Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot Why is this front page NY Times story in our Really Strange Stuff feed? What else can you call a political movement that says government energy efficiency initiatives are a U.N. plot to take away American freedoms. If that’s not strange enough, these folks are actually slowing those government initiatives. In some respects a UN plot for world domination through energy efficiency fits rather neatly into this age of the Tea Party, 9.11 conspiracy theorists and Occupy Wall Street. What's worth noting is the Tea Party is fueling this latest conspiracy-driven political movement and it's working. They are successfully fighting government initiatives like bike paths, high-speed trains and energy efficient housing all over the country. What do all these initiatives have in common? They will dramatically reduce this nation’s oil consumption. What do the Tea Party and the people selling oil have in common? They share the same bank account. If these folks want a conspiracy theory to gather behind they might take a hard look at their own organization’s funding. Read the story linked above. It's shocking and depressing. Now consider that article alongside this piece on folks in Maine begging for oil to heat their homes, and not getting it while Big Oil reaps record profits.

Kyocera to Launch Solar With Li-Ion Battery Storage for Homes in Japan Speaking of those folks in Maine in the story linked above, would their lives be any different if they had the systems Japan’s government is helping its citizens buy. Or would such an effort be viewed by the Big-Oil fueled Tea Party folk as a government conspiracy to take away our freedom to waste the oil Big Oil sells us. OK enough teeing off on the Tea Party. Clearly the organization has many well-meaning, good hearted Americans among its ranks. NBN contends they are there despite the best efforts by the organization's leaders. These are misguided people, not bad people.

_Integrating Anaerobic Digestion Into Our Culture Part 2: Stats, Reality and the Future NBN knows just enough on the subject of renewable energy from organic digestion, to sound knowledgeable. This article on the other hand sounds like an excellent review of the subject that we only wish we had the time to digest, pardon the pun, in both parts. However, this sentence got our attention: “Germany, which has the largest installed base of solar and the third largest installed base of wind gets more renewable energy from organic materials than wind and solar combined.” Is there really that much energy to be gleaned using bacteria to break down sugar and starch into natural gas? We may revisit this piece when time allows. In the meantime we have to wonder how the Koch Brothers feel about this technology.

We needed a filler to help balance off the front page more—hey, esthetics are everything—so NBN thought this photo filled the bill. All those little gray dots are aquatic deadzones, areas where nutrient loading have created algal blooms that suck all the oxygen out of the water killing all the fish through a process called eutrophication. Two points to make here: one is that deadzones are becoming an enormous problem and the other is that Google has once again earned the fawning appreciation of NBN with yet another amazing, free data base that allows a unique view of the world. You have to check out the Deadzone tab on Google Earth to get a real appreciation of how bad this problem is. And unless we dramatically clean up our wastewater treatment plants and reduce the use of fertilizers in this country these deadzone are only going to grow in size and number.

_Hatcheries Change Salmon Genetics After a Single Generation The impact of hatcheries on salmonids is so profound that in just one generation traits are selected that allow fish to survive and prosper in the hatchery environment, at the cost of their ability to thrive and reproduce in a wild environment. This discovery is more than just another argument for aquaponics and moving fish farms inshore. It also illustrates just how aggressively humans are redefining "fittest" as it relates to evolution and just what is a "wild" population in a world where humans call the shots in most every ecosystem in the world. Hatchery born salmon have been released into the wild for decades. The results of this study suggest we haven't had a truly wild population of salmon in decades.

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Solar-powered Internet Connectivity in Lascahobas, Haiti We talk often about the internet playing a part in human evolution, so we thought this article on the Illinois Institute of Technology’s solar powered internet access project in Haiti might be a good illustration for this subject. The Haitian school being wired up has just two teachers who have ever used the internet. That means none of the students have. It will take some work by the students to fully understand just how powerful the internet is: many may get no further than the nearest online free video game. So just hooking-up the school isn’t enough bring the students up to speed. They will need some instruction. But so many of the minds that will be opened to this experience are quite literally blank slates. It’s one thing to be a second grader in Dayton Ohio who has never seen the internet, you’ve seen so many other elements of technology the shock is muted. But a Haitian? That’s a shock to the system that might just reach into the DNA in some fashion. Certainly any student so-exposed will stand a far better chance of survival in this world than one who isn't.

