it would build the A$7 million ($6.5 million), 10-megawatt power station as part of a push to make Cloncurry one of the first towns to rely on solar power alone.
“The town of Cloncurry has long claimed the title of having recorded Australia’s hottest day — 53 degrees (Celsius) in the shade in 1889, so I reckon we’re on a winner,” Queensland Premier Anna Bligh was quoted as saying by Australian Associated Press.
Solar thermal power differs from photovoltaic panels that make power directly.
Instead, 8,000 mirrors will reflect sunlight onto graphite blocks. Water will be pumped through the blocks to generate steam which generates electricity via turbines.
Heat stored in the graphite produces steam well after the sun goes down, allowing electricity generators to keep running at night.
Via Treehugger.
Presidential Candidates' positions on first responders
Popular Logistics is combing the candidates’ position papers to compare positions in the following areas:
- First responders – policy and funding of equipment and training for paid and unpaid, full-time and part-time first responders, and the infrastructure that supports them;
- Energy policy (conservation, strengthening power grids, renewable energy, emergency power)
- National Health Insurance. Our position is this – ideology is more or less irrelevant in the face of potential bioterror or WMD attacks; if only because of those circumstances – the entire population needs catastrophic health and disability insurance.
We’re going to do these an issue at a time. That’s for two reasons. Because we’ve got limited resources and would like to report as we have something to report. And because, based on our preliminary research, on issue #1 – it looks like the issue isn’t on anyone’s radar screen.
Matthew Wald, NYT: “Plan for Nuclear Storage Is Slow to Form”
Matthew Wald has this piece on the Times website:
Nov. 4 — The Energy Department has not finished plans to consolidate storage of nuclear bomb fuel and other high-risk materials now spread among numerous sites, even though the department said in 2005 that it would do so within about a year, according to a Government Accountability Office report to be released Monday.As a result, the department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defend additional sites.
The G.A.O. had reported that the Energy Department was putting off making security improvements at some of the storage sites because the sites were due to be phased out. But the new report makes clear that the goal of shutting down some obsolete weapons and research centers, and simplifying the security job by centralizing “special nuclear material,” as bomb fuel is called, has yet to advance from concept to plan, let alone to finished project.
The Energy Department “has completed only two of the eight implementation plans for consolidating and disposing of special nuclear material,” the new report found, and it cited problems with those two plans.
Portland apparently a node of the international bicycling conspiracy
would have it, Portland is a hotbed, – not just of big brands (Nike, etc.) –
what is most distinctive about the emerging cycling industry here is the growing number of smaller businesses, whether bike frame builders or clothing makers, that often extol recycling as much as cycling, sustainability as much as success.
Like the local indie rock bands that insist they are apathetic about fame, many of the smaller local companies say craft, not money, is what drives them.
“All the frame builders I know got into this because they love bikes,” said Tony Pereira, a bike builder whose one-man operation has a 10-month waiting list, “not because they wanted to start a business.”
Mia Birk, a former city employee who helped lead Portland’s efforts to expand cycling in the 1990s, said the original goals were rooted in environmental and public health, not the economy.
“That wasn’t our driving force,” Ms. Birk said. “But it has been a result, and we’re comfortable saying it is a positive result.”
Ms. Birk now helps run a consulting firm, Alta Planning and Design, which advises other cities on how to become more bicycle-friendly. In a report for the City of Portland last year, the firm estimated that 600 to 800 people worked in the cycling industry in some form. A decade earlier, Ms. Birk said in an interview, the number would have been more like 200 and made up almost entirely of employees at retail bike stores. Continue reading
Sidebar: Drawing a Line Between Enduring Harm and Legitimate Fear
Adam Liptak , in yesterday’s Drawing a Line Between Enduring Harm and Legitimate Fear , tracks a case in which a woman who has:
- been genitally mutilated;
- been promised – without her consent – to marry a man who is also her first cousin
- the Board of Immigration Appeals has rejected her application for asylum – while expressing, or conceding, that she’s going back into a very bad situation.
My recollection is that – as of late – even sexual acts more or less consented to – the case that Kurt Eichenwald was covering, the calls for more done about “human trafficking,” – isn’t this case exactly that – sexual slavery, enforced by violence.
