» 2008 » March

We do it with beer. Why not vino?

I don’t usually have much difficulty in liquor stores; after all, the only product they sell is one of my favourite things. This time, though, I wanted to buy my red table wine in a refilled bottle — Bordeaux in a burgundy bottle, oh my! Sadly, my search left me dry.

It shouldn’t be so hard; after all, refilling bottles is a giant success story. Canadian beer bottles have a 97 per cent return rate and each is refilled 15-20 times in its lifetime. In Germany, Coca-Cola is sold in refillable plastic bottles. Prince Edward Island has required all carbonated beverages to be sold in refillable containers since 1984.

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » Some good points and interesting tidbits, but mostly I like the style and tone, more writers should use humour even for serious subjects.

Earth, that is. Our energy expert cracks open the Democratic candidates’ proposals on global warming — and is impressed.

The most important call for the next president won’t come at 3 a.m., and it won’t involve military security.

The gravest threat to the American way of life is posed by unrestricted greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Global warming threatens to put the Southwest into a permanent drought, raise sea levels by 6 or more inches a decade, generate hundreds of millions of environmental refugees at home and abroad, wipe out half the planet’s species, and increase average temperatures in the nation’s interior 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit. And these impacts would likely get steadily worse for hundreds of years or longer.

No enemy, foreign or domestic, poses a threat to us that is so devastating, so irreversible. Top climate scientists tell us the threat might be all but unstoppable if the nation and the world don’t take serious steps over the next decade to restrict GHG emissions. For all the urgent crises the next president has to deal with in the middle of the night, the most important calls he or she will have to make concern how to stop global warming.

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » Clinton or Obama, either way the really important question is can the Democrats take out the Republicans in the upcoming election. They have to win, we can’t let the oil-mongers continue to drive the bus in their pollution-spewing manner any longer.

What should we do with the carbon we produce when we burn fossil fuels? Some experts say we should fight climate change by putting the carbon back underground, whence it came.

In late January, a blue-ribbon panel recommended that Canadian governments spend $2-billion to begin deploying carbon capture and storage technology (CCS). This technology injects the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels into exhausted oil and gas fields or salty aquifers deep underground.

As is true of any large-scale energy technology, CCS carries costs and risks. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, the world’s leading expert body on these topics, has estimated that CCS’s costs are competitive with other leading ways to cut emissions and that its risks are small compared to those of related
industries, such as underground storage of natural gas. CCS is not a magic bullet. But many climate and energy experts think that it’s among humanity’s best tools to control carbon emissions.

Source: www.homerdixon.com/…

LS » Of course we would rather have technology that eliminates the creation of carbon but a multi-pronged approach is necessary while reality works to catch up to our ideas, so in the mean time, like it or not, we also have to rely on technology that can sequester carbon.