_ Environmental Bootcamp Coming to New Orleans Up to now the dreaded insurance seminar was often held up as the occupational purgatory that no middle-aged professional wanted to find themselves participating in, or worse, looking forward to. Now we have the Environmental Bootcamp as the potential standard bearer of boredom. The bootcamp is a three-day emersion into environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, NAAQS, NSR Program, NSPS, NESHAPs, Title V Permitting Program, the Clean Water Act, Water Quality Permitting, Storm Water Management & NPDES Permitting, SPCC Compliance and Planning, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Identification of Hazardous Waste/Exclusions and Delisting of Wastes, CERCLA, EPCRA, TSCA, Environmental Audits, ISO 14001. Who would volunteer for such torture, let alone pay $1,150 to attend? The answer to that question is less important than the fact that enough people will do so to justify  holding such an event, which is great news.

_ Thieves Seek Restaurants’ Used Fryer Oil This first sounded like good news: people are stealing use fryer grease from behind restaurants. Surely, we thought, there is no more certain milepost that the environmental movement is truly becoming an element of everyday life than seeing crime elements cashing in on it. To the tune of $750,000, according to one grease recycling company quoted in the story. Despite such losses, the article says, getting local law enforcement, particularly prosecutors’ offices, to take the matter seriously has been a bit of a chore. To quote the article: “Turning arrests into convictions with punishments large enough to deter future theft is rare.” You have to wonder: if thieves were targeting barrels of crude oil from refineries the matter might be taken a little more seriously. Still, NBN takes some solace knowing that yet another waste product in this country is being put to good use, regardless of who is using it.

_ DuPont Achieves Zero Landfill Status in Building Innovations Business Certainly DuPont has a lot of environmental damage to atone for, and there’s clearly more room for improvement in its current operations. But hearing the corporation reduced the trash in its building innovations company from 81 million pounds to nothing in three years, well, that’s something to clap about. Whenever we think about recycling we have to remember there’s two sides to the story. First, Dupont's effort means there's 81 million pounds of debris not going into a landfill. Second, and perhaps more important, that translates into many more millions of pounds of raw material not being mined or milked from Mother Earth to create new building innovations supplies, what-ever the heck those may be.

_ Graphic Image Warning: Leopard Scalps Man in Brutal Attack There are a thousand different jokes to pursue with any news story about leopard attacks in India (well maybe a few dozen). However, if you’re looking for a few laughs, NBN would like to direct you to the comments at the end of this story out of eastern India. What’s no laughing matter is the attacking leopard was released back into the wild. NBN is all in favor of protecting wildlife, but one would hope that a leopard prone to attacking humans might give Indian wildlife officials paws to reconsider before releasing it back into the wild. BTW there’s nothing graphic about the images. Outdoor Life just used this headline to draw readers.

_ Reaping benefits of exercise minus the sweat Once again, exercise to the rescue. This Harvard study shows some odd chemical it's calling Irisin, produced during exercise, appears to prompted the body into turning bad white fat into great brown fat. Irisin helps the body hedge against diseases like diabetes, cancer and obesity. The authors of the study actually think they can have some sort of pill distilled from Irisin in about two years. Yeah, exercise in a pill. Wanna get in on the ground floor of that company? We didn't have time to read the whole article, but you might want to.

_PolyU scientist finds novel use of African mushroom in cancer research A young scientist from PolyU's Food Safety and Technology Research Centre has successfully prepared highly stable selenium nanoparticles by using the polysaccharide-protein complex extracted from the African Tiger Milk mushroom. The preliminary study discovered that these stabilized selenium nanoparticles can significantly inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells by apoptosis. We include it here just to illustrate traditional medicines like herbs and mushrooms can have roots, pardon the pun, in real science. That and the theory that the mushrooms only grow where tigers milk has leaked onto the ground. Finally, something that likes to drink Tigers Milk.

