Listening to: Electric Dream - Shapeshifter

Duarte Design has a write up about their involvement in creating the presentation that Al Gore uses in the movie/lecture ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. The presentation is a thing of beauty and is truly instrumental enabling the audience to ‘get it’.

Listening to: Public Service Announcement (Interlude) - Jay-Z

The BBC World story on the Stern Report… fix it now and fix it for a bargain price:

Climate change could cut global growth by a fifth, costing up to £3.68 trillion in total, unless drastic action is taken, a review is to warn.

But taking action now would cost just 1% of global gross domestic product, economist Sir Nicholas Stern says.

…

However the review says failure to act early could end up costing between 5% and 20% of global GDP and render large parts of the planet uninhabitable with poor nations hit first and hardest.

Listening to: Public Service Announcement (Interlude) - Jay-Z

From the Guardian Unlimited:

Britons face the prospect of a welter of new green taxes to tackle climate change, as the most authoritative report on global warming warns it will cost the world up to £3.68 trillion unless it is tackled within a decade.

The review by Sir Nicholas Stern, commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and published tomorrow, marks a crucial point in the debate by underlining how failure to act would trigger a catastrophic global recession. Unchecked climate change would turn 200 million people into refugees, the largest migration in modern history, as their homes succumbed to drought or flood.

Listening to: Sweet Lullaby (Apollo Mix) - Deep Forest

Sol Ideas have a great little outline of how you make solar cells.

Listening to: Miracle Mile - Icehouse

I found this over at WorldChanging.

It is an architectural tile made from titanium dioxide. The tiles when exposed to sun light (UV) work as a catalyst to break down common urban air pollutants like nitrous oxide and ground-level ozone. It is the work of a design firm called Elegant Embellishments.

Listening to: Electric Dream - Shapeshifter

The Tesla guys have got another great post… this time about photovoltaics and the total energy costs. Embedded ion the article was this great little graph from nrel.gov:

In this particular case the graph deals with the energy pay off you get from using photovoltaics… but for me it representative of the pay off that is available to people who take advantage of the structural change we’re starting to experience with climate change. In An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore uses this image of the earth and a pile of gold bars on a set of scales… representing the perceived either-or choice. Adopting clean tech isn’t an either/or choice! It is the image above… massive and accumulating pay off.

Listening to: Earth - Shapeshifter

Popular Mechanics has a very comprehensive article about the reality of the hydrogen economy:

At first glance, hydrogen would seem an ideal substitute for these problematic fuels. Pound for pound, hydrogen contains almost three times as much energy as natural gas, and when consumed its only emission is pure, plain water. But unlike oil and gas, hydrogen is not a fuel. It is a way of storing or transporting energy. You have to make it before you can use it — generally by extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels, or by using electricity to split it from water.

Listening to: Stranger - Pacifier

Very cool! Exactly the sort of leadership that is required. From BoingBoing:

Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA will soon become America’s largest solar electric installation on a single corporate site, and one of the largest such projects in the world, according to solar power systems integrators EI Solutions.

The solar firm will build an installation at the Googleplex with a total capacity of 1.6 megawatts (”enough to supply 1,000 average California homes,” according to EI’s press release).

Listening to: I Will Follow - U2

… it appears in Wikipedia?

Listening to: Can I Have It Like That - Pharrell featuring Gwen Stefani

Fortune has a very interesting article about the use of diesel engines to compete against the emerging hybrid power plants:

While a diesel may have won LeMans, winning over American consumers won’t be easy. “[Toyota’s] success has been to put the idea in consumers’ minds that hybrids are the only solution, but that’s wrong,” says clean-diesel proponent Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault (Charts) and Nissan (Charts). Though half the new cars in Europe have diesel engines (credit $6-a-gallon gas and tax subsidies), most Americans still associate the word with soot-spewing, bone-rattling specimens from the ’70s