Maybe we’ve got enough female refugees, especially those who, because of the mutilation, aren’t so useful in construction a “damsel in distress” narrative. This requires, I think, more thought (on my part) – I’m disturbed and offended but need to re-examine my reasoning.
DARPA “Urban Challenge” – autonomous ground vehicle competition
DARPA’s Urban Challenge – the third – was held last weekend; what’s DARPA’s Urban Challenge?
The DARPA Urban Challenge is an autonomous vehicle research and development program with the goal of developing technology that will keep warfighters off the battlefield and out of harm’s way. The Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles maneuvering in a mock city environment, executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles.
The program is conducted as a series of qualification steps leading to a competitive final event, scheduled to take place on November 3, 2007, in Victorville, California. DARPA is offering $2M for the fastest qualifying vehicle, and $1M and $500,000 for second and third place.
– snip –
What is an autonomous ground vehicle?
An autonomous ground vehicle is a vehicle that navigates and drives entirely on its own with no human driver and no remote control. Through the use of various sensors and positioning systems, the vehicle determines all the characteristics of its environment required to enable it to carry out the task it has been assigned.
Why develop autonomous vehicles?
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001, Public Law 106-398, Congress mandated in Section 220 that “It shall be a goal of the Armed Forces to achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that… by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned.” DARPA conducts the Urban Challenge program in support of this Congressional mandate. Every “dull, dirty, or dangerous” task that can be carried out using a machine instead of a human protects our warfighters and allows valuable human resources to be used more effectively.
Who are the teams?
The Urban Challenge teams come from across the United States and around the world, and share a passion for the advancement of robotic technology and machine intelligence. This diverse group includes teams from both academia and the robotics, automotive, and defense industries.
(It should be noted that at least some of these machines probably drive better than a substantial number of people who live in Brooklyn).
I’m sure that lots of good stuff will come out this DARPA project. But it’s interesting to watch Congress asserting itself with a demanding deadline in this project – we’re not hearing about Representatives and Senators banging their hands on hearing-room tables – demanding 100 mpg vehicles, better insulating materials, or field-deployable energy systems that will reduce the horrible risks associated with sending convoys out to pick up a truckload diesel.
The Urban Challenge main page;
John Markoff’s excellent piece in yesterday’sTimes. Markoff has been covering this process since at least 1984. In my less-than-methodical view of my hometown paper, Markoff’s byline means it’s going to be interesting – and often well ahead of the pack.
Here’s a Times
page with links to all of his recent work.
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/teamlist.asp.
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In Copenhagen Bicycles Overtake Cars (via EcoProfile and TreeHugger)
April Streeter has this in yesterday’s Treehugger:
As a result of half a century of planning, Copenhagen has achieved a fabulous cycling goal – during the morning rush hour more bikes and mopeds pound the inner city streets than personal cars and buses. Just a bit more than a third of inhabitants get to work by bike every day – the other two thirds take public transport or a personal car. But the news gets even better – Copenhagen’s municipal government is increasing spending to improve bike lanes and paths and the bike travel experience.According to this survey, Copenhagen is behind places such as Amsterdam (where a claimed 40 percent of traffic moves by bike) and Portland, Oregon in providing the best inner-city biking experience. This may be true, but Copenhagen has got to be the stylish bike capital – especially with the bloggers at copenhagengirlsonbikes and cycleliciousness making it look so cool to ride.
City officials now want to increase cyclists to make up half of all commuters by 2015, as well as increase cyclists’ speeds by 10 percent while reducing the risk of injury. How will they do it? Partly by investing more – they added about 25 million Danish crowns (US$ 3.7 million) in 2007 to the yearly budget of 75 million crowns.
Already in the city, subway stops and other open spaces sport large bicycle parking stalls – the best are the covered double-decker stalls – and the city will build even more of these to encourage cyclists to park away from pedestrian and other traffic. They’ll also widen lanes to accommodate more bikes.
In addition, some heavily-trafficked lanes will sport a new bicycle pictogram to show that they get a special ‘green wave’ – traffic lights will be coordinated so cyclists who maintain speeds of about 20 kilometers/hour can just keep on moving.
