Save The World, Get Off The Meds

My education includes, but is not limited to, degrees in Paramedic, Health Science, Exercise Physiology and Herbal Medicine. And NO, I'm not a professional student! All of the degrees occurred within a few years of each other. So naturally, I tend to look at the environmental impacts of items most people don't. Medications is one I've been researching for a number of years, waiting for the data to emerge. Alas, it hasn't! I firmly believe the pharmaceutical companies have no desire for the general public to know exactly what damage they cause the earth with the research, development and manufacture of all their "medications".

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Your House Sucks (Outside Air at Least)

I will try to spare you from too much cheerleading about how great the green building movement is. Nor will I overly promote my consulting company Baosol and how useful our services are. I will send you these newsletters in the spirit of entertainment, accuracy, and importance. Just a word of warning though, I find science to be very entertaining as I’ll start with a building science story.

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Artificial Wetlands For Wastewater Processing (pt. 2)

This is the second part of post "Artificial Wetlands For Wastewater Processing". The first part is here.

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Artificial Wetlands For Wastewater Processing (pt. 1)

This isn't one of my shorter pieces, so beware! I wrote a version of this to send to my state assemblywoman and ended up sending it to a number of local town officials as well as the local university.

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Introduction

Hello everyone! I’m new in town, so I thought a very quick introduction would be a good thing. I live in upstate NY - which is essentially anything north of NYC. That being said, I’m just south of Syracuse - obviously not very far upstate.

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What is Sustainable Building?

This is something I wrote a little while ago but am posting it because I still like it:

What is sustainable?

The “green” building movement is maturing quickly and has created a tremendous amount of dialog. People of many disciplines and backgrounds are engaging with what green building means.
With this in mind, it seems good to go back to some basic principles, before jumping into what sometimes may seem like the latest craze.

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Buy Sunscreen or Build an Igloo?

In case you‘re too young to remember (wish I was), there was a lot of talk about global cooling, not warming, going around in the ‘70s.

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Are There Limits to Being Green?

Maybe There Should Be...

I’m here, so I’m obviously not apathetic to environmental issues, though I don’t obsess over them (no offense, Juliette). I’m no eco-scholar, I’m an environorm through and through. But I finished college, I read a few articles now and then, and just because I don’t get carded anymore doesn’t mean my hominine cerebral cortex has turned to mush. And I simply can’t hold back a tiny snicker when I hear about the lengths some people will go to wipe out even a miniscule trace of a carbon footprint.

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The Sea Level Rise Mystery

Twenty inches per decade -- that's the estimate of how rapidly the oceans rose in the last interglacial period about 121,000 years ago, in research appearing in Nature. That's eight feet over 50 years, in a world just 2°C warmer than we are today.

Not good.

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Larry Burns: Reinventing the car

For today's inspiration check this amazing speech from General Motors veep Larry Burns. He previews cool next-gen car design: sleek, customizable (and computer-enhanced) vehicles that run clean on hydrogen -- and pump energy back into the electrical grid when they're idle. Ideal for Treenexers.
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Living in the Green Future

Popped into Costco today to pick up a couple of items, and what did I see?

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Three Solar Gadgets That Almost Nobody Needs

Our friends at TreeHugger had recently published interesting list of 10 strange solar power devices. Here at Treenex we've decided to reduce the list down to 3. ..and here are the scores.

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Of planes and corn

The aviation industry should be worried. As you probably already know, flying is contributing to climate change. There isn't much mystery about it, and it's quite straightforward - fuel goes in plane, plane burn fuel to fly, greenhouse gases go in the air, climate change happens. However, this is also true of buses, so what the big deal?

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New blogger

Hi everyone,

I have just been invited to join this blog as a writer, and I thought it's be nice to introduce myself before writing about gloom and doom.

My name is Juliette, I'm French and I live in the Netherlands. I've previsouly spent a year in the US, another in Italy and a summer in Berlin, so I'm quite international. I currently study International Law - only a few months to go and I'll get my degree! I am very active with Greenpeace (I was an intern there until a few weeks ago). I blog a lot (here, here and here), and I twitter.

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Dutch Have Safest Cycling Streets

The Netherlands is best cycling country. Now it's official - new research (from the Dutch, actually) shows Holland to have the safest cycling roads.

