Crikey intern Olly Perkins writes:
Today’s green news:
EPA confirms: greenhouse gasses are bad. The US Environmental Protection Agency, about to declare greenhouse gasses dangerous pollutants, has embarked on what the New York Times is calling, “one of the ambitious regulatory programs in history.”
“This will officially end the ear of denial on global warming,” said one US Congressman, and as a consequence the NYT says:
It sets the agency on a collision course with carmakers, coal plants and other businesses that rely on fossil fuels, which fear that the finding will impose complex and costly rules.
Clearing the air with indoor plants. So while everyone waits for regulatory systems around the world to realise their ambitions and then even longer for pollution levels to start dropping, Kamal Meattle from New Delhi, India, claims all it takes to guarantee yourself all the fresh air you want inside your own home is a few pot plants:
- The Areca Palm (or Chrysalidocarpus lutescens) is does great air cleansing work during the day. About 4 shoulder height plants per person should do the trick.
- The Mother-in-law’s Tongue (or Sansevieria trifasciata) takes over by converting CO2 to O2 at night. You want about 6 to 8 of these waist high plants per person.
- The Money Plant (or Epipremnum aureum) does the job of filtering out removing Formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds.
Mr Mettle has spent the last 15 years putting his theory to the test at the at Paharpur Business Centre, a 20-year-old, 50,000 sq ft building, by filling it with over 1200 plants for 300 building occupants. As a result, the Indian government has declared it the healthiest building in Delhi. Read more at Green Spaces.
Could the military lead the way in renewable energies? According the Time magazine, that’s a real possibility. Recently, the British Ministry of Defense (MOD) published a “Defense Technology Plan,” laying out long term long term research goals. Among the five “capability visions” which it hoped would stimulate new technologies was “Reduce dependency on fossil fuels.”
Speaking to Time, Paul Stein, the MOD director of Science and Technology said:
“We and our allies need creative alternatives to fossil fuels. This document gives our partners in industry the confidence that we are serious about finding those solutions. The message is clear: we’ll consider anything, as long as it works and gets us away from fossil fuels.”
Look it. NASA has announced a new partnership with Microsoft Research’s WorldWide Telescope to push over a hundred terabytes of high-resolution images of our planetary neighbours from NASA’s Planetary Data System into the Microsoft product. Previousl,y only full data sets were available in the exotic format FPT front end. NASA says the new agreement will make access easier for the general public. More at Wired Science.
One Comment
What the EPA in the USA do in recognising the risk bad air imposes on all of us, and particularly more vulnerable individuals in workplaces and our living environments, is a matter that has been going on for so long it may seem extreme. It is not.
I encourage all to take a look in peer reviewed medical journals for articles, (eg. Exposure Assessment of Diesel Bus Emissions, Maricela Yip1, Pierre Madl1*, Aaron Wiegand2, and Werner Hofmann1, Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2006, 3(4), 309-315, Air pollution: to the heart of the matter, Tim S. Nawrot1*, Abderrahim Nemmar1,2, and Benoit Nemery1, European Heart Journal (2006) 27, 2269–2271). It tells a story of what has been fed to us as necessary risk, without elaborating on the years it takes off our lives.
To bring the matter closer to home, I reflect on air quality reports by the EPA in south australia. I relate the one for 2007, released in December 2008. The Report is principally historic data. It relates to emissions data of 2002-3 and 2005-6. Where 2007 data is reported, discrepancies exist between data presented in figures for Adelaide, and the national comparisons with other capital cities.
The single biggest issue I have with this report is that if it is meant to provide the public confidence that regional air quality measures are used by authorities to relate the risk to health in the community and stimulate action to identify and contain causes, then they are failing miserably.
The air quality measures are so nonspecific and outdated that they tell our respiratory specialists and General Practitioners very little about patient and community risk exposure in their living and working environments. Health is given minor reference in the report. This report tells them what regional levels might have been from 2 to 6 years after the event.
It is very difficult for epidemiologists to relate this sort of delayed information to population data. It is damn well impossible for clinical staff to take any advantage of it.
My biggest concern relates to inadequate process generating information about risks in our community, and then connecting those risk profiles with vulnerability in the community. Identifying where each is elevated is not happening, and it can deliver so much for all of us.