Across Öresund in Sweden cyclists are not quite so pampered, but some good things are happening – in Gothenburg cyclists will soon be able to use the same Internet service cars have long had access to to create individual bike destination maps for all locations in the city. Via ::Ecoprofile
Update: Colville Andersen – of cycleliciousness notes in a comment to TreeHugger:
Great post. Thanks for the big up about our blogs.
One thing, however, the “survey” you link to is not a survey at all… it’s a commercial website writing a opinion piece about bike cities, without any real research.
Love the treehugger world. Keep up the good work.
Which came first?
Ralph Blumenthal, NYT: Stalled Health Tests Leave Storm Trailers in Limbo
How much can FEMA get done in 19 months? It can not test trailers – occupied trailers – for formaldehyde, which it’s known about for that long.
Ralph Blumenthal follows up on this in the October 18th editions of The New York Times.
Three months after the Federal Emergency Management Agency halted the sale of travel trailers to survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita over possible risks from formaldehyde and promised a health study, none of the 56,000 occupied units have been tested.
“It is inexcusable that 19 months after the first questions were raised, testing of occupied trailers has yet to begin,” – Representative Henry A. Waxman.
“It is inexcusable that 19 months after the first questions were raised, testing of occupied trailers has yet to begin,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
At a Congressional hearing on the trailers in July, R. David Paulison, FEMA’s administrator, said the agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “are scheduled to begin Phase 1 of the study in the Gulf Coast next week.”
But the first teams did not reach New Orleans and Mississippi until the end of September, and then began only a baseline assessment of unoccupied trailers, laying the groundwork for the full-scale study, said a C.D.C. spokeswoman in Atlanta, Bernadette Burden.
One result of the delay in the testing is that the agency has postponed a plan to charge rent on the trailers beginning in March. The rent was intended to encourage people displaced by the hurricanes to move into nonsubsidized housing.
Before sales were halted over the safety questions, 10,839 of the trailers were auctioned off by the General Services Administration and 819 more were sold directly to occupants by the emergency agency from July 2006 to July 2007, raising potential liability issues.
“It’s different now,” an agency spokeswoman, Mary Margaret Walker, said. “The idea of asking people to pay rent for units with health concerns doesn’t seem to make sense.” She said the change had not been announced.
This week, the agency announced a program of relocation subsidies, up to $4,000 a household, to encourage storm victims to return home to the Gulf states or seek permanent housing elsewhere.
But problems with the trailers have dealt further setbacks to self-sufficiency efforts: 4,110 people living in FEMA trailers have asked to be relocated because of health concerns, the agency said. Among these, 771 have been moved to alternative housing, 546 have been given rent subsidies to live elsewhere and 83 have been moved back into hotels and motels at government expense. Continue reading
International Herald Tribune: U.S. widens contract fraud inquiry to include military’s food suppliers
The International Herald Tribune reports that a company being paid $1 billion per year to provide meals in Iraq is under investigation for price-gouging. The company, formerly Public Warehousing, now Agility Logistics, appears to be so well-connected that ConAgra, Tyson Foods and Sara Lee were excluded from at least some business. (Scratch the surface here, I’m afraid, and we’ll find firms complaining – nominally – that other peole are stealing – when what they’re actually upset about is not the stealing – but the other people who are doing it.
Federal agents are investigating whether several large food companies charged the government excessively high prices for supplies to U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait, according to administration officials.Widening their previously disclosed inquiries into contract fraud and corruption in Kuwait and Iraq, investigators from the Justice and Defense departments are examining deals that Sara Lee, ConAgra Foods and other U.S. companies made to supply the military, officials said.The inquiry centers on whether the companies overcharged Agility Logistics, a Kuwait-based company formerly named Public Warehousing that is the U.S. Army’s principal food supplier for the war zones. Investigators are also reviewing whether Agility Logistics improperly took payments from the food companies.
Agility Logistics, which supplies enormous amounts of fruits, vegetables and meats for more than 160,000 troops in combat zones, said in a statement that it had done nothing wrong and was fully cooperating with the investigation.
But a Justice Department lawyer, Brian Mizoguchi, told a Federal Claims Court judge in Washington on June 12 that the company’s business arrangements were the target of “a very large and active investigation into criminal fraud involving amounts in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” Continue reading
James Glanz, NYT: “Iraqi Contracts With Iran and China Concern U.S.”
