Eideard

Sigmar Gabriel, Social Democrats + Joachim Gauck + Angela Merkel, Christian Democrats
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Germany’s government and the two major opposition parties have said they will jointly nominate Joachim Gauck, a human rights activist originally from East Germany, to be the country’s next president.

Angela Merkel said her coalition government, and the centre-left opposition had rallied behind Gauck, 72, who was initially proposed by the opposition Social Democrats and Greens.

He is not a member of a political party.

“What moves me the most, is that a man who was still born during the gloomy, dark war, who grew up and lived 50 years in a dictatorship … is now called to become the head of state,” Gauck said. “This is of course a very special day in my life.”

Christian Wulff, 52, resigned as president on Friday after two months of allegations about receiving loans on favourable terms and hotel stays from friends when he was state governor of Lower Saxony. He was Merkel’s candidate when elected less than two years ago…

When Wulff resigned, Merkel immediately said she would work with the Social Democrats and Greens to find a consensus candidate to succeed him…

The chancellor said that clergymen such as Gauck – a former Lutheran priest – were at the forefront of the protests that eventually brought down the east German regime.

Claudia Roth, the Greens’ leader, said “Gauck will restore the respect for the office, will restore dignity,” to the presidency, which had become tainted by Wulff’s actions.

Isn’t it interesting how a nation which parallels so many of our circumstances in the United States figures out how to take different directions, grow and even prosper in hard times.

Anyone even imagine this happening in the United States with the clown show we have in Congress?

Woo-Hoo! He got his sign autographed by Rick Santorum
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.

“Down the road, this data will be used against you,” warned one speaker at a recent Roanoke County, Va., Board of Supervisors meeting who turned out with dozens of people opposed to the county’s paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.

Local officials say they would dismiss such notions except that the growing and often heated protests are having an effect…

Well, they’re only having an effect on cowardly, opportunist local politicians. A significant portion of the breed.U

Read the rest of this entry »

An engineering firm has unveiled plans to turn the Eiffel Tower into a vast, tree-like monument by cladding its mesh iron body in over 600,000 plants.

The controversial proposal from Ginger — a French company that specializes in ecological design projects — would cost $97 million and remove 87.8 tons of carbon dioxide from the Paris skies, according to the company’s calculations.

Ginger CEO Jean-Luc Schonebelen concedes that it is probably not the most efficient form of carbon sequestration, but says the idea — which has so far received no official endorsement from Paris City Council — could have profound symbolic value…

And symbolic value is all this project would achieve. It is not suggested as a permanent installation; but, a 2-year demonstration of a commitment to carbon sequestration by the Paris council.

Parisians are quick to defend their city’s architectural heritage but says Schonebelen, “they are also very concerned about the environment and I’m sure will come around to the idea…”

However, the company is yet to formally present its ideas to…the Paris City Council.

My recollections of Paris are of a commune accepting of whimsy and practicality. The arts and humanities, science and scholarly pursuits alike are part of the social landscape of this venerable city.

Which still leads me to reject what is nothing more than a fanciful, creative political statement. The city and its denizens would be better served by spending an equivalent amount on greening each of the arrondissements joined as that political and social entity called Paris. Certainly more of their traditional chestnut trees.

We have been moving through the slowest arrival of springtime in decades here in La Cieneguilla. The trees and willow brush down in the bosque of the Santa Fe River are just turning to leaves and green.

 
The article that brought me to this TED washing machine and Hans Rosling was in the NY TIMES the other day. Now, you would have to subscribe to their digital edition to read that article; so – as I did the last time the TIMES farted around with a paywall – I found a newspaper that pays even more than you or me to reprint their articles.

Read the article after you watch the video. It discusses many of the ways that Hans Rosling and his Gapminder website work very hard to make data very easy to understand.

If you’re reading my blog on an iPad, the video link up top may not work. Here’s a link directly to the video at TED.

The Inhabitat crew hit the Detroit Auto Show and checked out some of the hottest hybrid, fly-wheel and all electric cars. Check out their footage (and yes, that’s Katie Fehrenbacher’s sister).

Police in Spain seized 162 kilos (356 pounds) of cocaine hidden inside plastic bananas that had been concealed in a 20-tonne shipment of real fruit from Ecuador.

“The imitations with the drugs, which were very similar to real bananas, were hidden amongst a shipment of real fruit,” it said in a statement.

The cocaine was wrapped in clear plastic sheets inside the fake green bananas, pictures released by police showed.

Four people were arrested in the operation surrounding the shipment which arrived at the Mediterranean port of Algeciras from Guayaquil, the largest and the most populous city in Ecuador. Police believe one of the four arrested is the leader of the ring who was responsible for maintaining contacts with the Colombian drug cartels that supplied the narcotics.

“These contacts led him to travel to the interior of the Colombian jungle to personally supervise the shipment of the cocaine and inspect its quality,” the statement said.

No one inspected the quality of his brains. Though, plastic green bananas is a pretty good stunt.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

More than a quarter of the electricity generated in Scotland last year was produced from wind, hydro and other renewable sources.

