The Worlds First Bendable Bike

As someone who has had plenty of bike pieces stolen over the years (including a carbon fiber fork just this weekend from my LOCKED garage) I like the idea of this bike. It is pretty sweet -- basically the entire frame is made from these short pieces that are connected through some type of ratchet mechanism within the frame itself. When you are riding the bike, the mechanism is in locked mode, and the frame is sturdy just like a metal frame. When you are ready to park it though, you just push a button and the ratchet mechanism unlocks, turning your bike into some kind of mutant gumby transport. You can then literally fold the entire thing around a pole as shown in the picture above and lock it to itself using a small, pocket sized u-lock.

I'm betting the gears only come fixed...

Is Obama Ready to Put His Weight Behind an Alternative Energy Bill?

For months, bloggers and news organizations have weighed in (and in and in) on whether or not Obama's clout is required to move the climate bill out of limbo, and whether he and his aids are willing to put some of the presidents remaining political capital on the line for it. Early this morning, Obama seemed ready to answer that question. In a statement issued online to the millions who backed his presidential bid, the president asked his network to lend their names to a campaign to change the way America produces and consumes its energy. Later, in a speech he gave while visiting oil soaked Mississippi, Obama reiterated his support for an alternative energy bill: "Our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardize our national security. It will smother our planet. And it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk."

This is all encouraging news, but it still doesn't tell us if Obama is willing to put his money where his mouth is. He's passed a healthcare bill, he's averted the greatest monetary crisis since the great depression, and he's about to preside over a historic (if incomplete) financial reform bill. Will he have anything left for the environment? Looks like we'll have to wait and see.

Coolest Green Apartment Ever

This whole video (and the concept behind it) is sweet, but just WAIT for the last couple seconds...

Green Greed is Good

Today being Earth Day, I had the pleasure (and/or annoyance) of having pretty much every e-mail in my inbox reference Earth Day in the subject line. Most of them were boring and standard ("Happy Earth Day," "Earth Day Resolutions," "Call Your Senator/Representative This Earth Day," or "It's Earth Day: Give Us Money!"), but one of them really stood out, and it was from one of my favorite daily newsletter senders: Urban Dictionary. Their tagline: "Green Greed."

Urban Dictionary defines Green Greed as "companies and people who don't care about the environment at all, except when it will make them money."

So that got me thinking: is green greed really that big of a problem? Sure, I won't pretend I'm not irked to see GM hopping on the green bandwagon (and making crazy money on it) after they spent 20 years convincing people to buy giant, unnecessary gas guzzling SUV's and after literally killing the electric car. But that fact of the matter is that with the help of GM, people will have more access to green transportation over the next few years then they would have if GM hadn't gotten on the bandwagon. At the end of the day, that's all that really matters right?

As I've said before, I do enjoy some things that aren't good for the environment, and it seems to me that the best way to make sure those things get greener, and the best way to make sure those greener versions get into the hands of ordinary 'Mericans, is to applaud green greed. That doesn't mean we need to forgive GM their sins, that we shouldn't take them to task for the problems they still have, or even that we need to be their #1 cheerleader. But as far as I am concerned, why companies go green is not nearly as important as that they do go green.

You know what -- I think that is my Earth Day resolution. To paraphrase the immortal Gordon Gekko: green greed is good -- just don't forget who you're dealing with.

Why You Should Burn Your Trash

I've felt strongly for some time now that the energy of the future was going to be waste (ie. trash). I was introduced to this theory through the peer reviewed scientific lens of Back to the Future (which also introduced me to the possibility of flying skateboards, more on that in another post).

In the film, Doc Brown's original fuel for his time traveling DeLorean is plutonium, whose hard to obtain nature lands Doc in a pretty sticky situation. At the end of the film however, after Doc goes to the future and refits his machine with a new fangled flux capacitor, all it takes to fuel the DeLorean are a few choice items he pulls out of Marty's trash can, replacing forever Docs reliance on dangerous, hard to obtain nuclear fuel. I find this fable sums up pretty well my own opinions on the subject: why should we deal with dangerous, dirty fuels when we have more than enough waste full of untapped energy to go around?

The answer of course is that while there are many theoretical options for tapping into that energy -- cellulosic ethanol, methane from landfills, thermal energy from compost heaps, algea biofuels, the list goes on -- we are simply not there yet. We currently do not have the technology to turn waste into fuel in a way that is both cost effective, non-toxic. According to an article in yesterdays New York Times however, the technology may finally be here to do just that. The most amazing thing about this new technology technology? It's not even a new technology at all.

The idea of burning garbage as fuel has been around for a long time, but in the modern era it can be traced back to the 1970's. The recently formed OPEC was driving energy prices up, and cities were running out of landfill space. This obvious set of problems spurred a few entrepreneurs to develop "garbage to energy" systems: these systems burned garbage to make steam, or ground it into fuel pellets. What seemed like a slam dunk however quickly turned into a big problem:

"Garbage to Energy Plants were expensive, and to finance them, cities signed (were asked to sign) long term contracts to deliver and pay for a guaranteed supply of garbage. If the city didn’t have enough garbage, it had to pay anyway. The incentive to recycle would be gone. Also, the energy calculations started with garbage = 0. But Garbage wasn’t worthless – it was full of stuff that could be reused and recycled. You could save more energy and other resources by recycling paper than by burning it, and then cutting trees to make new paper." (www.garbage.org).

