HOK HOK’s design for Project Haiti, an orphanage for Port-au-Prince, was inspired by the way kapok trees store water and maximize available resources.As neighborhoods devastated by Hurricane Sandy begin drafting plans for reconstruction, some progressive architects and urban planners are arguing that the emerging science of biomimicry offers a way forward. The notion is that the next generation of waterfront designs could draw inspiration from the intricate ways that plants and animals have adapted to their situations over hundreds of millions of years.
Kapok trees, honeycombs and mangroves are just a few of the naturally occurring features or processes that have informed the designs of buildings from Haiti to South Korea to New York City in recent years.
“Nature is a dynamic entity, and we should be trying to design our buildings, our landscape and our cities to recognize that,” said Thomas Knittel, a biomimicry specialist at the prominent Seattle-based architecture firm HOK.
In Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, for example, the rainy season and humid climate have been factored into the design of HOK’s Project Haiti, an orphanage that is to replace one ruined by the 2010 earthquake. Construction is to begin this spring, and the building should be completed later this year.
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David Ferris Pachyappa Bala, the co-founder of Ampere, with its latest electric bicycle, the sturdy Angel.COIMBATORE, India — In early 2012, after years of experimentation, an Indian start-up called Ampere developed an electric motorcycle that people would actually buy.
It wasn’t a sleek, shiny bike for the urban hipster — the company had tried that and failed. It was the Angel, a heavy, clunky converted Chinese bicycle that goes only 15 miles an hour but can carry extremely heavy loads. The customers were farmers and small tradesmen in the southern countryside who liked the fact that the bike could take a beating, cost only $386 and could be fueled for virtually nothing since farmers here get their electricity at no cost.
Then, in May, an acute power shortage took hold in Ampere’s home state, Tamil Nadu. The supply of rationed electricity in most of the state dropped from 13 or 14 hours a day to 8. Almost immediately, said the company’s co-founder, Pachyappa Bala, the company’s monthly sales dropped from 600 bikes to 60.
Ampere’s plight highlights an unexpected consequence of the worsening power shortages in India. The fledgling market for electric vehicles, which might help clean up the polluted air, is losing traction because customers aren’t confident they can fill up the battery.
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I would guess a few Green readers had the experience, over the holidays, of arguing yet again about global warming with a parent or brother-in-law who thinks it’s all a big hoax. Maybe there’s some undiscovered substance in roast turkey that makes people want to pick fights around the dinner table.
M.I.T. Press Fortunately, the M.I.T. climate scientist Kerry Emanuel has provided us with a solution to this problem: an updated edition of “What We Know About Climate Change,” his 2007 book explaining the science of global warming.
I’m happy to report that the new edition of this slender volume is an improvement — perhaps even the single best thing written about climate change for a general audience. It is a little longer than the first edition, 93 pages instead of 85, but it’s still an easy read — most people will get through it in a single sitting.
The new version updates the science to the latest numbers, of course, but it also adds a couple of chapters about the potential solutions to climate change and the bizarre politics that have cropped up around it in recent years.
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Associated Press Conservationists fear that damage in places like Reeds Beach in New Jersey left almost no sand for the spring spawning of horseshoe crabs, on whose eggs birds like the red knot, center, feed during their migration.Conservationists are warning that swift action is needed to repair mid-Atlantic bird refuges that were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy.
In a report issued on Thursday, researchers at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences said that beaches should be replenished, nesting islands rebuilt and water-control structures in managed wetlands repaired to recreate the right conditions for threatened or endangered species to breed or migrate during the coming spring and summer.
The organizations identified more than 70 sites from Massachusetts to Virginia that need to be restored, at a combined estimated cost of $48.7 million. Such projects would be intended not only to repair the damage from the hurricane but also to allow coastal areas to withstand future major storms.
“Hurricane Sandy did significant damage to some long-term conservation work,” Stephen Brown, director of the shorebird science division at the Manomet Center, said in a statement. “Important habitats for high-priority species have been altered by this storm.”
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Coast Guard, via European Pressphoto Agency The Deepwater Horizon rig, owned by Transocean, after a well blowout killed 11 men in April 2010.Transocean has agreed to pay a total of $1.4 billion in civil and criminal fines and penalties for its role in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in 2010, the Department of Justice just announced.
Under a federal court settlement, it will also plead guilty to violating the Clean Water Act. And Transocean will have to take steps to improve safety and emergency response procedures on its drilling rigs.
Transocean owned and operated the drilling rig that was in the gulf when a well blew out in April 2010, killing 11 people and causing billions of dollars of damages in a spill that continued for three months. But far more of the culpability has been assigned to BP, which was in charge of the drilling operation.
“Transocean’s rig crew accepted the direction of BP well site leaders to proceed in the face of clear danger signs — at a tragic cost to many of them,” said Lanny A. Breuer, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division.
