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Ten Years of the Biological Diversity Act

India’s Biological Diversity (BD) Act was enacted in 2002. There is now a decade of its existence to reflect on.The genesis of the law can be traced to the Convention on Biological Diversity(CBD), which was signed at the Rio Summit in 1992. While assessing the 10 years of the Act, one has to be mindful of how India itself has undergone change in these years. By the time the Act came into force, trade imperatives had begun to influence environmental law and policy making both at the national and global level. The final shape of the Act and the manner of its implementation through the BD rules issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) in 2004 reflect that bent. ...
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Wednesday,16 January, 2013  |  Hits: 705

Americans Installed a Record Number of Rooftop Solar Panels This Year

Americans installed a record number of rooftop solar panels in 2012, according to a recent  Solar Energy Industries Association report. The group expects a total national installation of 3.2 gigawatts this year, 684 megawatts of which was installed in the third quarter alone. And fourth quarter rooftop panel projects could double to 1,200 megawatts – the highest number ever. A drop in solar panel prices combined with the rise of leasing programs has made it less costly and easier for homeowners to invest in rooftop solar panels, Bloomberg News reports, resulting in a surge of residential solar installations. “While Q3 2012 was remarkable for the U.S. PV market, it is just the opening act for what we expect to see in Q4,” Shayle Kann, vice president of research at GTM Research, said in the statement. More companies and government agencies are turning to solar energy as well, SEIA announced. Such programs rose 24 per cent in the third quarter to a total of 258 megawatts. This trend will continue with installations expected to soar an additional 25 per cent next year to 4 gigawatts. Even as our leadership lags in the face of climate change, the people are taking power into their own hands. ...
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Friday,14 December, 2012  |  Hits: 642

Lizard named after Obama was wiped out by climate change

Well it was just a matter of time before some commie scientists named an extinct animal after the 44th president of the United States. Obamadon gracilis is the name, and the foot-long creature — which was discovered in a fossil bed in Montana — has been extinct for about 65 million years. And ironically, its extinction may indicate that paleolithic changes in climate affected animals differently than previously believed. Paleontologist Nicholas Longrich explains that scientists are now rethinking the idea that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs spared smaller lizards like Obamadon:...
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Friday,14 December, 2012  |  Hits: 722

Gaps in India’s implementation of biodiversity law

Ten years after introducing a Biodiversity Act, India is yet to put it to serious use although several large "development" projects have invited controversy for their likely impact on biodiversity, say Shalini Bhutani and Kanchi Kohli. A National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) was created in 2003, but the government is not bound by its recommendations. The Act was meant to "provide for the conservation of biological diversity," in line with the primary objective of the Convention of Biodiversity (CBD). But, given the reality in which it operates, the question is whether the Act will come anywhere near effecting biodiversity justice....
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Friday,14 December, 2012  |  Hits: 233

India backs exploration of rare earths in deep sea

With China controlling most of valuable rare-earth mineral supplies, India makes a strategic move to back exploration off its own coast India has joined the race to explore and develop deep-sea mining for rare earth elements — further  complicating the geopolitics surrounding untapped sources of valuable minerals beneath the oceans. The country is building a rare-earth mineral processing plant in the east coast state of Orissa and it is spending around US$135 million to buy a new exploration ship and to retool another for sophisticated deep-water exploration off its coast. The Central Indian Basin, for example, is rich in nickel, copper, cobalt and potentially rare-earth minerals, which are highly lucrative and used widely in manufacturing electronics such as mobile phone batteries. They are found in potato-shaped nodules on the deep-sea floor. "These nodules offer a good solution to meeting the nation's demand for metals," C. R. Deepak, head of the deep-sea mining division at the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Chennai, told SciDev.Net....
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Friday,14 December, 2012  |  Hits: 543

Endow-Bio, Inc., the First National Endowment for Biodiversity

This is the birth announcement of Endow-Bio, Inc., the First National Endowment for Biodiversity.  Please help us to publicize our brand new, all-volunteer, 501(c)(3) public charity.  Endow-Bio, Inc. operates wholly within the U.S.   Our current crises of nature, conservation and culture call for an audaciously hopeful response in the form of this new public charity.  Our mission is to further conservation of biodiversity of native species and their habitats in the U.S., to expose the full breadth of our environmental problems, to show there are good-hearted people working to solve these problems who would benefit from more support, and to provide a simple and inexpensive social mechanism to provide such support.  Our essential goal is to increase public participation in conservation here in the U.S., in the broadest sense.  Currently, about 2% of charitable giving in the U.S. supports conservation. We think this level of funding should much higher and we are doing something about it.  ...
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Tuesday,11 December, 2012  |  Hits: 750

