Trends in Sustainability

It was in most respects a typical heist that happened in Dublin last month. Masked men, roughed-up security guards, $650,000 in stolen booty. But this wasn't art or jewelry that was stolen. The contraband, instead, was four rhinoceros heads.

all it a blind spot. When it comes to improving energy efficiency, the talk is usually on physical infrastructure that we interact with directly and can see: buildings, cars, machinery and battery-powered electronics. Communication networks, perhaps because they’re largely invisible and operate behind the scenes, are more off the radar.

But just because electricity doesn’t leak out of windows or fall out of tune doesn’t mean networks can’t be made more efficient. In fact, many of the same factors that reduce the efficiency of other energy-based systems (such as the inability to modulate power output based on real-time demand) negatively affect the performance of today’s information and communication technology networks (ICTs). And as traffic volume on ICTs continues to grow, efficiency will continue to degrade without enhancements.

As with electrical grids, many existing inefficiencies are legacy issues of bygone eras.

ASK YOURSELF how you think Fairtrade might work.

And question what you want when you buy coffee: the best quality coffee possible, or the coffee that gives its farmer the best price?

It’s less likely to get both than you might think.

Oslo, the capital of Norway, has a strange garbage problem. Too much? No, not enough. At first it might seem like any garbage is too much garbage, but Oslo (like many other cities in Scandinavia and Northern Europe) has built cogeneration plants that produce heat and electricity from garbage -- enough to heat about half of the city. But the locals don't produce enough garbage, partly because of their high recycling rate, so they have to import millions of tonnes of it from places like England and Sweden. They're even considering importing American garbage.

I recently attended an economics lecture that touched on the direct correlation between economic development and the access to, and effective deployment of energy (coal and oil). In a nutshell, the energy of coal and oil replaced human and animal labor which increased productivity on a massive scale. Fossil fuels also made large scale metal production possible which enabled better engines and construction which then drove the industrial revolution and all manufacturing since.

Obviously, this is not a comprehensive explanation of all the macro-economic drivers of growth, but in the simplest terms, energy provided the power that made industry possible. More than anything, this is what has produced our higher standards of living.

As I thought about the role of the Internet and information technology in relation to productivity growth, it occurred to me that I.T. and the Internet mostly serve to make industry more efficient but doesn’t really create anything on its own. Here’s a very simple example. In order to make a car you need steel. In order to make steel, you need energy. You don’t actually need the Internet or an enterprise resource management system to make a car. An ERM makes your automobile factory more efficient but it’s not imperative to the actual production of a car in the same way steel and power are needed.

Waste is a design flaw in so many products. To tackle resource scarcity we need rethink products and ensure fewer end up on the mountain of e-waste

Mosquito eggs are engineered to withstand the worst of Mother Nature and able to last for several years — until a drought ends and the rains come.

"They are incredibly complex; they have a plastron (protective surface) and actually have their own atmosphere," said Joe Conlon, an entomologist and technical adviser to the American Mosquito Control Association. "Hey, mosquitoes have been around at least 170 million years, and it's not because they are stupid."

East of the Mississippi, rain has returned to most areas, making it possible for those millions of mosquito eggs to begin hatching — and prompting some experts to warn of a huge plague of mosquitoes coming to a neighborhood near you

“Let me show you the world, says Swedish academic Han Rosling as he demonstrates the dynamics of population growth, child mortality and carbon dioxide emissions. The challenge for the world is to get everyone out of extreme poverty and get the richest people to use less fossil fuels so that everyone can share their energy levels, he says.”

"Mars can't just be a one-shot mission," says Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon.

He's part of a group who met last week in Washington DC for the first Human to Mars Summit, or H2M. The astronauts, researchers and space flight firms aim to chart a path to the Red Planet by 2030.

And they are thinking beyond mere visits. Though it won't be easy, they say establishing a permanent, sustainable outpost on the Red Planet may be our civilisation's only chance of long-term continuity.

"Single-planet species don't survive," says former astronaut John Grunsfeld, who still works at NASA. "That's a pretty sound theorem – just look at the dinosaurs. But we don't want to prove it."

