MetaFilter posts tagged with America and environment

The Movement Begins...

kliuless — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:22:10 -0800

Generation WE: How Millennial Youth Are Taking Over America And Changing Our World Forever (v i a) kinda over the top imo :P but ymmv! cf.

The 4th degree

Artw — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:38:04 -0800

80 percent of Americans say global warming is real and poses a threat to humanity. Which is good because if the global temperature raises by 4 degrees we're all dead. However only 44 percent would be willing to face any financial hardship in the name of a solution.

There Could Be Blood

kliuless — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:36:53 -0800

Andy Grove on Our Electric Future - "Energy independence [viz.] is the wrong goal. Here is a plan Americans can stick to." Perhaps some infrastructure spending^1,2 is in order? [etc., &c., cf.] also see :P - "Tesla Motors Is Delivering Cars" - "Superconducting Power Grid Launches In New York" - "New heights reached in polymer based solar cell efficiency"

[S]pray a sheet of glass with a mixture of dyes combined with a substance called tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminium. In combination, the dyes and the glass act as the waveguide, preventing light from escaping. Meanwhile, the interaction between the different dye molecules and those of the tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminium allows a quantum-mechanical phenomenon, called Förster energy transfer, to come into play. This eliminates the reabsorption loss by ensuring that light is re-emitted at a frequency which the dye molecules cannot then reabsorb. On top of this—literally—Dr Currie and Dr Mapel have come up with another trick: placing a second sandwich of dye and glass over the first. The upper layer of dye intercepts high-energy light, such as ultraviolet. The lower one captures longer wavelengths that have passed unperturbed through the upper, and also any lower-energy light that has been re-emitted within the top layer and somehow escaped. The upshot is a device that, even as a prototype, converts ten times more of the incident light into electricity than a conventional solar cell. [and btw]

cheers!

What. The. F*ck. Clean Air Act (2005)?

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 18:08:21 -0800

The US Clean Air Act makes it illegal to sell highly environmentally-friendly cars in 42 states. Apparently.

We’re too sophisticated to allow bioregional commerce.

ZachsMind — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 13:22:05 -0800

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal by Joel Salatin. This Saturday will mark this article's four year anniversary. Frankly, I was mildly surprised not to have found it mentioned before in MeFi. It's a good read about a sad state of affairs; how our government is turning its own people into outlaws, because freedom has been traded in for an illusion of security. ...but then we already knew that. Don't we?

reminds me of energy policy

amberglow — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 18:04:40 -0800

What a coincidence, huh? (wapo, reg reqd) For the third time, environmental advocates have discovered passages in the Bush administration's proposal for regulating mercury pollution from power plants that mirror almost word for word portions of memos written by a law firm representing coal-fired power plants. The passages state that the Environmental Protection Agency is not required to regulate other hazardous toxins emitted by power plants, such as lead and arsenic. The actual proposals and study are here.

The moon, satellite...or cheese whiz?

troutfishing — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 09:59:31 -0800

The bias of balance : new study of how media "evenhandness" distorts truth "Two researchers argue, in a paper published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, that following the norms of American journalism, U.S. media have promulgated a bias in the coverage of climate change essentially by giving too much credence to climate skeptics at the expense of the scientific consensus." - "Reporters and editors at four of the nation's top newspapers [ New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal ] adhered to the journalistic norm of balance at the expense of accurately reporting scientific understanding of the human contributions to global warming" (an earlier work in this vein).

The UnGreening of America

fold_and_mutilate — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 13:32:56 -0800

The UnGreening of America.

So much for "the Homeland".