Al Gore receives Nobel Price for Peace

So good ol' Al receives the Nobel Prices for Peace 2007.

While we congratulate Mr. Gore to his success, we reflect on what it takes to receive such an award.

Gone are the days when guerillas like YASSER ARAFAT and SHIMON PERES could receive this distinction for merely stop fighting. Or, as in 1993, NELSON MANDELA and his long time foe, the President of the Republic of South Africa FREDRIK WILLEM DE KLERK shared the prize.

What, we wonder, would a laureate-colleague of Mother Theresa's stature, who spent decades caring for the sick and dying in Calcutta, think about a yuppie-guy travelling the globe first class with a lap top and a power point presentation under his arm? What, we wonder, does awareness about CO2 in the atmosphere have to do with world peace? Don't they have an ecology prize? Where are the mothers that resisted war in Chechna or the men and women who risked their lives to protect refugees in 'Hotel Rwanda' in this selection? Where are all the many brave and selfless people who stand up against tyranny and injustice?

Having received the prize myself in 1988, I feel unworthy of this honor in the company of those brave and selfless people who stand up against tyranny and injustice.

I just looked at a list of nobel prize winners on the web - they are nowhere to be found in the company of those who merely stop fighting their own wars. Why not go all the way and nominate Rumsfeld or Bush or Ghadaffi? Perhaps they haven't caused enough bloodshed yet, so a peacedefined as 'absence of war' would not weigh in enough with the Nobel Institute.

Only LE DUC THO of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam had the decency to decline the prize when he received it together with HENRY A. KISSINGER in 1973.

Now that's a man with integrity.

New Eco-Friendly Packaging Triggers Boom In Guilt-Free Littering

An interesting Painting

Came across an interesting lttle box in a side street in Palo Alto, CA, which I wanted to share here. I like the design of course, but I could not figure out the purpose of the box.

Can O Worm - fun for the whole family

Keeping wriggly pets is indeed a lot of fun for the whole family. There's always something going on in the Can O Worms worm box and it is quite astonishing how much kitchen garbage these friendly helpers devour every day.

Perhaps you, too, would like to recycle your kitchen waste into wonderful vermicompost?

Find out more about the Can O Worms on my homepage

http://www.topsoiljapan.com

Let's cure the bubonic plague with malaria!

We at Neighborhood Worm Farm are committed to act responsibly and think about how we can recycle valuable resources or reduce energy consumption.

Therefore we advocate reducing waste in the household. To us it makes sense to recycle any waste on the spot, right where it is produced, to eliminate further transportation or handling elsewhere. We believe keeping worms are ideal to deal with kitchen garbage. They are easy to handle, 100% biologic and instead of consuming energy, they supply you with the best fertilizer nature has to offer.

Now here is industry's answer to reducing garbage: Companies like National Panasonic and Hitachi came up with a brilliant gadget that purportedly transfers kitchen garbage into compost within hours. It almost looks like a rice cooker, only bigger, and has a chamber which receives the kitchen garbage. You can dump up to 700 g of organic waste at a time. Close the lid, push a button, and magic will run its course. 105 minutes and 1.75 KWh later you will find all garbage reduced to 1/7 of its original volume, burned down to a miserable little, almost odorless pile. Let's feel good about it! We've reduced 700 grams of garbage to 100 grams, saving 600 g space in the municipal landfill. And it does not smell as bad as garbage.

But at what cost?

Not only did we fork out 70,000 Yen [ USD 583] for the equipment (subsidized by cities for up to 20,000 yen!! [USD 166]), we've also consumed 1.75 KWh electricity in half an afternoon. To produce this amount of electricity, approximately 1 kg CO2 was added to the atmosphere - negligible, you might think, until you multiply this amount by a million households [only 1 in 40] and 365 days per year: Collectively, that reduction in kitchen waste a la Hitachi burdened the environment with an additional 251,038.40 tons of CO2, not counting the energy needed to produce and distribute the million so called home-composters.

Can you really cure the bubonic plague with malaria?


