ApocaDocuments (10) for the "Recovery" scenario from this week [see full week] ~ [see full Recovery scenario and stories]
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Sun, Jun 8, 2008 from Natural News:
Nanosolar Price Barrier Breakthrough Makes Solar Electricity Cheaper Than Coal
A new combination of nano and solar technology has made it possible for solar electric generation to be cheaper than burning coal. Nanosolar, Inc. has developed a way to produce a type of ink that absorbs solar radiation and converts into electric current. Photovoltaic (PV) sheets are produced by a machine similar to a printing press, which rolls out the PV ink onto sheets approximately the width of aluminum foil. These PV sheets can be produced at a rate of hundreds of feet per minute.
"It's 100 times thinner than existing solar panels, and we can deposit the semiconductors 100 times faster," said Nanosolar's cofounder and chief executive officer, R. Martin Roscheisen. "It's a combination that drives down costs dramatically."
Nanosolar is ramping up production of its PowerSheets at factories in San Jose, California, and Berlin, and expects to have them commercially available before the end of the year. The buzz around the PowerSheets is so strong that the company already has a three to five year backorder. ...
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That's three to five years too many -- jeez, ramp this up, outsource if you have to!
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Sun, Jun 8, 2008 from AP, via Abilene Reporter-News:
Markets emerging for old-fashioned farming, ranching
A recent study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that intensive industrial livestock production has yielded antibiotic-resistant bacteria, degraded the environment and devastated rural communities by replacing farm and ranch jobs with poorly paying feedlot positions.
By contrast, operations such as Hearst Ranch raise their animals without growth-promoting hormones or antibiotics -- and don't confine their livestock to teeming feed lots.
"In the consumer's mind, there's a connection to better health and to better for the environment and to good corporate citizenship," Goldin said. "It's just starting, but I think it's going to be a very powerful movement." ...
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We need folk songs and slogans: Back Home on the Range? That Land is Our Land?
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Sat, Jun 7, 2008 from People's Daily:
How to kick the carbon habit?
To seriously de-carbonize the current energy economy, the greatest challenge perhaps lies in how to integrate the new energy resources into the existing energy infrastructure that was designed around fossil fuels.
Electricity is the most important element of today's energy system. Mostly produced by coal-fired power plants, it also happens to be the largest and most easily replaced contributor to carbon emissions because almost all renewable sources, including solar, wind, geothermal, ocean and bioenergy, are all able to produce electricity. ...
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In The People's Daily!? Maybe we need a Little Green Book and a cultural revolution.
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Sat, Jun 7, 2008 from Boston Globe:
Home oyster gardening popular restoration effort
"Oysters in the Chesapeake Bay have been all but wiped out, but amateur conservationists are signing on to the growing hobby of home aquaculture to help bring the struggling bivalves back.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has sent out thousands of wire cages over the last decade to people in Maryland and Virginia willing to grow oysters under home docks for nine months and return them for "planting" on sanctuary reefs on the Chesapeake's tributaries." ...
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To paraphrase the idiom, the oyster is your world.
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Fri, Jun 6, 2008 from AP News:
Oregon judge sends polluting company owner to prison
The owner of a company that repeatedly mishandled waste oil and other hazardous material in violation of federal environmental laws has been sentenced to six months in prison.
Donald Spencer will also pay a $150,000 fine on behalf of his company, Spencer Environmental Inc.
A prosecutor says a prison sentence in such an environmental case is rare.
Spencer was convicted of two federal felonies for failing to dispose properly of thousands of gallons of used oil and wastewater contaminated with highly corrosive hydrochloric acid. ...
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Let's hope it's not an endangered species.
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Fri, Jun 6, 2008 from NOAA Fisheries Service, via ScienceDaily:
Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean Dolphin Populations Improving
The numbers of Northeastern offshore spotted and eastern spinner dolphins in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean are increasing after being severely depleted because of accidental death in the tuna purse-seine fishery between 1960 and 1990, according to biologists from NOAA's Fisheries Service. ...
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This deserves a Flipper laugh: ka-ka-KA-ka-ka!
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Fri, Jun 6, 2008 from Vineyard Gazette Online:
Against Odds, Piping Plovers Rebound
The first clutch of chicks hatched at Tashmoo on May 24. On other beaches all over the Vineyard, more happy events have since happened or are imminent. But the perpetuation of the threatened species is thanks as much to the efforts of human midwives as to the plover parents.
Ring the shorebird information line and you’ll learn that large parts of the East Beach on Chappaquiddick are closed to over-sand vehicles, lest roaming chicks be killed. Further closures are imminent on the Edgartown side of Norton Point. ...
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Thank goodness those plover are photogenic!
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Wed, Jun 4, 2008 from Guardian (UK):
End of the road for Hummer after sales of 'world's most anti-environmental car' dive
Loathed by environmentalists, military-style Hummers have survived years of vandalism, arson and abuse. But the lumbering American gas-guzzling vehicles have met their match in the rocketing cost of filling a tank with petrol.
Alarmed by a slump in demand for vehicles that consume vast quantities of fuel, Hummer's owner, General Motors, is reviewing the future of the Hummer brand which was originally a civilian version of the US military's armoured Humvee. The struggling Detroit-based carmaker said it was considering off-loading the business -- and with US sales plunging, its prospects are cloudy. ...
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One species we're glad to see going extinct.
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Tue, Jun 3, 2008 from Peterborough Examiner (Canada):
Holistic permaculture looks at whole system
Permaculture is permanent agriculture (agriculture that can be sustained indefinitely) and permanent culture (a method of working with, rather than against, nature).... using multiple crops that form beneficial plant communities, forest farming, crop rotation, no till, preserving native seeds and plants, composting, conservation of land and water, and bringing nature back to our homes. ...
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Working with Nature? That's not the way we do things here.
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Mon, Jun 2, 2008 from BBC (UK):
Progress at UN biodiversity forum
Nearly 200 countries have agreed on measures to protect the world's most threatened wildlife. At a Bonn conference they pledged to set up a deep-sea nature reserve and increase by tens of millions of hectares the area of land protected. But environmentalists... said progress was too slow compared to the threat to the world's species. ...
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Pesky environmentalists. Why don't they just get a job while they still can?
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