Official figures showed the amount of renewable power increased by a fifth, while the total power generated in Scotland went up by 3%.

Scotland exported nearly a quarter of the total power produced…

Roseanna Cunningham, the environment and climate change minister, commented: “As Scotland faces a white Christmas, we are greening up our energy supply.

“Scotland is blessed with abundant natural energy sources, particularly in our seas, and today’s figures follow a steady trend towards Scotland’s energy becoming greener and cleaner”. She said 2010 had also been a “tremendous year” for the renewable power sector, with more wind power developments in the planning and construction pipeline.

She said Scotland was on course to meet its 2011 target of sourcing 31% of its electricity from renewable sources. The Scottish government recently uprated its targets to hit 80% by 2020.

Hand out a little credit where due. Brian Wilson got all this rolling when he was Cabinet Minister for Energy.

Whatever you may think of Brian’s dedication to Blair and Blairite politics, he got the Green direction in UK power production off the ground. Something that Blair probably wouldn’t have pressed for on his own.

New research produced by Southern Methodist University’s Geothermal Laboratory, funded by a grant from Google.org, suggests that the temperature of the Earth beneath the state of West Virginia is significantly higher than previously estimated and capable of supporting commercial baseload geothermal energy production…

The SMU Geothermal Laboratory has increased its estimate of West Virginia’s geothermal generation potential to 18,890 megawatts, assuming a conservative 2 percent thermal recovery rate. The new estimate represents a 75 percent increase over estimates in MIT’s 2006 “The Future of Geothermal Energy” report and exceeds the state’s total current generating capacity, primarily coal based, of 16,350 megawatts.

The West Virginia discovery is the result of new detailed mapping and interpretation of temperature data derived from oil, gas, and thermal gradient wells — part of an ongoing project to update the Geothermal Map of North America that David Blackwell produced with colleague Maria Richards in 2004. Temperatures below the earth almost always increase with depth, but the rate of increase (the thermal gradient) varies due to factors such as the thermal properties of the rock formations.

“By adding 1,455 new thermal data points from oil, gas, and water wells to our geologic model of West Virginia, we’ve discovered significantly more heat than previously thought,” Blackwell said. “The existing oil and gas fields in West Virginia provide a geological guide that could help reduce uncertainties associated with geothermal exploration and also present an opportunity for co-producing geothermal electricity from hot waste fluids generated by existing oil and gas wells…”

The team’s work may also shed light on other similar geothermal resources. “We now know that two zones of Appalachian age structures are hot — West Virginia and a large zone covering the intersection of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana known as the Ouachita Mountain region,” said Blackwell. “Right now we don’t have the data to fill in the area in between,” Blackwell continued, “but it’s possible we could see similar results over an even larger area.”

Here’s the published report. Researchers feel this presents an excellent opportunity to move the region towards cleaner energy, reduced costs.

I think there’s a real possibility of that happening – when they own as many state and federal politicians as the coal industry does.

Bill McKibben says – “Forty years in, we’re losing”.

This weekend, when speakers at Earth Day gatherings across the country hearken back to the first celebration in 1970, they’ll recall great victories: above all, cleaner air and cleaner water for Americans.

But for 20 years now, global warming has been the most important environmental issue — arguably the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And there we can boast an unblemished bipartisan record of accomplishing absolutely nothing.

To mark Earth Day this year, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) were supposed to introduce their long-awaited rewrite of the House’s climate legislation. Now that’s been delayed for at least a few days, which is probably just as well, since, as Graham points out, it’s no longer really an environmental bill…

Worse, the bill might specifically remove the strongest tool the environmentalists won in the wake of Earth Day 1: the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to use the Clean Air Act to bring the fossil fuel industries to heel. Enforcement may be preempted under the new law. Even the right of states to pioneer new legislation, such as California’s landmark global warming bill, apparently could disappear with the new legislation…

That weakness has many sources, including the corrosive power of money in politics (and human beings have never found a greater source of money than fossil fuels). But at least part of the problem lies within environmentalism, which no longer does enough real organizing to build the pressure that could result in real change…

I remember interviewing Pete McCloskey, the California House member recruited by Gaylord Nelson to be the Republican sponsor of the original Earth Day…But just as important was what happened next: “About two weeks after Earth Day,” McCloskey said, “there was an article on the sixth or seventh page of the Washington Star — some of the Earth Day kids had labeled 12 members of Congress the Dirty Dozen and vowed to defeat them. Nobody paid much attention.

On the first Wednesday in June, though, everyone in Washington opened the paper to find that the two Democrats on that list — one a powerful committee chairman, the other a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee — had lost primary fights by fewer than a thousand votes. Within 24 hours, seven of the 10 Republicans on the list had come to me, even though I was despised, being against the war and all. ‘What’s this about water pollution, about air pollution? What can you tell us?’ ” For the next few sessions, anything tinged green passed Congress with ease: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act.

The Golden Rule for American politicians is – “Get re-elected!” Nothing else really matters.

Get up on your hind legs and register folks to vote. Do it as a Green activist. Scare some Democrat or Republican into pretending they have a conscience and an understanding of science beyond Howdy Doody.