My favorite earth day bit was Bill Maher on the Huffington Post, talking about Colony Collapse (of bees) and the possible link to cell phones –
Maybe you don’t need to talk on your cell phone all the time. Maybe you don’t need a bag when you buy a keychain. Americans throw out 100 billion plastic bags a year, and they all take a thousand years to decompose. Your children’s children’s children’s children will never know you but they’ll know you once bought batteries at the 99 cent store because the bag will still be caught in the tree. Except there won’t be trees. Sunday is Earth Day. Please educate someone about the birds and the bees, because without bees, humans become the canary in the coal mine, and we make bad canaries because we’re already such sheep.
EnergyHack — for great reusable bags, try reusablebags.com! They’ll save trees and oil too.
Happy Earth Day, may we see many more!
It’s a small world after all when even the Disney Co. tries to go green. But there’s more, by switching to biodiesel Disney will save a lot of money, at least 50 cents per gallon.
Plus,
For Disneyland, the switch to biodiesel saves as much as 150,000 gallons of diesel fuel each year, while potentially reducing carbon dioxide emissions by up to 80 percent, Disneyland Resort spokesman Bob Tucker said Monday.
Yay for Davis. Home of the closest Whole Earth Festival, a town which probably has more bicycles than cars, a great place for an electric car dealership!
The first car dealership to exclusively sell electric cars in Davis opened its doors Monday and offers three models of three-wheeled vehicles running solely on electricity. The dealership currently has 12 vehicles starting under $10,000 - used for around-town driving of up to 40 mph - on site and available for test driving.
Following in the footsteps of the first X Prize, which awarded $10 million to the first private effort to launch a space craft, the X Prize Foundation now plans to offer and $10 million award to the first company to build a production model car that gets 100 miles to the gallon.
Via the Red Herring
“Zero is the new black.”
Ever since he was written up in the Times last week, No Impact Man has been causing shockwaves. Here’s a guy who, with his family, is going without… reducing his intake to local foods and his output to a tiny fraction of the typical American’s.
Seth Godin Linked.
No Impact Man Linked.
Here are the small and absolutely painless things we’ve done to reduce our impact since starting this blog:
Signed our son up for the bus from school (better than idling in front of school)
Scheduled an energy audit.
Started a second compost pile.
Bought and installed more fluorescent bulbs.
Deep recycling (why just recycle bottle and cans when you can also recycle plastic bags that the paper comes in), every box that passes through the house and anything paper.
Are we zealots? Categorically no. Whether it’s global warming that gets you hot or the fact that oil is a finite resource, it’s good to conserve as much as we can for our children and their children too.
It’s also time to ask who are the real conservatives?
What kills me is that even if the US car companies didn’t think the electric car was right for the US market, what a huge opportunity they missed to be out front for the world market, and now, when the future is almost here, foreign carmakers will continue to pioneer new markets with Hybrid and Electric cars.
Via Science Daily, this may only be three to five years out.
Juicing up your cell phone or iPod may take on a whole new meaning in the future. Researchers at Saint Louis University in Missouri have developed a fuel cell battery that runs on virtually any sugar source — from soft drinks to tree sap — and has the potential to operate three to four times longer on a single charge than conventional lithium ion batteries, they say.
This gives juice boxes a whole new demographic!
Link.
We’re going to see more and more human-interest profiles just like this one about Ken Cannon of Keizer, Oregon.
Heck, these ZAP electric cars are cute, and when we can rely on independent manufactuerers like ZAP and Tesla that will actually sell cars to their customers (instead of leasing them like evil GM), well see many more such stories in small-town newspapers everywhere.
Link.
Shutdownday.org asks you to turn off your computer for one day. That’s tomorrow, March 24.
I’m turning off my work desktop — no email for me. It’s Spring and I want to work in the yard anyways, but we may have to sneak at least one blog post from another computer.
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?
More alternative energy news from north of the border — there’s a great profile of an electric car converter based in a rural Vancouver Island community in this morning’s Vancouver Sun.
Electric Car Conversion Alive on Vancouver Island.