It was the worst offshore oil spill in the nation’s history.
6:19 p.m. | Updated
John Schwartz’s story on the settlement is here.
Accolades for the Canadian-born executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, who died last week in rough surf on a Mexican beach, focused not just on her accomplishments but on her relative youth.
Getty Images Rebecca Tarbotton Rebecca Tarbotton was a female 30-something in a universe of environmental leaders dominated by male 50-somethings (a major exception being her mentor, Michael Brune, 41, now the executive director of the Sierra Club.)
Whether it was her youth or her blend of merriment and determination, Ms. Tarbotton made a significant splash in her two years at the head of an environmental group that blends research, negotiation and direct action to prod corporations and financial institutions to examine how their purchasing, manufacturing and financing decisions affect the environment.
She was instrumental in the Rainforest Action Network‘s work persuading many food companies — General Mills most prominent among them — to renounce the use of palm oil, which is grown on plantations whose proliferation abets the destruction of rain forests in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.
But the campaign that drew the most attention culminated in Disney’s agreement last fall to stop producing paper products made from “irresponsibly harvested fiber,” including tropical hardwood from areas that are highly valued for environmental conservation purposes. The announcement came a few months after two Rainforest Action Network protesters dressed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse chained themselves to the gates of Burbank Studios while a banner was hoisted reading “Disney: Destroying Indonesia’s Rainforests.”
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Gary Stokes/Sea Shepherd One of the images captured this week in Hong Kong by the conservationist Gary Stokes.A series of photographs taken this week by an environmental campaigner underline Hong Kong’s role as the epicenter of the global trade in shark fins. Shot in the city’s Kennedy Town neighborhood over three days, they show thousands of shark fins drying on the roof of a large industrial building.
The images were captured by Gary Stokes, a conservation photographer who is also the coordinator for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in Hong Kong. You can see more of them here here at his blog.
Shark fins are the main ingredient of a soup that is widely regarded a status symbol in Chinese culture and a must-serve at important events and celebrations like weddings. As I have reported in the past, the dried fins sell for several hundred dollars a pound. Often they are sliced from sharks that are then thrown back into the sea to die.
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J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times In the last-minute tax maneuvering in Congress this week, wind power came out well.
Wind not only got an extension of its tax credit in the federal budget compromise, but the rules were also restructured: while the extension runs for only one year, the nature of the deadline has changed. Projects do not need to be finished and feeding electricity to the grid by next New Year’s Eve; construction only needs to be started.
That change could prove critical. The renewal comes so late – developers had lobbied all last year to avert a Dec. 31 expiration – that most wind developers had simply stopped work on projects that could not be finished by the end of 2012.
The process of getting a wind farm going, including studying the wind resource, negotiating a land lease or purchase, obtaining environmental and construction permits, signing a contract to sell the electricity to a utility, getting financing, ordering the equipment and then installing it, can easily take more than two years.
A Senate aide who was involved in the run-up to the yearlong extension by Congress said that approval on New Year’s Day could have been “like inviting somebody who is halfway around the world to lunch in an hour.’’
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Warren E. Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy is acquiring two SunPower photovoltaic power projects in California for $2 billion to $2.5 billion, the companies say. The plants are expected to go online in 2015 and, at peak output, rival a fossil fuel plant’s generation. [Forbes]
China is releasing hourly air pollution monitoring data in 74 of its biggest cities, measuring levels of small particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and carbon monoxide, the state news agency Xinhua says. [Reuters]
A one-year extension of the federal tax credit for wind power, part of the Congressional budget compromise, will save as many as 37,000 jobs in the industry, the American Wind Energy Association estimates. Unlike the former tax credit, it will cover all wind projects that start construction in 2013; they will not have to be feeding the grid by the end of the year. [Bloomberg]
Republicans and Democrats from New York and New Jersey denounce a House decision to pull legislation on aid to help the states recover from the trail of devastation left by Hurricane Sandy. [Associated Press]
Coast Guard overflight of Kulluk aground from anchoragedailynews on Vimeo.
The Coast Guard has released a short video of the Shell drilling rig that ran aground on Monday night in the Gulf of Alaska. The video, taken on Tuesday morning from a helicopter, shows the rig, the Kulluk, rolling slightly in the surf just off the coast of Sitkalidak Island, about 50 miles south of Kodiak, Alaska.
Occasionally large waves crash into it, sending spray onto its decks, but the 266-foot-diameter rig appears to be largely intact; there is no sign so far that any of the more than 150,000 gallons of fuel and lubricating oil it is carrying is leaking.
A response team with representatives from the Coast Guard, Shell, the state’s environmental protection agency and other groups will develop a plan to salvage the rig after inspectors can be landed on it to assess the damage.