California Got 20% of Its Power from Renewable Sources in the First Half of 2012

For the first six months of 2012, California generated one fifth of its electricity from renewable sources. The California Public Utilities Commission just released its first/second quarter 2012 renewable energy progress report to the Legislature, and it claims that 20.6% of the state's power demand was met with wind, solar, geothermal, and other non-nuclear clean energy sources.That's quite the hallmark. According to CPUC:California in 2011 saw the greatest year-to-year increase in renewable generation achieving commercial operation since the beginning of the state’s renewable energy program. The state’s investor-owned utilities served 20.6 percent of their electricity with renewable energy in 2011 (up from 17 percent in 2010). In 2011, Pacific Gas and Electric Company served 20.1 percent of its retail sales with renewable energy, Southern California Edison with 21.1 percent, and San Diego Gas & Electric with 20.8 percent.The ever-growing share of renewables in the state's energy menu continues to expand thanks primarily to California's ambitious Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), which requires utilities to produce 33% of their power from clean sources by 2020. The law is working precisely as intended—analysts expect to see an even bigger jump in the second half of this year.The report notes that "More than 300 MW of new renewable capacity came online in the first two quarters of 2012, and another 2,740 MW is scheduled to come online before the end of the calendar year."Another tool that's helping to speed the growth of clean power is California's fledgling feed-in tariff program, which rewards homeowners, individuals, and businesses for installing small-scale renewable projects like rooftop solar—the utility pays a slightly higher rate to buy power from those sources and feed it directly into the grid. The FIT has been immensely successful in Germany, which gets way less sun than the Golden State.And I can assure you that those incentives are resonating in California—I just got back from visiting family there, and both my parents and my grandparents have newly installed solar panels on their roofs. They live in a pretty conservative area, and their friends are installing arrays, too. Indeed, the program enjoys bipartisan support, and innovative companies like Sungevity are cashing in by offering popular solar leasing schemes.Renewable energy continues to be a bright spot in an economy still wracked by unemployment; good jobs, cleaner power, additional income for consumers—California has, on this front, built a successful model well worth emulating.    ...
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Monday,06 August, 2012  |  Hits: 105

New Bladeless Wind Turbine Claimed to be Twice as Efficient as Conventional Designs

When it comes to the future of wind power, one company thinks it looks a lot different than you would expect, and cheaper and more efficient to boot. Saphon, out of Tunisia, is interested in finding partners to mass-produce and market their unique wind energy device, based on their own Zero Blade technology."The Zero-Blade Technology is largely inspired from the sailboat and is likely to increase the efficiency of the current wind power conversion devices. The blades are replaced by a sail shaped body while both hub and gearbox are removed." According to the company, their zero-blade technology devices are capable of overcoming the Betz' limit, which states that no turbine can capture more than 59.3 percent of the kinetic energy of the wind. An average wind turbine captures only 30 to 40%, while the Saphon turbine is said to be 2.3 times more efficient. Additionally, the cost is expected to be 45% less than a conventional turbine, mostly due to the fact that there are no blades, no hub, and no gearbox on the units.The Saphon Zero Blade technology is different in other ways as well, most significantly being storage of energy. Most of the kinetic energy can be stored (via a hydraulic accumulator) or converted to electricity with a hydraulic motor and generator."We've developed several prototypes. We are at our second generation prototype. We did the testing and this second one is twice as efficient as a three blade turbine and in terms of manufacturing is at least 50 percent cheaper." - Hassine Labaied The company is now looking for manufacturing partners to bring the turbine to market, and once that happens, they expect to be shipping out units anywhere from 18 to 24 months afterward....
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Monday,06 August, 2012  |  Hits: 492

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Thursday,05 July, 2012  |  Hits: 399

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Thursday,05 July, 2012  |  Hits: 410
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