2012 March 27

Importance of Water Conservation | Infographic

Have you ever considered just how important water is? Although water is a renewable resource, it should be used wisely. Humans use water excessively, at a much faster rate than it can be replenished. Between showering, doing dishes and laundry, we continually waste thousands of gallons of water each year. How do you conserve water?

There are many ways to reduce your water consumption, such as turning off the water while you brush your teeth, making sure your sprinkler isn’t wasted on concrete, amongst many other water-saving tips. However, a quick and easy way to conserve is to use low-flow fixtures on your home appliances. One household can save 40,000 gallons of water each year with low-flow fixtures. If every household in the U.S. also used low-flow fixtures, we could save 2 trillion gallons of water! The infographic below illustrates the point that just a few eco-friendly changes can make a HUGE environmental impact!

Source: eLocal.com

Activists Defend Germany’s Massive Renewable Energy Growth

Annual Sales of Electric Bicycles to Surpass 47 Million by 2018

Crazy Bike Rides in Peru’s Mountains (Videos)

BP Oil Spill Definitely Caused Coral Deaths in Gulf of Mexico

Meet Mr. Coal Guy: ‘Coal-De-Lay-Ee-Hoo!’

As long-delayed rules to enforce the Clean Air Act against coal pollution go into force, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has launched Mr. Coal Guy, a new social-media campaign with satirical videos that parody the coal industry’s multi-million dollar advertising campaigns. These videos feature Mr. Coal Guy, played by Mr. Show’s John Ennis, using iconic TV shows from the 1980′s to portray coal as fun, hip, and totally safe. In one video, Mr. Coal Guy provides the voiceover to a clip of Bob Ross’s timeless landscape painting to promote mountaintop removal coal mining (“scrapey scrapey goodbye lakey!”):

Another video portrays a coal-executive beach party celebrating “the fact that coal pollution never causes any health problems”:

The $300,000 campaign is “a funny send up of just how desperate dirty fossil fuel execs are to keep our country chained to the dirty, outdated 19th-century energy source,” says Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign. The campaign is on Facebook and Twitter at @mrcoalguy.

Denmark set to use wind power to supply 50% of its electricity

The Danish Government has unveiled an ambitious low carbon strategy which aims to make greater use of renewable energy sources and reduce carbon emissions by more than 34% by 2020.

As part of the strategy, Denmark aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by more than a third against a 1990 baseline, this is in addition to cutting energy consumption by more than 12%, against a 2006 baseline.

To achieve this Denmark intends to supply 35% of its total electricity from renewable energy sources, with 50% of this coming from wind power, and thus creating thousands of renewable energy jobs.

An agreement has been reached between the Danish Liberal and Conservative parties to build two offshore wind parks, with a capacity of 1,000MW off the coast of Denmark by 2020. It is anticipated that this agreement will help Denmark, which is already at the forefront in renewable energy, hit a target of generating 100% of energy from renewables by 2050.

Commenting on the deal, Danish Minister for Climate, Energy and Building, Martin Lidegaard, said that windfarms will be central to reaching  green energy targets, Lidegaard hopes that “Denmark will once again be the global leader in the transition to green energy”.

According to the Danish Energy Association, the energy industry has supported these ambitions by investing billions in the new power generation, smart grids and interconnectors.

Allen & York specialise in renewable energy jobs in the UK and Europe.  Current renewable energy jobs include:

James Cameron’s Record Dive Exposes Need For Global Protection Of The High Seas

The Deepsea Challenger submersible begins test dive near Papua New Guinea. The sub is the centerpiece of a joint scientific project by explorer and filmmaker James Cameron, the National Geographic Society and Rolex to conduct deep-ocean research. Photo: National Geographic

by Lisa Speer, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Yesterday, filmmaker James Cameron became the first solo explorer to reach the ocean’s deepest point, traveling nearly seven miles down through some of the darkest, most mysterious waters on Earth. Cameron’s successful venture to the bottom of the Mariana Trench comes at a pivotal time for the deep ocean. As world leaders prepare for a June meeting in Brazil to discuss the future of our planet’s resources, the fate of the deep ocean is at stake.