To add a little more insult, NEC markets its home-composters under the "ECO" predicate; a cute leafy logo that assures the house wife everything is well thought out and ecologically sound.

We certainly disagree.

Shipment of Can O Worms arrived in Kobe

Received my 1st shipment of COWs from Australia to satisfy growing demand for worm boxes in Japan.


Eva is having fun helping!

Feeding your worms

You could do what I did for the longest time and bury your kitchen garbage as is in the bedding. Over time, the worms will gobble it all up and nothing but sweet smelling soil will be left. But given the fact that our wriggly friends do not possess any teeth, a burried banana peel will remain for quite a while in your bin, as the worm depends on a myriad of micro organisms to break down its food for him.

So I decided to aid my recycling workers by turning our kitchen waste into a nice shake for them. For this purpose I use a regular kitchen blender, which I purchased cheaply at a nearby home center. (My wife did not allow me to use our kitchen blender we use for cooking.) I throw in all garbage including apple, banana, vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, tea leaves, egg shells, rice, bread, etc. (no bones, meat, crab shells or fish, though) and add a little water to produce a thick, soupy shake. This I pour onto the surface of the worm bin, making sure I don't cover the whole area. You can never be sure that your cocktail does not contain a substance your worms don't like or might actually be toxic to them! They need a place to escape to. Then I cover all up with wet newsprint or a burlap bag and my pets happily chomp away at their feed. As a matter of fact, it's quite astonishing how much they can devour: since I've started this feeding system, I think through-put capacity has tripled!

Al Gore pleads for environment before U.S. Congress

The appearance of the Oscar- winning, Nobel-nominated Tennesseean stirred extraordinary interest. It was broadcast live by cable news channels, and long lines of people waited for hours to claim the seats available to the public.

Gore delivered the same message to a joint meeting of two House subcommittees dealing with energy, science and technology in the morning, and to a hearing of the Senate environment committee in the afternoon: Humans are artificially warming the world, the risks of inaction are great, and meaningful global action to cut emissions linked to warming will happen only if the United States takes decisive action.


This is taken from an article in the IHT on March 22, 2007.
I post it here because I think Al Core's contribution to the environmental cause is so enormous not because he's such a conservationist, but because of his contacts to the highest levels of decision makers.

All about Kenaf

Kenaf is a 4,000 year old NEW crop with roots in ancient Africa.
A member of the hibiscus family (Hibiscus cannabinus L), it is related to cotton and okra, and grows well in many parts of the U.S. It offers a way to make paper without cutting trees. Kenaf grows quickly, rising to heights of 12-14 feet in as little as 4 to 5 months. U.S. Department of Agriculture studies show that kenaf yields of 6 to 10 tons of dry fiber per acre per year are generally 3 to 5 times greater than the yield for Southern pine trees, which can take from 7 to 40 years to reach harvestable size.




While the flowering can last 3 to 4 weeks, or more, per plant, each individual flower blooms for only one day. The stalk of the kenaf plant consists of two distinct fiber types.
The outer fiber is called "bast" and comprises roughly 40% of the stalk's dry weight. The refined bast fibers measure 2.6mm and are similar to the best softwood fibers used to make paper.
The whiter, inner fiber is called "core", and comprises 60% of the stalk's dry weight. These refined fibers measure .6mm and are comparable to hardwood tree fibers, which are used in a widening range of paper products.



Upon harvest, the whole kenaf plant is processed in a mechanical fiber separator, similar to a cotton gin. The separation of the two fibers allows for independent processing and provides raw materials for a growing number of products including paper, particle board, animal bedding and bioremediation aids.
 






At the end of the growing season, the kenaf plant flowers. After blooming the flower drops off, leaving a seed pod behind. In almost all parts of the U.S. the seeds can never mature. Because of their African origin they require an additional 60-90 days of frost free conditions to reach the point of germination. This means kenaf cannot run wild across the country like a weed. It also presents some interesting challenges for developers to insure a consistent supply of seed for next year's crop. Much research work is being done in the area of seed development, with leading edge companies like Vision Paper developing innovative and environmentally sound solutions.

