If you are from British Columbia, Washington or Oregon and you are planning to buy an electric car now it’s the time. Starting this fall and with an investment of $1.32 million the Washington State Transportation Department plans to turn Interstate 5 into the nation’s first "electric highway". The highway will hold enough charging stations so electric vehicles will be able to make the entire 276-mile trip from the Canadian border to the Oregon state line.
This is the sort of creative yet simple solution I love finding. If we can use goats to mow overgrown fields, why should we keep using fossil fuel consuming mowers and herbicides? Google has “hired” some goats to eat extra weed at its Mountain View headquarters.
California Grazing “provides holistic land management and brush & weed control through grazing”. They have over 800 goats, and offer their service in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and surrounding areas.
To control the goats and make them mow limited areas, California Grazing provides portable electric fences.
According to Google, the price of hiring these goats is similar to that of hiring lawn mowers. However, the benefits of the goats are quite interesting: the emissions caused by mowers are avoided, as well as the noise, plus goats fertilize the soil while grazing. And, Google workers get to have fun watching the four-legged mowers eat up extra weed!
You are eligible to receiving a $1,500 rebate when buying certain electric motorcycles. California has ambitious plans for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, specifically 25% by 2020. This program is aimed at fostering more sustainable transportation.
The first electric bikes to have qualified for the rebate are Zero Motorcycles, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger helped promote.
He said: “I love the financial side of these motorcycles because they cost less then one cent per mile to operate and you get a 10% federal tax credit plus a California rebate of $1,500. That equates to a 25 percent price reduction making these electric motorcycles affordable for anybody.”
I’m interested in your opinion. Do you think this rebate system will encourage the buying of electric bikes? Do people trust them enough?
VIA: Inhabitat
As my plane was leaving LA after TED2010 and I watched the curious man-made landscape of circling streets and repetitive housing, I thought of the provoking book by Stewart Brand called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto which stated some environmental heresies. The first one, and the one I will examine here, was that cities are green. It is hard to think about New York City, for instance, as a model for sustainability but let’s examine the lifestyle of organic eating, juice sucking, prius driving southern Californians for a minute. They all live 30 to 90 minutes away from their jobs, so each family has at least one car, usually two, with a big commute twice a day. If we do some math with this calculator from the EPA we’ll see that a typical Californian household emits between 20,000 to 35,000 Kg of CO2 a year.
Each house has to receive (at least) water, electricity and some bandwidth so pipes, copper cables and fiber optics have to be deployed to cover miles and miles of land. Furthermore, all those lawns require massive amounts of water and fertilizers, let’s not forget we are actually on a desert with almost no rain. Each time they need groceries they go to a supermarket, you need quite a bit of them to cover such big areas, and they all need truckloads (literally) of food and supplies. The amount of energy and other resources consumed by this design is monstrous.
The contrast of this way of living with Californian’s love for anything green is startling. At the TED conference we received an aluminum bottle to refill from filtered water dispensers instead of the typical and stupid water bottle. If 1500 persons consume 3 bottles of water a day for 5 days we would have fabricated a mountain of 22500 plastic bottles. Although you could argue that they can be recycled if properly disposed, it takes quite a bit of energy and carbon emissions to turn that amount of slightly used plastic into usable bottles. I personally think that it is a catastrophe that after installing all those water pipes, people everywhere in the world still consume bottled water. The plastic has to be fabricated from oil using energy to melt and take its shape, then sent to a spring, if you are lucky, and then back to supermarkets all over the world. Then you grab those waters, haul them to your trunk, take them home, drink them, throw them away and probably end in a landfill nearby.
TED had also on display Hybrid Cars by Lexus, and although I applaud Hybrid’s oil efficiency I hardly think that they constitute a solution for a zero-emissions, green way of transportation. There were a few Segways and a few bicycles but most people there had arrived either by car (bad) or by plane (the worst), including myself. I took a flight from Buenos Aires, to Dallas and then to LA. The carbon emissions of that flight were roughly 2,825 Kg of CO2. You can calculate them here. As one TED U session said, if you wanted to be green going to TED you would have to go walking.
I’d better start walking now to reach TED2011 on time.
California is one of the most progressive states in terms of environmental action and policy. This particular case is yet another proof of it. Starting on 2011, California will demand new buildings to comply with a number of green regulations. These will be included in the first mandatory state-wide green building code in the US; dubbed Calgreen.
The set of rules was passed unanimously by the California Building Standards Commission. Starting January 1st 2011, buildings will have to meet these new green requirements.
California has set the ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 33% by 2020. Calgreen is expected to help accomplish this target.
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On November 4th California lawmakers passed an $11.1 billion overhaul of the state’s outdated water system. The plan gives Mr.Schwarzenegger the tools needed to begin restoring the crucial Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta which will allow for a stable water supply to Southern California cities and farmers in the Central Valley.
This will help supply a growing population while attempting to preserve a fragile environment and will be funded by a bond measure. It has been a long time in the making but was forced to resolution by a third dry year, decreased snowfall and the introduction of new pumping restrictions to protect delta fish.
At the centre of these water bills is our need for a sustainable and reliable water system. Legislators, for example, want to require California cities, with some exceptions, to use 20 percent less water by 2020. Clearly, there is a dual issue based on our level of consumption of water and our accessibility to it. They both require large investments, which mean job creation, and we can strongly contribute to one of them by managing our own personal water levels.
The cost of sustainability may be high, but the cost of inaction is much higher. That Californians recognize this and are now investing in their future despite (and because of) serious economic problems should encourage us all to do the same.
Source: msnbc
Lake Arenal is located in the mid-north of Costa Rica. This great lake is the principal source of energy of the country by using hydro power and wind power generation. Around the lake, you can find hotels, restaurants and homes that want to develop in a sustainable way in order to keep the spectacular environment that surrounds them. This is where the project of sustainable urbanization project is being developed.
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