In just 12 weeks, heads of state from around the world will gather in Rio de Janeiro for a major global summit on the planet’s future. Known as the “Earth Summit,” this meeting addresses the health of our climate, air, food sources, fresh water, and oceans. This meeting is vastly important—the last time world leaders gathered like this to discuss broad environmental concerns was a full ten years ago. It is essential that leaders at the 2012 Earth Summit address the future of some of our most vulnerable ocean space, the high seas.

Half of the Earth is covered by a vast global commons—that portion of the deep ocean that lies beyond the jurisdiction of any one country. Known as the “high seas,” this area of international waters (present in all regions of the globe) constitutes two thirds of the world’s oceans. The only way to ensure the health of the high seas is through international cooperation. And as this enormous area is increasingly threatened by deep sea mining, overfishing, ocean warming, acidification, and plastic and noise pollution, protecting the high seas is getting harder and harder every day.

Adding to the hurdles of protecting this crucial ocean area is the outdated and gap-ridden legal regime under which human activities—including fishing, shipping, energy production, and others—are managed.

While marine parks in the high seas would allow sea life to thrive protected from industrial activities, no legal mechanism exists to establish such areas in the high seas. Prior environmental impact assessment is required for some activities in the high seas, like mining, but not for others, including certain types of fishing. The standards are also inconsistent, differing widely among sectors.

As we saw during James Cameron’s journey, much of the high seas lies so deep that even sunlight cannot penetrate to the ocean floor. The marine life there—from bioluminescent organisms to exotic microbes—remains largely a mystery to us, so much so that Cameron once dubbed the deep ocean an “alien world here on Earth.”

If we are going to conserve, protect, and continue to learn from the amazing array of life in the deep, the existing legal regime needs a major overhaul.

The good news is that there is growing support for a new treaty that would protect ocean life beyond national jurisdiction. Such an agreement could clear the way for establishing fully protected parks on the high seas, require prior assessment for all activities, and address a variety of other management gaps.

It is essential that when our global leaders head to the 2012 Earth Summit in June, they launch negotiations to protect the high seas as a matter of urgency. This vast ocean area is critical to the health of our planet, our way of life, and the well-being of all nations.

Lisa Speer is Director of the International Oceans Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard.

Will EU Countries Reach 2020 Renewable Energy Targets?

Switching From an SUV to a Prius Saves 430 Gallons of Gas a Year

Here Come the First Greenhouse Gas Limits on Power Plants

Part 1: Lots at Stake in the US as Energy Takes Political Spotlight

BREAKING: Obama Administration To Establish Strong Carbon Pollution Limits For New Power Plants

In one of the most significant reversals of Bush-era policy, the Obama administration plans tomorrow to issue greenhouse pollution limits for new power plants, a major step in the fight against global warming. The new rule — which will go into effect in 2013 — confirms the end of the era of dirty coal-fired power plants:

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits between 800 and 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

Since the late 1990s, “natural gas has been the fuel of choice for the majority of new generating units,” and in the 2000s, wind power generation also grew significantly. With the high cost of its toxic pollution from mine to plant, coal has been losing out to cleaner sources of fuel in the electric utility sector. Although few new coal plants have been built in the last twenty years, aging plants — some built in the 1930s — still produce about 40 percent of U.S. electricity, and about 80 percent of carbon pollution from the power sector.

In March 2001, newly elected President George W. Bush reversed a campaign pledge to limit greenhouse pollution from power plants, the source of 40 percent of United States global warming pollution. In 2008, Bush White House officials refused to open an email sent by its own Environmental Protection Agency which called for action against man-made climate change.

“This is the third major executive action launched by the Obama administration to reduce carbon pollution,” writes Center for American Progress senior fellow Daniel Weiss. “With growing evidence that the serious impacts of climate change are already here, President Obama deserves credit for this new standard. We must urgently adopt and implement these new pollution reduction standards for power plants.”