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Obama: US Ready to Lead Fight Against Climate Change

Obama told the European Union that the US is now ready to take a leading role in tackling climate change. According to Reuters, Obama pledged US support in drafting a global pact to replace the Kyoto protocol when world leaders meet to participate in climate talks in Copenhagen this December.

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Carbon-free Winter Games in 2010?

Organizers of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games said on Monday they are confident they can find sponsors to help with the estimated C$4.5 million ($3.6 million) cost of keeping the event from adding to global warming.

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Iceberg in Australia - One of the Top April Fool’s Hoaxes

Museum of Hoaxes today has published a list. One of the hoaxes is extremely interesting for all the Treenexers.

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Public Transit Users 3 Times More Likely to Meet Fitness Guidelines

A new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia suggests taking public transit may help you keep fit. The study, published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, finds that people who take public transit are three times more likely than those who don’t to meet the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada’s suggested daily minimum of physical activity.

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India Shows its Dedication to the Renewable Energy

India is one of the most rapidly growing economics in the whole world. And definitely it requires a lot of energy to maintain all of its factories. So the recent news are really great. India joined the International Renewable Energy Agency last week, becoming the largest energy consumer in the recently launched organization.

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Kamal Meattle: How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference and its lectures has been around for some time, and became the inspiration for the people, who wants to think outside the box. TED Conference website contains hundreds of videos from lectures; and we’ve found one that all of the Treenexers should find interesting.

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The Age of Stupid

We have already had a quick glance on The Age of Stupid on the previous post, and now it’s time for a more thorough look.

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The Maldives Choose to Become Carbon-neutral in a Decade

The president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, had unveiled a plan to make his country carbon-neutral within a decade. The announcement comes only days after scientists issued stern new warnings that rising seas caused by climate change could engulf the Maldives and other low-lying nations this century.

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Three Top Greenest Cars of the Year

Another interesting news from “green” cars field. Few days ago the three finalists for the World Green Car of the Year were announced. The Honda FCX Clarity, the Mitsubishi iMiEV and the Toyota iQ were picked as the top contenders.

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The Best of the Greenest from Geneva Motor Show

Geneva Motor Show this year was quite different not just because of the worldwide financial crisis which had strongly touched car industry. The exhibition was also full of green car models. Our colleagues at Inhabitat have selected their favorites, but here at Treenex we also have some favorite green cars from the very same exhibition

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Electricity 2.0 or tweet every watt you use

Few days ago winners of “Greener Gadgets’09″ were announced. And the winner was “Tweet-a-watt”, gadget which observes energy you use and tweet amount of energy that you use.

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Scotland will get 6.4 Gigawatts of energy from offshore wind farms

We have already talked about large alternative energy project in California, but it seems that Europe is also keeping up pace and is even trying to leave the US behind. A couple months back it was announced that the UK’s Crown Estate would be helping out with financing pre-construction costs for offshore wind farms, which would be able to produce impressive amount of 6,438 MW of renewable energy.

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Volkswagen up!, carbon emision down

Splendid news has reached us from Europe’s largest carmaker Volkswagen AG. The company will team up with Toshiba Corp to develop an electric-powered version of its subcompact Up! concept car.

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Green revolution ahead

Good news everyone - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and former US vice president Al Gore have called on the world to use economic stimulus urgently needed to tackle the global economic crisis to launch a long-term green revolution.

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Samsung has introduced ‘greenest’ cellphone so far

Samsung is seriously keen on going green – last year Samsung has launched two cellphones which were built with green materials or equipped with functions that help save energy. This year Samsung came even further and presented solar powered cellphone.

Samsung said in a statement its Blue Earth solar-powered model had a touch screen and was made from plastic taken from used water bottles.

The integrated solar panels on the back of the phone can yield a three minute call after a ten minute charge. For non-sunny days additional charger is included.

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World‘s largest solar power complex to be built in California

BrightSource Energy and Southern California Edison announced, that they will develop series of solar power plants in Mojave desert. Seven different plants will be able to produce over 1,300 MW of solar thermal power.

If everything will go as was planned, this should be the largest planned solar project, beating China‘s plans to have 1,000 MW plant.

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Australia suffers, climate change is to blame

The land down under is one of the first countries to suffer from forest fire at such large scale. Hundreds dead, thousands displaced and homeless.

Australian police claims that the half of forest fires were started by arsonists. This leaves the other half, which is to blame for the deaths and devastation. And that suspect is climate change. Scientists say, that rising temperature is to blame.

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