When we discussed our home solar panel project in mid-2011 with friends, one of the first questions everyone asked was, “What’s the payback period before you break-even?” The second question was unsurprisingly, “How much is it costing you?” but the focus always ended up on the payback. After all, if you’re going to invest in green technology, you’re hoping that at some point in the near future, you get ahead of the game. It turns out that something we didn’t plan for — our Chevrolet Volt — is actually helping us boost the ROI and cut our payback time in half.

SAN FRANCISCO - A solar-powered airplane that developers hope to eventually pilot around the world took off early yesterday from San Francisco Bay on the first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States with no fuel but the sun’s energy.

Nutrition is full of nonsense.

You will find bold health claims for all kinds of foods, most often based on zero evidence.

Here are the top 11 “health foods” that are actually very harmful.

Can destroying a tropical rainforest be “sustainable”?

Well, according to a decision taken yesterday by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the major industry-NGO body, this greatest of environmental crimes is now officially “green.”

Palm oil plantations have driven the destruction of more than 30,000 square miles of tropical forest in Indonesia and Malaysia alone, pushing species like orangutans and Sumatran rhinoceroses and elephants to the edge of extinction. It’s the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Southeast Asia, and has propelled Indonesia to be the world’s third largest climate polluter behind only China and the United States.

Nonetheless, at its Extraordinary General Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, the RSPO formally rejected longstanding calls from membercompanies, scientists and nonprofit organizations to stop certifying as “sustainable” palm oil produced through deforestation and other environmentally damaging practices like destruction of ultra carbon rich peatland and use of highly poisonous chemicals like the notoriousparaquat, which is linked to kidney failure, respiratory failure, skin cancer, and Parkinson’s disease.

Crisis-mapping technology has emerged in the past five years as a tool to help humanitarian organizations deliver assistance to victims of civil conflicts and natural disasters. Crisis-mapping platforms display eyewitness reports submitted via e-mail, text message, and social media. The reports are then plotted on interactive maps, creating a geospatial record of events in real time.

The first generation of these humanitarian technologies was powered by free, open-source software produced by organizations such as InSTEDD, Sahana, and Ushahidi. For example, Ushahidi (the name means “witness” or “testimony” in Swahili) developed an interactive-mapping platform linked to a live multimedia inbox and used it to document violence that erupted in Kenya after the disputed presidential elections of 2008. Eyewitnesses sent reports of ethnic attacks and other violent incidents to the Ushahidi Web site via e-mail and text message. Ushahidi then plotted the location of each incident on a Google map, creating a public record of events.

The Ushahidi platform was later used to crowdsource a live crisis map of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. In the days and weeks following the earthquake, eyewitnesses submitted a large volume of text messages, tweets, photographs, video, and Web-based reports to the Ushahidi in-box. Once these reports were manually collated and plotted on the Ushahidi platform, they became a live crisis map of urgent humanitarian needs. For example, the map showed exactly where victims lay buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings, and where medical supplies needed to be delivered. The US Marine Corps, one of the first responders to the earthquake, has stated that the map helped them save hundreds of lives. The Ushahidi platform has since been used in response to dozens of other disasters worldwide.

Billionaire entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk has already tackled space flight and electric vehicles, but now he’s moving on to an arguably more difficult problem: Los Angeles traffic jams.

Musk told The Los Angeles Times in a recent interview that he’s fed up with the notoriously congested traffic situation in LA and is willing to pay money out of pocket to address the problem.

“If it can actually make a difference, I would gladly contribute funds and ideas. I’ve super had it,” he said, noting that the contribution would be for the city and his own happiness.

In fact, Musk has already spent money on the issue, as he donated $50,000 to the Angelenos against Gridlock cause of improving the transportation system in the city.

But here's what humans have that sharks and algae don't. We are able to learn from the past, including the deep geological past of our planet, and we're able to plan for the future. For example, geologists and paleontologists know that most of the previous mass extinctions on the planet were caused by climate change. Volcanoes or asteroids ripped the planet apart, loading the atmosphere with carbon and other poisons. The oceans went acidic and the climate got so hot that lots of species died out. At other times, sudden ice ages gripped the planet, locking once-temperate regions like Antarctica into massive blocks of ice.

Unlike sharks, humans are in a position to understand the dangers that await us if the climate changes too much. And, even better, we can do something about it.