_American DG Energy to Provide Clean Energy from Fourteen Combined Heat and Power Systems at Multiple Buildings. This is what we’re talking about. A Massachusetts company just inked a deal with a New York property management company to provide heat and supplemental electricity to buildings the management company manages. This is a 15-year, $24 million deal that’s being fueled through installation of hyper efficient natural gas utilities to serve the building’s HAVC, hot water and electricity needs. While we’re not thrilled with the natural gas part of this equation, we love the efficiency part. The real beauty of it is, it’s all private investment. Efficiency, not consumption, has to be the new driver of this economy. The property management firm is RY Management and the Massachusetts company is American DG Energy. They deserve a round of applause.

_Stoller Enterprises Introduces Stimulate Products to Enhance Plant Growth and Crop Yield Just what this country’s agriculture industry doesn't need, a cocktail of hormones to sprinkle over crops to amp up their cell division and seed production. While it's clear we need to get as much from our crops as possible in this world of seven billion and counting, but do our watersheds need yet another pollutant running off our farms and into our rivers and streams? We already have bisexual fish resulting from all the medications we flush into these watersheds. What are we going to get when we start mass producing hormones to dump into our ecosystems? Queer ducks? Opps, we mean gay ducks.

_ This Is a Big Deal Here’s the great Tom Friedman exclaiming over Obama’s deal with the Big Three automakers to increase the U.S. auto fleet’s mileage by five percent annually starting in 2017.  That’s five years away. (Thank you State University of New York!) According to this article, in the past 20 years CO2 emission jumped by 50 percent giving the world “much less chance of avoiding dangerous climate change.” Then we’ve got this article saying Big Oil is increasingly setting its sights on domestic sources of fossil fuels. Lastly we’ve got an endless stream of articles suggesting the planet is warming much faster than anyone thought before. So just how big a deal is this auto deal, Mr. Friedman? Make no mistake, NBN loves Friedman. But his argument here sounds more like taking a step in the right direction after we’ve jumped off a cliff. 

_ Suntactics sCharger-5 Solar Charger Impresses Forbes New Product Editor in Recent Review of Hiking Equipment Made in America These folks couldn’t have prepared a better press release for this issue of NBN. On the one hand, who wants to be seen walking around sporting solar panels that make them look like the Flying Nun. On the other hand, for such small sacrifice you can insure your cellphone, ipad, electronic nose hair clippers…whathaveyou… are always charged and ready to go. It’s taking advantage of resources at the planet’s convenience instead of our own and reaping the benefits at the cost of a little humility. What’s wrong with that?  How is this superior to the solar bra that NBN panned a few years back? We’re not sure anymore that it is.

_ VisionBedding Announces a Line of 2012 Bedding to Help Prepare for the End of the World Every once in a while NBN posts something that truly makes no sense. Try as we might, we just can’t craft the words needed to make the amazing concepts in our heads into something other folks can understand. So it’s with a sense of great relief that we read this press release which makes absolutely no sense. What sort of retailer, of high-end products or otherwise, plans a marketing strategy around the pending end of the world? We assume there’s a tongue-in-cheek element to this release, but we can’t find it. Worse, the sales pitch just sort of fizzles out by the fourth paragraph. Go ahead, give it a shot.  

_ A (Literally) Fishy Study on Political Ignorance NBN was casting about in the internet for a logical thread needed for one of this week’s posts when we landed this fishy article we’re now filleting for every pun we can. At first we were impressed with the use of the simplest of intellects, fish, to offer insight into political movements like the Tea Party. So we read it a second time. It seems to say that uninformed elements of a population can play a vital role in insuring democracy, the very sort of debate that’s been fixed to both the Tea Party and Occupy movements of the past two years. The second reading, and a brief tour of the comments made at the bottom of the article, only seemed to cloud any conclusions drawn in the first. It is, however, worth a read if you’re curious about the dynamics of crowd decision making.

