Christopher Butler
via Art Knowledge News:
Five members of the art activist group ‘Culture Beyond Oil’ today poured non-toxic black oil around the British Museum’s world famous Easter Island sculpture, in protest at BP’s sponsorship of the museum. The group, inspired by Liberate Tate’s intervention at Tate Britain earlier this month, said it had deliberately chosen the giant statue of a human head because it represents the way in which civilizations once considered invincible can collapse in a short period of time. The activists were careful not to pour oil on the sculpture itself, which is seated on a modern stone plinth.
“Thirty years is nothing compared to the hundreds—often thousands—of years involved in ice patch archaeology, but the untimely release of dangerous chemicals we once thought long-forgotten is chilling proof that very few things are ever gone for good.”
AP Photographer Charlie Riedel just filed the following images of seabirds caught in the oil slick on a beach on Louisiana’s East Grand Terre Island. As BP engineers continue their efforts to cap the underwater flow of oil, landfall is becoming more frequent, and the effects more evident. (8 photos total)
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We are now at a point in time comparable to 1850, which marked the outset of the last great energy transition. Then, about 85% of the world’s total primary energy supply came from biomass fuels. In 2005, about 85% of the total supply originated from fossil fuels. By the late 1890s, when fossil fuel consumption rose to equal the biomass contributions, each of them supplied about 0.7 TW (Terawatts or 1012 watts); today, even if we were to replace only 50% of all fossil fuels by renewable energies during the coming decades, we would have to displace coal and hydrocarbons flows of about 6 TW. That is an enormous shift.
Today there is no readily available non-fossil energy source that is large enough to be exploited on the requisite scale. True, energy carried by solar radiation is several orders of magnitude larger than any conceivable global energy demand, but so far, practical conversions into electricity (using photovoltaics) or large-scale industrial heat are quite negligible. Also, other renewable energy flows could not cover today’s worldwide total primary energy supply, even if, economics aside, they were fully exploited by current techniques. And even nuclear power’s contribution is constrained by limited fissionable material.
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21st Century Energy: Some Sobering Thoughts
An impartial examination of some basic principles reveals five factors that will make the transition to a non-fossil world far more difficult than is commonly realised. These are: the scale of the shift; the lower energy density of the replacement fuels; the substantially lower power density of renewable energy extraction; intermittency of renewable flows; and uneven distribution of renewable energy resources.
“One Cubic Foot”
From National Geographic:
How much life could you find in one cubic foot? That’s a hunk of ecosystem small enough to fit in your lap. To answer the question, photographer David Liittschwager took a green metal frame, a 12-inch cube, to disparate environments—land and water, tropical and temperate. At each locale he set down the cube and started watching, counting, and photographing with the help of his assistant and many biologists. The goal: to represent the creatures that lived in or moved through that space.
I’d use a phone like this. In fact, it makes me excited for the day my Blackberry dies and I can just go back to having a regular old phone.
This phone concept is getting us closer to what Saul Griffith calls “heirloom design.” When you think about the entire energy cost of phones, it’s the manufacturing process that’s the most harmful aspect by far. So reducing the number of phones we make is way more important than, for example, marginally increasing the percentage of post-consumer recycled content in each phone.
For that reason, James Barber set out to make a phone that would last for five years. He also included modular components so that the camera, for example, can be swapped out as camera technology progresses. It’s easy to disassemble—there’s one jumbo-sized screw holding it together—and the whole thing is 85-percent recyclable.
Great idea!
I can’t fathom a better way to reduce waste created by plastic bags and other packaging than by eschewing the stuff altogether, which is precisely what London’s Unpackagedgrocery shop does.Beginning life as a market stall in 2006, Unpackaged is a unique and brilliant concept that is so simple it hurts, especially considering the sheer amount of packaging waste that is ridiculously filling our planet’s landfill sites. Within the beautifully designed shop, organic whole foods, dried fruit, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, even refillable oils, vinegars and wines are all available to place straight into your own containers, that you will have brought along with you … if you haven’t then reusable bags are available.
From a WIRED gallery of ice seen from space:
The Sea of Okhotsk sits between Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia. In the winter, it becomes largely covered by ice. In the image above, captured by the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite in February 2007, cold winds from Siberia combine with moist ocean air to form the cloud streets streaming away from the ice.
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/gallery-ice/3/#ixzz0d4m4UvgJ
Resetting the Doomsday Clock
This is the 19th time the Clock has been reset. The last time, in 2007, Pentagram recommended the group adopt the Clock as its symbol, and created standards for its use. In the three years since, the Bulletin community has grown considerably. This publication’s clear statement of purpose is a indication of the group’s maturity and confidence as it moves into its second 50 years, and an invitation to join the global effort to turn back the Clock.
WIRED: “In his endless quest to squeeze every possible mile from a gallon of gasoline, our friend Darin Cosgrove has given his econobox a homemade boat tail and boosted his fuel economy to 64 mpg.”
