Climate Technology
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Spray coating makes your stuff last forever so you can buy less of it
If you watch one video today, make it this one — the shot of chocolate sauce sliding off a pristine pair of white tennis shoes looks like pure CGI. But it's real. As Tuan Nguyen explains at SmartPlanet, what you're looking at is a new type of spray-on silicon coating that dries into a nano-scale […]
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How your Prius is hurting the planet
Hybrid cars like the Prius emit less carbon than conventional cars. But they also depend on rare earth materials to make their engines work. And the mining of rare earth extracts a heavy toll on the environment in other ways. China has most of the world's easily accessible rare earth (which isn't actually rare, just […]
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Most efficient solar panel ever
Physics tells us that the most efficient solar cell should be able to convert 33.5 percent of solar energy into electricity, but to date the closest that the layabouts we call "scientists" were able to manage was 24 percent efficiency. Now a new solar cell has smashed that record, reaching 28.4 percent efficiency. They pull […]
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Is your stuff falling apart? Thank Walmart
Forever in blue jeans, babe? Not anymore.Photo: bburkyMy friend Tony’s closet is as good a place as any to begin an investigation of Walmart’s environmental impact. Tony has a pair of Levi’s that date back to high school more than 20 years ago. They still fit him and they’re still in rotation. The fabric has […]
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Smacking down the latest Solyndra silliness
I’m really getting tired of playing this game.Photo: Thomas HawkI’m as sick of writing about Solyndra as y’all are of reading about it, but somebody’s got to write something sane about this latest chapter, and obviously the political press has no interest in doing so. You may have seen the new rash of stories in […]
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How Coke reversed a bottle ban in the Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon is very beautiful, except when it's covered with disposable Dasani bottles left by littering tourists, which is a major problem for the park. So the National Park Service decided to ban disposable bottles. But then a bigwig at Coca Cola, which has donated $13 million to the park service over the years, […]
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How electric vehicles can give a boost to local clean energy
A plug for plug-ins.This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. The Northwest could get an additional 12 percent of its electricity from local wind power if one in eight of the region’s cars used batteries. That’s the conclusion of a study [PDF] from […]
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Instead of buying kitchen gadgets, why not share?
If you’ve ever looked at a wedding registry, you might have a sense of how many uni-tasking kitchen appliances there are on the market. Most kitchens have more gadgets than they can hold, and most people aren't using their canning equipment/bread machine/cider press very often. So wouldn't it make more sense to share? In Portland, […]
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Can today’s technology tackle climate change? Who cares?
Let’s ponder the real questions.One of the most heated arguments among climate policy analysts is over the following question: “Do we currently have the technology we need to tackle climate change?” For brevity’s sake, I refer to it as the “enough technology” debate. The way it usually breaks down is, those who say we don’t […]
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It’s not dead yet! The electric car makes a comeback, again, maybe
There are a couple of things you ought to know about the new film Revenge of the Electric Car, director Chris Paine’s sequel to his 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? First, this would be more aptly named The Running Saga of the Electric Car, or better yet, How The Electric Car Gets Its […]
