Green vending. PepsiCo are trialling new ‘green’ vending machines that could be used around the world in a few years. Heather Clancy explains at ZDNet:

I am one of those annoying people who doesn’t care much about which cola I drink, but if you’re a purist, PepsiCo has just given Pepsi fans another reason to brag: the company is in the process of installing roughly 30 new “green” vending machines across the United States that are designed to eliminate so-called F-gases that are widely found in refrigerators and air-conditioners. (Here’s a little treatise on why the “F” word really is a very bad thing.) The machines also use 15 percent less electricity that your typical machine.

OK, so 30 machines isn’t all that many. But it’s more than zero and it’s a positive start when it comes to addressing a problem that Greenpeace and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are trying to highlight more visibly.

More than zero. Well, it is a start…

EIS uses video, conventional photography and time-lapse photography to document changes on the Earth’s glacial ice. The team have installed 27 time-lapse cameras at 15 sites around the world — including Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and the Rocky Mountains. The EIS website explains:

EIS cameras are programmed to shoot once an hour, every hour of daylight, indefinitely. Each camera captures approximately 4,000 images per year for a total projected archive of nearly 500,000 photographs by completion of the survey. The time-lapse images will be edited into video that reveals how fast climate change is transforming large regions of our planet.

The project began in 05, and the team started downloading footage in 07.

Carbon emissions are invisible, but very large chunks of ice sliding into the sea are a  real and vivid visual clue that the effects of global warming are unfolding much faster than first thought.

You can also view the ETS footage on Google Earth.

Watch this (quickly expanding) space.

Happy Birthday, nuclear disaster! It’s 30 years since the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island melted down.

TIME looks at how it changed the US energy industry, and asks: if the disaster hadn’t happened, and the nuclear industry had continued to grow unabated, would the country’s greenhouse emissions be significantly smaller?

Scientific American has some in-depth reports, including this great one on the robots that were used to clean up the disaster.

Earth Hour: the fallout. So, Earth Hour happened. The Boston Globe has picture — big pictures. Sydney power use dropped by about 9%, according to the SMH, but The Age reports that much of Melbourne was less enthusiastic.

Did you participate in Earth Hour? Or did you opt for Human Achievement Hour instead?

Is ecotourism inherently destructive? The Guardian’s John O’Mahony heads up the Amazon to look for monkeys, but ends up asking: can we visit the Amazon without destroying it?

It is idyllic: immensely biodiverse and sublimely beautiful, an ecotourist’s dream that makes it easy to forget all those statistics that mark this out as one of the most threatened regions on the planet – and suppress that niggling question of whether I should be here at all.

He’s done it very carefully, of course. The usual Ruddsterness of saying effectively ‘oh, I don’t think it’s a problem, but everyone else does, so don’t blame me if it doesn’t work out right.’

John Howard’s prime dog-whistle was telling everyone he disagreed with Pauline Hanson while saying that her views were legitimate and had to be heard. Here we have Rudd pronouncing to the world that we can’t wait to take action on climate change while lamenting that that others obviously think we have to wait until the financial crisis is over. Howard took the opportunity to adopt Hanson’s policies and attitude. Rudd is adopting a target that he admits is deliberately weak because of the GFC.

Dog-whistle politics at its best, folks. This is how it’s going to be for the rest of the debate…

Earth hour. It’s that time of year again, is everyone ready to feel awesome about themselves? Balance it all out? Crikey is. But are there some  selling the self satisfied glow a little too cheaply…

60 of your earth seconds. To symbolise their commitment to helping the environment, Nickelodeon has asked kids to unplug their games and gadgets for a minute on Earth Day. According to Variety, the request doesn’t extend to T.V.

Take that, Earth! Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun called it hypocrisy.  “Just symbolic hypocrisy,” but worse he says
“is the hypocrisy that even Earth Hour’s sponsors have given up hiding.”

Bolt claims sponsors are expending more resources to promote the event than will be saved observing it.

Adding to the indignation, one Facebook group that is calling on people to “keep every light you own running during Earth Hour,” reports the Courier Mail.

“The Earth Hour makes people feel like they’ve done their share and makes them sleep better… that’s nice for them but it doesn’t really help the earth,” says group member Alexander Woodhouse.

