Tag: environment

Driving green for fun and prizes

As regular readers of this blog will by now realize, Ford keeps letting me drive their vehicles in exchange for writing about them. Which is a sweet deal, you have to admit. Even if the vehicles aren’t always to my taste (hello, giant red F150 pickup!), I enjoy driving them. Recently, though, the driving-Fords gig …

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Fuel from germs

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/01/Fuel-from-Germs.mp3[/podcast] For years, we’ve been turning crops such as corn, wheat and sugar beets into fuel, using yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. But there’s an obvious problem with this. That stuff we’re turning into fuel is also food for humans and feed for animals. (And as an aside, how come we always call it …

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Honeybees in decline

Honeybees, particularly in the United States, are in decline. In 2007-2008, 36 percent of apiaries surveyed by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that some of their colonies had simply…disappeared, a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. In the most recent survey, covering September 2008 to April …

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Liquid fuel from solar power

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Liquid-Fuels-from-Solar-Power.mp3[/podcast] In recent years, scientists and engineers have turned to biofuels—fuels generated from living things, and hence renewable—as a means of weaning us off of fossil fuels in favor of something cleaner, less likely to run out, and less wrapped up in international geopolitics. Fermenting the sugars found in corn or other grains into ethanol …

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Future energy sources

A lot of attention in Canada has been focused recently on the Kyoto Agreement to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. But scientifically, the goal for preventing possibly catastrophic global warming has been set far higher than Kyoto’s modest reductions. An article in the November 1 issue of Science sets out the challenges. Entitled “Advanced …

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Challenge Bibendum

Will we be driving gasoline-powered cars 10 or 20 years from now? Judging by the 2001 Michelin Challenge Bibendum, some of us will, but many won’t. The Challenge Bibendum (Bibendum is the real name of the made-of-tires Michelin Man) offers manufacturers an opportunity to demonstrate alternative-fuel vehicles in real-world conditions. This year’s challenge drew 27 …

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Global warming update

What with all the talk about the greenhouse effect recently, I decided it’s time for a quick review… The term “greenhouse effect” is usually used today in reference to a predicted gradual warming of the Earth caused by an increase in various gases in the atmosphere, primarily due to human activity. Really, however, the greenhouse …

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Landfills

ou know, I produce a lot of garbage (and no, I’m not talking about this column). I’m not alone, either: Canadians produce more garbage per capita than any other nation in the world. Regina alone produces, on average, 600 tons of residential waste a day. That garbage has to go somewhere, and in most communities, …

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Alternative fuels

Having written about fossil fuels, it behooves me to also write about alternatives, lest I neglect my environmental duty. Besides, I have all these left-over notes … We use fossil fuels primarily for power generation and transportation. Huge strides have been made in reducing emissions, but scrubbers and catalytic converters don’t change the fact that …

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Green technology

There is a tendency for people to see “technology” and “environment” as mutually exclusive terms. Technology is sometimes portrayed as the cause of the world’s environmental problems, and the abandonment of technology as the cure. Well, it might be true that the world’s overall environment would be in better shape if we’d all stuck to …

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The greenhouse effect

Presumably, by now, you’ve heard of something called the “greenhouse effect.” (If you haven’t, we’ll pause briefly while your next-of-kin checks to see if you’re still breathing.) The term “greenhouse effect,” as usually used today, refers to the predicted gradual warming of the Earth due to an increase in various gases in the atmosphere, primarily …

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