BAGHDAD, Oct. 17 — Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday. Word of the project prompted serious concerns among American military officials, who fear that Iranian commercial investments can mask military activities at a time of heightened tension with Iran.
– snip –
The Iraqi Electricity Ministry, which Mr. Wahid heads, is one of the few in the central government that has received praise for successfully spending much of the money allocated to it in the Iraqi budget for reconstruction projects. Because of security problems, a shortage of officials who are skilled at writing and executing contracts, and endemic corruption, many of the ministries have either left their rebuilding money unspent or poured it into projects that have had a marginal impact on the quality of life for Iraqi citizens.
One point here seems to be that the Iraqis are ungrateful and unreliable, and are encouraging our our competitors (China) and enemies (Iran), and and giving them footholds in Iraq. This may be so, and it may come at the expense of American contractors like Bechtel. My observations:
- If Iran and China build or rebuild the power grid, isn’t likely that hey’ll start being blamed for its failures, now worse than it was under Saddam.
- The essential strategic error of a centralized power brig remains. The only way to guarantee a relatively steady supplyy power is a heavily decentralized network, such as that proposed by the Naval Postgraduate School with its “Solar Eagle” proposal- essentially a solar array on each building in the country, connected to the grid. If what you need to keep going is some battery charging for flashlights, a referigator and fans. To attack the grid you need to attack every building. Which means that effectively attacking the power grid becomes much more difficult – maybe not worth doing.
Here’s our earlier post on “Solar Eagle:” One thing Texas has in common with Iraq – “Solar Eagle” – the Navy Plan to beat the insurgents and help Iraq go solar. (The Times doesn’t appear to have noticed the “Solar Eagle” proposal – not surprising, in an environment with to few people and not enought time – the proposal was to learn about except by accident).
Now back to our excerpt from James Glanz’s October 18th piece:
Asked how he had managed to make progress within the bureaucratic morass of much of the Iraqi government, Mr. Wahid said he had simply learned to go it alone. Aside from financing, his main need from the central government was guarantees that Iraqi security forces would protect his workers and the electricity infrastructure.
“Do not annoy me,” Mr. Wahid said was his main message to the government. “Let me do my work.” Continue reading
Andrée de Jongh, 90, heroine of Belgian Resistance
My hometown paper, The New York Times, routinely publishes obituaries of people one has likely never heard of – but upon reading the obituary are glad the Times has written about them. (I’ve heard bits and pieces about the editorial process by which the Times identifies people, during their lifetimes, and keeps a “morgue” file – but I don’t know enough to explain it). From their obituary of Andrée de Jongh, of the Belgian resistance, who ran the “Comet” escape line for downed Allied fighters – so named because it was so fast.
Andrée de Jongh, whose youth and even younger appearance belied her courage and ingenuity when she became a World War II legend ushering many downed Allied airmen on a treacherous, 1,000-mile path from occupied Belgium to safety, died Saturday in Brussels. She was 90.
Her death was announced by a Web site for former resistance fighters, verzet.org. There was no information about survivors.
Derek Shuff, in his book ”Evader” (2007), told of three British crewmen whose bomber made a forced landing in 1941. They found their way to the Underground and were ensconced in a safe house when a slip of a young woman appeared.
”My name is Andrée,” the 24-year-old woman said, ”but I would like you to call me by my code name, which is Dédée, which means little mother. From here on I will be your little mother, and you will be my little children. It will be my job to get my children to Spain and freedom.”
She left and the three sat in stunned silence. One finally spoke. ”Our lives are going to depend on a schoolgirl,” he said.
Two of the men survived the grueling trek along what became known as the Comet escape line, because of the speed with which soldiers were hustled along it.
Ms. de Jongh eventually led 24 to 33 expeditions across occupied France, over the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. She herself escorted 118 servicemen to safety. At least 300 more escaped along the Comet line.
When the Germans captured her in 1943, it was her youth that saved her. When she truthfully confessed responsibility for the entire scheme, they refused to believe her.
The citation of her Medal of Freedom With Golden Palm, the highest award the United States presented to foreigners who helped the American effort in World War II, said Ms. de Jongh ”chose one of the most perilous assignments of the war.” Continue reading