Yeah what’s your point? Stop messin’ with our buzz.

But to be fair, behind all the slick advertising, all the extra resources used to promote the use of fewer resources Earth Hour does go a long way to rising awareness and their are those that take it seriously. To this end, Coke has announce that it be switching off some of the most famous advertising in the world, reports the Atlanta Business Journal:

Famous Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) signs will go dark in Times Square and on top of The Mirage hotel on the Las Vegas strip in the United States, Piccadilly Circus in London, and Kings Cross in Sydney. Other well-known illuminated signs and billboards will go off from Mexico to Cairo to Shanghai.

News briefs from across the planet:

Snake oil to fish oil. Fish, full of healthy things like protein and Omega 3 fatty acids, recommended by doctors the world over as part of a health and balanced diet, and now with added cures to  “high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression.”

msnbc reports that researches in the US have found that fish caught near water treatment plants serving five major US cities contain trace amounts of Pharmaceuticals use to treat the above aliments. Co-author of the study Bryan Brooks, a Baylor University researcher told msnbc

The average person hopefully will see this type of a study and see the importance of us thinking about water that we use every day, where does it come from, where does it go to? We need to understand this is a limited resource and we need to learn a lot more about our impacts on it.

Stepping forward. India, the world’s fifth largest primary energy consumer, has become  signatory to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

The 77th  state to join IRENA since it’s conception in January, India is to date the largest energy consumer to sign up. Yet opponents of IRENA in the US doubt whether it will in fact help India expand its renewable energy capacity. Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute:

“Experience proves that such agencies almost always quickly become bureaucracies that are effective only at perpetuating themselves and that often become obstacles to progress.”

More at World Changing.

Trading plans. A leading Chinese think-tank has developed an international emissions trading scheme based on the “different historic emissions of rich and poor nations” reports Reuters.

Yale University’s e360 environmental blog says the plan will benefit developing countries and place stricter limits on developed nations, such as the United States.

The plan, put forward by the State Council Research Development Center, would set emissions limits for each country based on the historic accumulation of CO2 and then allow nations to trade those emissions rights on an international market.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

News from around the planet:

Awkward introductions. It’s hard to believe that with a species becoming extinct every 20 minutes, scientists are still discovering previously unknown types of plants, beetles and yes, even mammals.

High in the Peruvian mountains, scientists with Conservation International have found all three.

The species: a mouse (Akodon sp.nov), a high-Andean plant (Senecio sanmarcosensis) and two beetles (Eriopis canrash and Cycloneda andresii) were discovered during a series of expeditions conducted between 2005 and 2008.

Unfortunately, and making for a rather awkward round of introductions, the Ancash region, in which all four species were found, is believed to be under treat by uncontrolled logging, unsustainable shepherding practices, forest fires and mining.

For articles on more recent discoveries, go to Science Daily.

Farming fight back. Small scale sustainable farming in the world’s two most populated countries is on the rise, as the rule poor in both China and India revert to organic and independent farming operations as a way to combat the environmental damage and disempowerment many are experiencing as a result large scale industrial farming.

Between 2000 and 2006, China jumped from 45th to second in the world in terms of land under organic management. With farmers reporting that by retaining independence they were able to access traditional marketing channels despite increasingly integrating supply chains associated with the rise of larger industrial farming, and ultimately receive better prices. Full report found at Green Leap Forward.

In India, a farming collective of 5000 Dalit (untouchable) woman from the central state of Andhra Pradesh, is producing organic food and has opened an organic seed bank to encourage similar projects around the country, reports Treehugger.

An open call for residents. C.L.E.A.R. Village Foundation is taking applications from people keen to become one of the 100 co-designers of an eco-village that could be replicated around the world:

C.L.E.A.R. Village Foundation’s five-year collaborative design project is working to construct a real-life C.L.E.A.R. Village. By bringing together leading figures from a variety of disciplines, powerful and complete solutions can be developed. The village will offer excellence in social, environmental and economic sustainability to both residents and guests. The village will let businesses test innovative solutions and technologies in a real world situation, showcasing their most innovative work on a world stage.

Meating of the absent minded. Finally, the NRDC would like us all to be aware that this week, Washington is playing host to the World Coal-to-Liquid Conference.