Passive Solar Energy

I love these 3 words: Passive solar energy.

Passive and energy mentioned in the same sentence, seemingly contradictory, become a really exciting concept for anyone who wishes to conserve and preserve. It's astounding how far a little thought on design can go and even more astounding how much of this knowhow has been lost or simply ignored in fields like architecture and agriculture during the oil age. It's time we started rediscovering some and implementing some principles again.

Passive solar heating and cooling represents an important strategy for displacing traditional energy sources in buildings. Anyone who has sat by a sunny, south-facing window on a winter day has felt the effects of passive solar energy. Passive solar techniques make use of the steady supply of solar energy by means of building designs that carefully balance their energy requirements with the building's site and window orientation. The term "passive" indicates that no additional mechanical equipment is used, other than the normal building elements. All solar gains are brought in through windows and minimum use is made of pumps or fans to distribute heat or effect cooling.
All passive techniques use building elements such as walls, windows, floors and roofs, in addition to exterior building elements and landscaping, to control heat generated by solar radiation. Solar heating designs collect and store thermal energy from direct sunlight. Passive cooling minimizes the effects of solar radiation through shading or generating air flows with convection ventilation.
Another solar concept is daylighting design, which optimises the use of natural daylight and contributes greatly to energy efficiency. The benefits of using passive solar techniques include simplicity, price and the design elegance of fulfilling one's needs with materials at hand.
Passive solar heating
Passive solar heating of buildings occurs when sunlight passes through a window, hits an object, is absorbed and converted to heat. The most efficient window orientation for heat gain is due south, but any orientation within 30 degrees of due south is acceptable. Once the heat has entered the building, various techniques come into play to keep and distribute it. Even in the Canadian climate, the prevention of overheating in the sun space presents one of the biggest challenges.
To let the sun in, a ratio of roughly eight per cent window to floor area is recommended for south walls. Although this number may seem small, it is important to remember it comes from the floor area, which is much larger than the wall area. Again, the control of overheating is a significant issue.
Once the heat is in, a well insulated and air-tight building envelope helps prevent heat loss and allows the solar heat to provide more of the heating needed. A crucial component of the energy-efficient building envelope is the window system. Where common double-glazed windows let heat escape, high performance windows, with insulated frames, multiple glazing, low-e coatings, insulating glass spacers and inert gas fills, can reduce heat loss by 50 to 75 per cent.
High efficiency windows, together with R-2000 levels of insulation and air-tight construction allow passive solar heating to cover a large proportion of heating needs in many locations. With the heat contained, often a simple ceiling fan or a forced air furnace fan (furnace burner off, of course) is all that is required for heat distribution. Using building envelope upgrades alone, up to 25 per cent of a building's heating requirement can be gained with passive solar techniques.
A helpful technique to control overheating and extend warm conditions in the sun space once the sun is down is the use of heavy mass materials in the walls and floors. Quarry tile or stone on floors in a mortar bed, and one wythe of brick or double layers of gypsum board on walls, will absorb solar radiation, smooth out the peaks of solar gain, and slowly radiate heat back into the room when the sun is gone.
Some solar homes use a centrally located masonry wood heater to store heat. The bricks and stones surrounding the firebox absorb the solar gain or heat from short but intense firings and slowly radiate it into the room.

The Kyoto Protocol and GHG

The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty aiming to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions believed to cause global warming and climate change, the most pressing environmental issues of our time. The treaty requires developed countries to reduce GHG emissions to below 1990 levels, but does not set binding limits on developing countries such as China.
However, the parties to the Kyoto Protocol recognized that reductions in GHG emissions can often be achieved more economically in developing countries than in developed countries themselves. Therefore the parties created the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
The CDM enables developing country parties who carry out projects that reduce GHG emissions to receive credits for these reductions. These credits can be sold to developed country parties, which use them to offset their own emission reduction requirements. For the developed country party this is often a more cost-effective option than reducing reductions from their own domestic operations.

The above introduction to the Kyoto Protocol is taken from Arreon Carbon's website. You can find more information at http://www.arreon.com/