Perpetual Innovation

Author: SustainMe

  • BBC News – The goats fighting America’s plant invasion

    BBC News – The goats fighting America’s plant invasion:

    A different approach to invasives. That would be Kudzu. I wonder how it works with balsam pear in Florida? How about the melaleuca?

    Old school, but an effective approach to attach invasive plants is the old goat trick.

    What I didn’t realize before reading this article, is that the double chew and strong processing of the stomach reduce the changes of seed making the passage through the digestive system (and coming out carefully planted and fully fertilized).

    First heard about the herd from NR.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • NASA, NOAA Find 2014 Warmest Year in Modern Record | NASA

    NASA, NOAA Find 2014 Warmest Year in Modern Record | NASA

    This is a good recap of the tie in to record warming with human activity.

    It also give links the the raw data and the detailed methodology.

    Anybody want to play with the raw, unadulterated data, you will find a LOT of it; and no matter which way you look at it trend line appears. And the trend line is very depressing.

    BUT…

    This blog is devoted to easy, affordable solutions that can be implemented right now, in a business friendly way. In fact, the first things that can be done, energy efficiency and telecommuting, offer huge savings to everyone concerned (and a nice boost in the direction of sustainability).

    Why not start by picking the low-lying fruit now, and then address the heavy lifting as the next step.

    Orrrr, we all can wait and wait until governments to get into the mix to help us all with the problems.:-(

    We like the business now solution.

  • It’s Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record (watch the data unfold)

    It’s Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record:

    This is a very cool — oops, hot, I mean — visual of the earth temperatures over recent decades.

    As you will see, the monthly averages and the annual averages spike up year after year. Only a few monthly numbers are higher now then in 1995 and almost no monthly numbers are higher than the 20th century average.

    2014 was unusual as a hot year because is was not an el nino year. This was a “normal” year in which 5 of the hottest months on record occurred. 2014 outpaced the prior hottest months of 2010 and 2005.

    You have to go back a decade to find a coldest record month. That’s some ugly statistics, no matter how you look at it.

    Here’s a different graphic of combined land and surface temperatures in this US Today article. Notice that you could start over with a trend line at about 1995 and produce a new trend line that is simply higher than the historical average of a century.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • Study: sea levels rising quicker than previously estimated – Blue and Green Tomorrow

    Study: sea levels rising quicker than previously estimated – Blue and Green Tomorrow:

    This is a bit of good news which really is really bad news related to sea level rise.

    The good news, if you can call it that is sea levels appear to have been rising far slower during the first century of the industrial revolution than previously measured (estimated). Apparently the tidal measures that have been around for centuries didn’t represent some areas well, the poles and Florida, for example. A new study publishing in Nature analyzes and adjusts for the big gaps in prior ocean level measures. This is from a study in the journal Nature. Here.

    The bad news, is that the last few decades have been more than twice what was measured/estimated.

    At the new rate of 3mm per year, sea levels should rise only about one foot over the next 100 years. But this doesn’t count thermal expansion of the oceans warming (thermal expansion) over time such that a couple degrees centigrade should produce yards of increased sea levels once the temperature works its way through some 2 miles of ocean (on average).

    If this doesn’t make you nervous, you have been munching out a little too much on Colorado brownies, and not living very close to the sea shore.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • FPL gets approval to charge customers for fracking investment… The Real Story.

    FPL gets approval to charge customers for fracking investment | Tampa Bay Times:

    I was astounded to here that FPL is getting into the Fracking business. There’s this baloney about trying to save some money for their investors. FPL Customers pay, in advance, to drill Nat Gas wells in Alabama, and then reap some of the benefits of the wells, if any, in the form of low NatGas prices in the future.


    It sounds too good to be true. And leaves you shaking your head as to why a publicly regulated power utility would wonder off the path into the woods looking for firewood and NatGas.


    So the Fla PSC rubber stamped the deal. As they always do. (Although the PSC turned down a petition to pay for Federal Lobbying, an obvious red herring in the mix.)

    Comes to find out that NextEra, the parent company of FPL, already has oil drilling interests… 


    There are many reasons why a power company might want to get into the drilling business, but the one given seems like the very last on the list.

    Water, maybe. Fracking takes huge amount of water, as does power generation.

    Pipe lines. Power companies already have massive right-of-ways related to power lines. This seems like a perfect fit: run power through the line and gas through the ground.

    The one I like best would be to capture the NatGas that is flared in oilfields, produce power and send the power off to the grid through wire. We currently flare half of all NatGas produced in the USA. Nobody really wants to talk about it, but probably more than half. (Better to flare it, then release the methane, but still a very ugly and wasteful business).

    Here seems to be the answer: Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) through pipelines to markets, domestic and abroad. We in the US pay only bout 1/3 of what the rest of the world pays for NatGas. At about $3.50 per unit for us, and maybe $10-$12 for most other countries. Liquidification and shipping LNG is in the works on many fronts. Cheniere Energy, Inc.
    (trading symbol LNG) is coming on board with export terminals with a vengeance. 

    Imagine what it will look like when our mountains of NatGas start to look like mountains of dollars.

    So what does this mean in the next era of power utilities? I don’t really know. It should take some time to understand the maze and the interlinking parts. 

    Here is discussion about Spectra Energy (drilling and such) and FPL and the pipeline in existence and/or planned. LAKE.org article. There’s a pipeline through the Gulf…

    So very interesting.

    And, of course, it has to be mentioned: NatGas is far better than that other major fuel (not mentioning any names, like Coal), but it is still not a renewable resources. Non-sustainable, by any other name, is still a broken business model… It’s just a mater of time.

    ‘via Blog this’