There’s scheming afoot, reckons the NRDC’s Rob Perks:

The participants are single-mindedly focused on fulfilling their dream of using federal tax dollars to fund an entirely new industry devoted to converting America’s coal reserves into liquid transportation fuel… Despite the Obama administration’s clarion call for clean energy solutions, the industry and its backers remain hell-bent on selling this fuel as a solution to America’s energy problems. In reality, liquid coal offers only enormous expense, minimal energy security benefits and an increase in greenhouse gas pollution.

Solar power. Scientists in China and Japan are using the scales on butterflies wings as a template for improved light harvesting on Gratzel solar cells. Tests have shown they absorbs more light than conventional dye-sensitized cells as well as being faster and easier to manufacture. Full journal article here.

When sun light hits a solar panel on an angle, much of that light is reflected off and lost. This has a major impact on solar efficiency, especially for static urban panels. Researches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new anti-reflective coating that can absorb sunlight from nearly all angles. By treating a silicon solar cell the anti-reflective coating, sunlight absorbency increased from 67.4% to 96.21%.

The cost of producing silicone based solar cells is often sighted as the reason why solar power is not yet a viable alternative to energy from fossil fuels. Canadian scientists at the University of Alberta and the National Research Council’s National Institute for Nanotechnology believe they have found the answer by making solar panels from plastic. In two years of development, they have had 30% improvements in working models. They believe that in five to seven years everyone will have access to inexpensive and mass-produced plastic solar cells made by ink jet-like printers.

Biofuels. An American company, Virent Energy, will open a demonstration plant later in the year that they claim will turn sugar water into the chemical equivalent of gasoline, reports CNET.

Produced from sugar cane, sugar beets and other plants, the facility will produce around 10,000 gallons of liquid hydrocarbons a year which can be refined into either gasoline, jet fuel or diesel.

Robotics and fish. Students from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Technology Laboratories are working to develop “fully autonomous greenhouse, complete with robots, pots and plants connected via computation, sensing and communication.”

As yet, the project is restricted to a few tomato plants and robot care takers. Each pot, equipped with sensors that record the plants vital information, can communicate to the  robots, outfitted with a robotic arm and water pump, letting it know what attention it needs and when.

Over the Atlantic, British scientists have created robotic fish capable of detecting pollution levels as they maneuver around the oceans. A video of the five foot long robo-carp can be found at Earth First

Disney goes green? The happiest company on Earth is planning to cut their greenhouse gas emissions in half over the next four years, but the Guardian’s Fred Pearce calls BS, asking: just how green can they be if they still rely on people travelling around the world to visit their resorts? The folks at Green Daily are also sceptical, doubting their ability to “cut 100% of their landfill waste” and noting the lack of timeframe put on the project.

On the other four-fingered hand, EcoSalon comes to Disney’s defence, noting their wildlife conservation area in Florida and the work done by their Worldwide Conservation Fund.

So is it just corporate greenwash in the face of a sinking stock price, or better than nothing?

The Terminator forms green army. Governator Ah-nuld is launching a ‘Green Corps’ in California, training at-risk young people for green jobs, like producing solar panels and producing wind turbines. A good work-for-the-dole idea for Australia?

Shell switch to biofuels. Oil giant Shell are dumping investment in wind and solar power to focus on biofuels, reports the IHT. Comments TreeHugger:

The thing that’s astounding in all that isn’t that Shell’s primary objective is making money for investors, nor that it may have difficulty developing wind and solar power at the moment. What boggles my mind is that despite all the evidence that biofuels show less promise than we once thought at reducing carbon emissions (for the most part, there are exceptions) and have a number of unintended land use consequences, that despite all the evidence that wind and solar will only take up a greater portion of our energy needs, that despite its own CEO saying that peak oil will be upon us within six years, Shell remains stuck in the past.

George Monbiot also questions Shell’s motives:

You’ll notice than in the newsletter he switches from “renewables” to “alternative energy and CO2 technologies”. Alternative energy is not necessarily renewable energy. The figure might include the cost of assessing the prospects of exploiting oil shales, for example – an extremely polluting fuel source, from which it takes a great deal of energy to extract liquid fuels.

… Shell is consolidating: has it stopped pretending to be anything other than a liquid fuel and gas company?