Add in the fact that burning garbage releases hundreds of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, and by the 1980's the garbage burning movement was dead. After all, how could we possibly make up for all of these huge negatives?

According to The New York Times, Denmark, and several other forward thinking European countries including Germany and the Netherlands, have found a way:

"Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago. In that time, such plants have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark, from wealthy exurbs like Horsholm to Copenhagen’s downtown area. Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions... With all these innovations, Denmark now regards garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem."

Additionally, the creation of these plants has not led to a drop in the recycling rate of these countries, in spite of the fact that they currently have some of the highest recycling rates in the world. This may be attributed to the fact that in these countries local governments usually manage all trash collection, incinerators and recycling centers, and financial incentives ensure that recyclable materials are not burned. For example, communities may recycle free of charge, but must pay to have garbage incinerated. Turns out government incentives CAN be a good thing.

Is this really possible? Can Denmark really have found a way to create energy and divert trash from the landfill in a way that doesn't release toxic chemicals into the environment or decrease our recycling rate?

There are of course downsides to the program. While scrubbers do keep the most toxic substances out of the environment, there is still no way to properly dispose of them and they must be stored forever in a way similar to nuclear waste. And there is still the American public to consider -- after 30 years of being told we do not want any plants of this sort built, can we really be convinced that it is now a good idea? An interesting debate to be sure, but whether we decide to follow Denmark's lead or not, I am still waiting for my own trash fueled flux capacitor.

Image provided by Richard Berg

UPDATE -- Let's Kill All the Animals (Even the Cute Ones)

Well, there we have it. As predicted, the Japanese succeeded in convincing enough countries to do an about face on protecting the porbeagle shark to bring that ban up for another vote and defeat it. That means that all eleven oceanic species up for CITES protection -- bluefin tuna, eight species of shark (not four as I posted yesterday, apparently they are listing each species of hammerhead separately) and two species of coral -- have been refused that protection.

Major freaking bummer.

Let's Kill All the Animals (Even the Cute Ones)

What a crappy month to be an animal.

Last week the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) began in the city of Doha, Qatar. Basically, every two and a half years nations from all over the world send representatives to this meeting with the express aim of regulating international trade in endangered species. This year, the species up for protection included bluefin tuna, sharks, and polar bears.

Now, no one expected winning protections for all these species at the convention was going to be easy -- there are many countries around the world, big and small, who benefit from this trade. Still, many people, myself included, had hope that at least a few of these species might receive the protection they so clearly need. The actual result? A big FU to endangered species.

First came the vote on tuna. Sponsored by the US and Monaco, most observers expected this to be the toughest of the protections to actually achieve -- Japan consumes massive quantities of bluefin (Japan alone imports 80% of all the bluefin caught in the Atlantic) and many African countries bordering the Atlantic make money by either selling bluefin directly to Japan or selling the rights for Japanese boats to fish in their waters. At the end of the day, this bloc has some serious pull (according to the CITES charter, all bans require a 2/3 majority to pass). Despite the fact that bluefin stocks are down more than 70% from their 1957 levels, this ban was, disappointingly but not unexpectedly, shot down.

Next up was a ban on the trade four different species of sharks: scalloped hammerhead, oceanic whitetips, porbeagles and spiny dogfish sharks. Again, the big opponents of this bill were Asian countries, namely China and Japan, where sharkfin soup is still a delicacy. Shark fins are generally obtained by catching a shark, cutting off it's fin, and then just tossing the now debilitated shark back into the ocean where it slowly sinks to the bottom and drowns. Say what you will about American farming techniques (and I've said PLENTY), there are few things more cruel and wasteful than shark finning.

Each of these species were voted on in a separate bill. While all of the bills received majority backing, only the bill regulating porbeagle sharks was able to reach the 2/3 majority threshold, and then by only the slimmest of margins. As for this one glimmer of hope, backroom negotiations are already under way -- China and Japan hope to swing enough votes in their direction to bring this bill up for another vote before the week is out and overturn the decision.

Last on the docket: the polar bear. Honestly -- what kind of a person do you have to be to not want to save the POLAR BEAR? This majestic creature is currently under enormous strain, and most observers agree that with the additional pressure of global warming, polar bears could very conceivably disappear in the wild within the next century. So clearly, the world managed to agree that we could ban the sale of polar bear parts and skins right?

Nope, it turns out the world couldn't do that either. We can't even agree not to kill and sell pieces of the mascot for global waring endangerment. Sorry endangered animals; you didn't do to well at this conference. Better luck in two and a half years.

Image provided by flickrfavorites