Snippets from the Interwebs 10

Yet another digest of snippets from the Intertubes. A lot is going on that the mainstream media barely reports on.




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Last week the state of Hawaii introduced a state-wide ban on plastic bags, becoming the first US state to do so. Now the city of Los Angeles has banned them too becoming the largest US city with a ban
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Globally, Mexico ranks 24^th in wind capacity and is expected to jump to 20^th, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC). Mexico only produced three megawatts (MW) of wind power in 2005, but now has almost 400 times that amount and by the end of this year will have two gigawatts (GW). Mexico has the 14^th largest economy in the world, is the 11^th largest greenhouse gas emitting country, and is the world’s 7^th largest producer of oil. Mexico also has Mexico City, which has some of the most severe air pollution in the world.
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Microsoft has committed to become carbon neutral beginning on July 1, the start of the company’s new fiscal year. The shift results from three years of internal discussions within the company to improve Microsoft’s carbon footprint and environmental performance. The company will roll out the new changes, including a new accounting system, across its operations in over 100 countries.

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Our Economic Development Minister Senator Alan Maclean has just been trying to drum up business for Jersey in Israel. Here’s what some of their entrepreneurs are doing -
Rafael Aharon, an Israeli entrepreneur, has come up with a plan to make paper from human waste. This might sound unsavoury, but he sees an untapped business with plenty of potential.
Aharon is the CEO of Applied Clean Tech (ACT), a sewage recycling company. Their system is an “integrated solution combining reduced sludge formation for municipal waste water treatment plants (WWTPs) with recycling of waste water bio-solids.”
They take sewage poop they treat it and make paper out of the fibre they find therein.
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In April, Mexico’s House of Representatives passed a new piece of climate change legislation, making it only the second country in the world behind the UK and its Climate Change Act to do so, once it is approved by Mexico’s Senate. The law calls for reducing carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2050.
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In March Virent and Virdia, formerly HCL CleanTech, announced the successful conversion of cellulosic pine tree sugars to drop-in hydrocarbon fuels within the BIRD Energy project, a joint program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Israeli Ministry of National Infrastructure and the BIRD Foundation. The project, which commenced in January 2011, successfully demonstrated that Virdia’s deconstruction process generated high-quality sugars from cellulosic biomass, which were converted to fuel via Virent’s BioForming® process.
Virent used Virdia’s biomass-derived sugars to produce gasoline and jet fuel, the latter being sent to the U.S Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) for analysis where it passed rigorous testing. Tim Edwards of the Fuels Branch of the AFRL said, “This fuel passed the most stringent specification tests we could throw at it (such as thermal stability) under some conditions where conventional jet fuels would fail. This fuel is definitely worth further evaluation.”
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Here’s a good website – ifixit.com - for those who want to relearn how to fix things. It mainly concentrates on electrical devices

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In March, the Danish government once again threw down the green energy gauntlet by pledging to generate 35% of its total energy from renewable sources by 2020 and 100% by 2050
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It would be good to find a site that rates thousands of products for such things as health, ethical and environmental performance.
Hence GoodGuide, a Web site and iPhone application that lets consumers dig past the package’s marketing spiel by entering a product’s name and discovering its health, environmental and social impacts
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Volvo Group, the transportation equipment manufacturer, has set a tall order for itself. It wants to reduce its carbon emissions from the construction equipment, buses and trucks it makes by 30 million tons by the end of 2014. To put the Volvo/WWF alliance in perspective, the 30 million ton reduction goal is the equivalent of the total carbon dioxide emitted by all of Sweden over a seven month period
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This website lets you examine in detail the performance of Germany’s huge photovoltaic sector in  real time – none at night! On this site you can view at any time the total output of all PV plants in Germany installed up to the specified cutoff date. As required, you can view this information as an absolute value or as a percentage of total installed output
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Moving along with Scotland’s ambitious plans to be the European leader in wind energy, Korean-based Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) has announced that it will base its first European offshore wind project in Fife. The venture is said to be worth up to £100m and is expected to create 500 new jobs in the clean energy sector in Scotland.
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Hank (who maintains the website EcoGeek and sings songs about particle physics) runs a YouTube channel that celebrates nerdiness. This Internet community is now a huge part of pop culture among self-professed teenage nerds. Hank’s new spin-off channel SciShow, which publishes videos about popular science topics, has only being going for a month but already has 90 000 subscribers and 1 million views. So I was very excited when Hank created this entertaining, polished, and wonderfully accurate video about climate change. He discusses sea level rise, anoxic events, and even the psychology of denial: In which Hank details the five scariest things that will likely happen because of climate change.