The Kulluk, which Shell used to drill a test well in the Arctic last summer as part of its plan to open the region’s waters to oil production, was being towed to Seattle last week for off-season maintenance when it became separated from its tow ship. Crews struggled for several days to reconnect tow lines, but the efforts ultimately failed. The rig’s 18-member crew was rescued by helicopter over the weekend.
Jeff Opperman Fishermen hurling nets along the banks of the Mekong in northern Laos.Seventy-two hours after leaving Cleveland, I slipped away from Christmas Eve dinner with my family, walked down a dimly lighted path and crossed a rickety bamboo bridge to an island. I knelt down and dipped my hand into the Mekong River.
Actually, in the dark I misjudged the distance to the water’s surface and wound up putting my arm in up to the elbow. It felt like … warm water. As if I’d stuck my arm into my son’s aquarium back home, 10,000 miles away.
Party music thumped from the hotel across the river, with a spotlight dancing through the dark tropical sky. It wasn’t quite the Mekong but rather the Kok River, one of its tributaries in northern Thailand.
Dramatic beginnings aside, I was grateful to finally be in the Mekong’s basin.
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In a big setback for Shell Oil, Coast Guard officials say that the Kulluk, a big offshore drilling rig, has run aground on an island in the Gulf of Alaska, Henry Fountain reports. A Coast Guard helicopter that flew over the rig Monday night spotted no detectable oil sheen from the rig, which is carrying about 139,000 gallons of diesel fuel and 12,000 gallons of lubricating oil and hydraulic fluid, officials said.
The record-setting disappearance of Arctic sea ice this fall was an indication to many climate scientists and ice experts that the pace of climate change was outstripping predictions.
Geophysical Research LettersThe rate of the ocean’s heat absorption is depicted along a color spectrum, with red representing the highest levels and green the lowest. Now a new study published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters provides a look at a dynamic that may further accelerate the process: the rate at which the ocean underneath the ice absorbs sunlight.
The bottom line of the study, which was done by four scientists, three at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, and one from the department of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is that the ocean under newly formed ice (“first-year ice” in the scientists’ terminology) absorbs 50 percent more solar energy than the ocean beneath older ice (“multiyear ice”).
This means that the more the ice melts in late summer, the more first-year ice replaces multiyear ice, and the warmer the ocean beneath the ice becomes, accelerating the melting process. One sentence of the study says it all: “a continuation of the observed sea-ice changes will increase the amount of light penetrating into the Arctic Ocean, enhancing sea-ice melt and affecting sea-ice and upper-ocean ecosystems.”
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Associated Press A Coast Guard helicopter crew rescuing crewmen from the mobile drilling unit Kulluk on Saturday.The Kulluk, a mobile oil drilling rig owned by Royal Dutch Shell, is said to be adrift again off the Alaskan coast after losing towlines from two vessels that were trying to hold it in place in pummeling winds and high seas. On Saturday, its crew was evacuated by helicopter. [The Anchorage Daily News]
After questions arise about Peabody Coal’s claim to being “the global leader in clean energy solutions,” the assertion disappears from the company’s home page. [Dot Earth]
Federal officials will shift cargo shipping lanes off the California coast to reduce killings of endangered fin and blue whales in their feeding and migration areas… [Reuters]
… And Georgia officials plan to incorporate bear tunnels into a big state highway project that will bisect the animals’ range. [Associated Press]
As Adam Nagourney reports in The Times, Death Valley is experiencing a burst of civic pride over reclaiming a world temperature record: a 134-degree reading registered on July 10, 1913, at Greenland Ranch in California.
Image supplied by Paolo Brenni, president of the Scientific Instrument Commission, courtesy of Library of the Observatorio Astronomico di Palermo A drawing of the Six-Bellini thermometer, the instrument used to record a 1922 temperature reading.The World Meteorological Organization announced in September that it was throwing out what had previously been thought to be the global record: a reading of 136.4 degrees recorded in the Libyan settlement of Al Aziziya on Sept. 13, 1922. The revised record made headlines around the world.
Yet the back story is even more interesting. Khalid el-Fadli, a Libyan member of the meteorological team that investigated the record, found the original 1922 temperature reading in a logbook at the Libyan National Meteorological Center, where he works, on Feb. 15, 2011, when a revolution had just broken out in the capital.
Working from the logbook, the international team would eventually discover that the reading was taken by an untrained observer with an instrument that was outmoded even for its time. What is more, the temperature did not jibe with other temperatures measured in the area on Sept. 13, 1922, and it differed markedly from readings taken later at Al Azizia.
Yet it took it took the team six months to pursue those findings, given that Mr. Fadli got sucked into a war immediately after reporting the discovery of the notebook. “During the revolution, it was very dangerous to call anyone outside,” he said in a telephone interview from Tripoli, the Libyan capital. And “international calls were shut down by the government” in any case, he said.
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