The nice people at EarthSite liked our tweets so much, they’re offering discount tickets to A Taste of Ki, happening in Sonoma on Wednesday, May 19th. This is going to be a really fun event, featuring all kinds of eco-chic and innovative products. Taste of Ki is a preview of the showcase event, The Ki, in August. You can get the 50% discount by registering at EventBrite, and using the code “earthsite“. If you sign up by this Saturday, it will apply to the early bird rate.
“When explaining the motives behind why one would want to take some free beer, the evil man responsible for dumping the beer, Joe Priesmeyer said, ‘Beer is a popular product.’”–Treehugger article about three landfill employees who “rescued” fifty cases of beer that was slated to be destroyed.
Amen, brother Joe. You are a true American Hero.
We are never going to solve serious problems like climate change or peak oil while governments focus on silliness like this.
“My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games,” — Jane McGonical
In her inspiring TED talk, game designer Jane McGonigal throws out a very interesting statistic: young gamers spend approximately 10,000 hours playing online games by the time they reach age 21. While this number may not seem significant, at first, it happens to be about the same number of hours a child will spend in school between 5th grade and high school graduation, and, according to Blink author Malcolm Gladwell is the magical number of hours one needs to spend learning a particular skill in order to become a “virtuoso”.
The Cleantech Group announced Wednesday that San Francisco-based startup DotUI has developed a unique way to influence consumer energy usage behavior, by combining real-time energy management software and hardware with digital picture frames and a “fun” interface.
I first encountered DotUI and its Founder/CEO, Ishak Kang, at the Green:NET 2009 Conference, where Mr. Kang presented his vision of user interfaces which are independent of their respective devices, following the user as he or she moved from one device to another. The presumption is that much useful technology goes unused because their user interfaces are difficult to learn. At the time, I wasn’t completely sure how this vision would translate into a viable product in the cleantech market, but it sure sounded interesting.
The company’s first offering, called the Nudgee, includes a wireless touch-screen digital picture frame device, which displays real-time energy usage data collected from “a universal gateway and electrical sub-meter. Gas, water, and air quality meters are optional.”
According to the article: “the company…is taking a fun approach, allowing users to see how much energy is being consumed, with updated images and content from friends and family, and utilizing social networking sites such as Facebook, instead of a dashboard approach other companies are pursuing.”
pmain: all good points. One that needs to be addressed right away is the idea of compounding growth in business as necessary or even possible. Simple math will show you that continuous compounding or exponential growth is not possible in a closed system. The Earth is a closed system, and as long as the Earth is the defining system boundary, then unchecked growth is not possible.
For some strange reason, even the most brilliant amongst us fail to grasp the consequences of this. We seem to be almost hard-wired to ignore it, because our individual evolutionary imperative tells us to accumulate as many resources as possible, to make sure that our own descendants survive. On an individual level, the short-term far outweighs the long-term.
PeterRijs, this is really fascinating. I don’ know much about chemical batteries, but replacing the electrolyte wouldn’t really be “charging” in the traditional notion. Doesn’t this simply replace one liquid fuel (oil) with another (the electrolyte)? The article doesn’t say what the electrolyte would be…do you happen to know it is, and what the economics are? What about the environmental impact of extracting it? Can it be re-used/recycled?
One nice thing about charging batteries with electricity is that it doesn’t matter where the electricity comes from. While it might currently be coming from a coal-fired plant, in a few years it could be coming from a solar plant and in 50 years it might come from a fusion reactor or a space-based solar grid.
pmain: I don’t know if it is as much an issue of “will we have enough time?” as an issue of “are we willing to commit enough money and resources right now?” We could not have developed the atomic bomb in only a couple of years if we hadn’t been willing to throw a massive no-holds-barred effort behind it. The only reason we were willing to do that was because we were, quite literally, “under the gun.”
Ever since I was a kid, when my father used give me Matchbox cars he bought on his way home from work, I’ve been crazy about cars. So I was extremely excited to have the opportunity to speak with Simon Saba of Saba Motors, whose EV vision is something any gearhead can get jazzed about: to deliver an exotic electric sports car with a price tag of under $40,000, that will have the looks and performance of cars costing 10 times as much and is environmentally friendly to boot!
At the last minute, I decided to attend Tuesday night’s Cleantech Open Awards Gala, and was pleasantly surprised at just how many companies with game-changing technologies were participating in the event. From the finalists to the runners-up to last year’s winners, the promise of what was on display was truly astounding, and gives me quite a bit of hope that we have a strong chance of beating some of the enormous challenges that are facing our environment.
EcoFactor, the competition’s overall winner, humorously presented an amazingly simple concept: a web-enabled thermostat that automatically and continuously adjusts the temperature of your home based on local environmental conditions. According to the company, over 50% of households with programmable thermostats do not program them. This technology avoids that problem, providing 25% or more energy savings with a hands-free solution.
While EcoFactor certainly has a very innovative product, I was simply shocked that they managed to beat out fellow finalist New Sky Energy, whose carbon-negative C02-to-building materials process appears to be an almost magical solution to excess carbon emissions. New Sky’s revolutionary chemical technology takes carbon dioxide from the air, combines it with polluted water, salts and renewable energy and ends up with carbonate-based building materials, in the form of bricks, tiles, laminated wood composites and others.
It has been three years since the release of AlGore‘s Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. Yesterday, Katie Couric sat down for an exclusive interview the former Vice President in advance of the release of his new book, Our Choice.
In the interview, Mr. Gore talks about the potential impacts of climate change, the need for sustained action, the importance of reducing dependence on foreign oil, and the benefits that can be realized in the process. He also addresses questions about his most vocal climate change critics.
The following are highlights from the interview, or you can watch the full show on the CBS News website.
Clip 1:We’ve Got To Act
AlGorespeaks about the key to solving the climate crisis is having a strong grassroots consensus, and how many people are beginning to stand up.
Ever since I was a kid, when my father used give me Matchbox cars he bought on his way home from work, I’ve been crazy about cars. So I was extremely excited to have the opportunity to speak with Simon Saba of 
At the last minute, I decided to attend Tuesday night’s 