_ Cal-Recycle WRAP Award Winning Company – CleanFlame In its never-ending search for things to do with things that appear destined for landfills, NBN has come across a great use for wax-soaked cardboard like ice cream and milk containers. These things are the bane of cardboard recycling operations, but they are great for burning in fireplaces. So much so that the California company in the press release linked above earned some sort of green award for their recycled dairy container firelogs. What’s to stop a homeowner from setting aside a corner of the basement and stockpiling these containers for use in their own fireplace or for cashing them in at a highly specialized recycling center that NBN keeps hoping people will build? It’s too inconvenient. Easier to just toss them into the trash or let cardboard recycling companies figure out what to do with them. 

_ Families Can Now Give Their Refrigerator a Green Update with the Ozonator We had to read this a few times before believing what it says: The Ozonater produces ammonia eating ozone inside your refrigerator to help keep foods from getting moldy. We’re not sure how this is good for the environment, as the press release linked above suggests. Perhaps it will mean less food thrown out so less food needed from over-fertilized farms. Has anyone polled the farmers, or the supermarkets they supply, on the usefulness of the Ozonator? Buying food and throwing it out may not be good for the environment, but it’s good for the economy and isn’t that all that counts these days? Speaking of overspending we came up with this little jewel for the holidays. So now we need counselors to keep us from overspending during the holidays. Even in the middle of a recession. Amazing!

_Composting Toilets Pitched As Better Than Sewers for Protecting Ponds When the folks of Massachusetts’ Plum Island were mulling hooking up to the nearest city wastewater treatment plant seven years ago, all the talk about composting toilets seemed like the chatter of tree huggers. Anyway you build it, a toilet without water comes across as an outhouse, indoors or otherwise. Never mind that composting toilets reduce household water demand by 40 percent. The best that can be said about the aroma of these things is that, installed correctly, they don’t smell. But what about skidmarks, and composting toilets depend on bacterial activity to breakdown the waste, so they are very sensitive to chemical cleaners. That’s a far cry from the arguably false sense of biosecurity one gets from things like scrubbing bubbles and the toilet duck. So, after $23 million in underground piping there's nary a composting toilet near Plum Island. Sewage is now sent to a wastewater plant a half-mile away where it’s filtered, treated with tiny bacteria-eating bacteria, laced with chlorine and then dumped back into the Merrimack River which washes over Plum Island before heading out to the Atlantic. Out of sight, out of mind, just don’t go clamming in the Merrimack. Now tree huggers on Martha’s Vineyard are making similar pitches for composting toilets there. You think the Kennedy’s want to worry about what to do with the bushel of “humanure” composting toilets create annually? Do you think they are susceptible to the idea of growing and selling bamboo with the liquid waste? All we can say is: how long before you can't dig Marthas Vineyard clams.

_ Continuous Three-Dimensional Control of a Virtual Helicopter Using a Motor Imagery Based Brain-Computer Interface We’re not sure how impressed to be with this work. At first it sounded like brain waves sucked through your scalp by EEG sensors were being used to do real tasks like turning on your kitchen stove. It turns out the paper talks only about using brain waves to manipulate a video game of sorts. However, there is a key difference in this work and previous brain-computer interface studies. In this experiment the brain waves used maneuvered a computer game piece, a helicopter, left and right and up and down by asking the subjects to  think about their right hand or left hand, tongue and toes respectively. That’s pretty cool. All other BCI work has been one dimensional, like turning a virtual stove on and off. Logically, this work raises the prospect, however far off in the future, of taking a human brain and plopping it into a robot and heading out to rake the yard. It also gave some writer a clear shot at a great pun in this Scientific American article on the study: “These kinds of systems could eventually open new doors for the disabled.”