This was posted over in SustainZine originally, but it does pertain to Innovation. The costs of the old systems of fossil fuels are far greater than the price we all pay at the pump. Plus they are crazy subsidized (one estimate is 1% of GDP directly and about 6% indirectly). But here’s the article. *** SustainZine *** A question I sometimes ask of people who think that fossil fuels are here forever more and that…
Ryder corporation has released its Corporate Sustainability Report for last 2021. They seem to be making more progress than many organizations, especially in the transportation industry. But their environment is one of the hardest to move to zero emissions. Long-haul trucking will be around for a long time and switching from diesel is difficult. All of the reporting creates fodder for anyone on the left, right or center to hammer on endlessly. See the Ryder…
Reforestastion in order to bring back something similar to native forest, and to draw down carbon dioxide levers, is actually rather tricky. You can’t plant a monosystem of, say, pine tries, especially if they are not native. One cool approach is to take acorns from an anchient native oak tree as one of 27+ natives in a reforestation areas. Check out this detailed article on BBC, 1,000-year-old oaks used to create ‘super forest’, by Hellen…
The unintended consequences of helping out where help may not be needed: your fav garden birds. (Along the same line is humming birds, if you don’t keep the feeder water clean and safe, you might be endangering all those hummers you were trying to encourage.) Sustainability means doing the right thing, as well as making sure that you watch to see if things that you do, don’t do what you thought they were designed to….
It’s World Bee Day, May 20th. There are lots of people worried about bees, and rightly so. To mix a metaphor, bees are the canaries in the coal mine. When bee colonies get wiped out (like colony collapse), it indicates that things are not right in the environment.  (When your canary dies in the coal mine, the methane levels are high enough to cut off oxygen, and to explode with any spark.) Pollinators like bees…
Here’s a great article in Clean Technica by Zachary Shahan on the falling prices of solar (PV). The cost per watt is the key measure to follow. Basically a rule of thumb is that $3 per Watt installed should be profitable, before any tax credit considerations. In 2006 the cost was $3.50 per watt for the panels. Now prices have dropped below $0.50 and would be lower if there wasn’t a trade tiff going on with China. Even…
