Link Banana

Perhaps the fact that I discovered this on Metafilter is a commentary on the nature of news-flow or my inattentiveness, but it seems that Raphael Correa got a new constitution of the term-extending type that Hugo Chavez recently failed to secure.

Perhaps more interesting, the document gives inalienable rights to nature, like:

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

For the eco-conscious consumer, there’s a new time sink aid available: GoodGuide. It’s description of itself:

GoodGuide™ provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of products and companies. GoodGuide’s mission is to help you find safe, healthy, and green products that are better for you and the planet. From our origins as a UC Berkeley research project, GoodGuide has developed into a totally independent “For-Benefit” company. We are committed to providing the information you need to make better decisions, and to ultimately shifting the balance of information and power in the marketplace.

(via Snarkmarket)

Tyler Colman says that we need to get over the stigma about wine that comes from a box. One reason:

A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.

Today’s good news: a new study found that there are many more western lowland gorillas in Congo than anyone expected. I found this line somewhat ironic:

“The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”

…by barring them from popular culture(?!). Maybe it’s just me, but this thesis seems a little absurd:

And many of those who imagined chimpanzees to be safe reported that they based their thinking on the prevalence of chimps in advertisements, on television and in the movies.

Having said that, I also didn’t know that chimpanzees are endangered. But I attribute it to insuffient publicity for that fact, not their presence popular culture.

That is kind of a self-evident fact, but with their increasing use in high-tech gadgets there’s justifiably increasing worry about the depletion of certain elements.

Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth’s crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues. Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there’ll be none left to use. Indium, another endangered element—number 49 in the periodic table—is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses (plus some others—it’s a gasoline additive, for example, and a component of the control rods used in nuclear reactors) and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade. Hafnium, element 72, is in only slightly better shape. There aren’t any hafnium mines around; it lurks hidden in minute quantities in minerals that contain zirconium, from which it is extracted by a complicated process that would take me three or four pages to explain. We use a lot of it in computer chips and, like indium, in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but the problem is that we don’t have a lot of it. Dr. Reller thinks it’ll be gone somewhere around 2017.

(via kottke)

Tyler Cowen’s been evaluating the environmental impact of flying (first here, second in title). Though he’s far from a conclusive answer, intriguing facts have emerged. For example:

Cargo has to come into play, too. Regardless of what you pay and what fare class you’re booking in, your travel on United between San Francisco and Nagoya, Japan is going to have almost no effect whatsoever on United’s decision-making. They’ve got a very large contract with Toyota and they fill up their 747 with cargo and the flight goes out with very low load factors yet is still profitable for them to operate.

Actually, says the Green Lantern, if you’re really green you use your pants. If you’re not open to that, the often-ineffective solution is the greener one:

The bottom line is that hand dryers will be the greener choice in about 95 percent of circumstances. If the choice is between using a tiny corner of recycled towel versus a 2,400-watt dryer, then the Lantern can see how the towel will win. But dryers get the nod in most other scenarios, particularly if the dryer is rated at less than 1,600 watts. (Check the specs plate on the side if you’re really curious.)

Mark Bittman has some practical advice for omnivores looking eat less — not no — meat.

1. Forget the protein thing. Roughly simultaneously with your declaration that you’re cutting back on meat, someone will ask “How are you going to get enough protein?” The answer is “by being omnivorous.” Plants have protein, too; in fact, per calorie, many plants have more protein than meat.

In a thorough summary of the basics of hybrid auto technology, The Economist’s Tech.view column sees a future that may favor less-efficient (but cheaper) mild hybrids over “stronger” ones like the Prius.

The complexity and cost of such drive-trains has made many in the industry think twice about strong hybrids. Mild hybrids like Honda’s may offer only modest fuel savings, but they are considerably cheaper to make. Selling for less than a Toyota Prius, the new mild-hybrid version of the Chevrolet Malibu has been a runaway success, despite having only 2mpg better fuel economy than a conventional Malibu.

This Green.view column raises some valuable points about Canada’s supposedly brutal seal hunts:

Still, groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) call it inhumane, and they have successfully lobbied politicians across Europe. In 2007, Belgium and the Netherlands banned trade in seal products. Other countries—perhaps even the whole European Union—may soon follow suit.

IFAW records hundreds of hours of video footage of the annual hunt, in which seals are killed either by shooting or with a hakapik, a heavy wooden club with a pick. Although IFAW feels the hunt is inhumane, a study published in the Canadian Veterinary Journal in 2002 concluded that most seals (about 98%) were killed in an acceptably humane manner.

Though I have no idea where this falls is proportion to America’s total consumption, it’s interesting to see that wind dominates among currently planned methods of power generation.

The local city council has been talking about this topic, and today a scattershot but related essay appears on Slate:

My chickens, I like to think, are the most highly entertained chickens in the world. I sunbathe with them, hang out in the bushes with them, and sing to them. When they hear me sing my one cover, “St. Louis Blues,” they know to be nervous. “I hate to see … that evening sun go down,” I croon. And they get goose bumps. They seem to know that when that evening sun does go down, one of them will lose her head.

It’s the way of the future according to David George Gordon. I find myself surprisingly interested in it. The crucial component is this:

Insect lovers like Gordon argue that entomophagy — the scientific term for consuming insects — could also be a far greener way to get protein than eating chicken, cows or pigs. With the global livestock sector responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions and grain prices reaching record highs, cheap, environmentally low-impact insects could be the food of the future — provided we can stomach them.

(via Slate)

Wired Science has an approachable look at this report which measured the per-capita emissions of the 100 largest US metro areas. There’s not much terribly surprising — density is good, public transportation is good, coal is bad, mild weather is good — but the map’s still interesting to see.

Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer:

Virtually no fuel is wasted during startup, and only a thimbleful is burned as the car roars to life. So forget about the 30-minute axiom you were raised on—the threshold at which it makes more sense to shut off rather than to idle should be expressed in seconds, not minutes.

A lot of environmental organizations advocate the 10-second rule: If you’re going to be stopped for more than 10 seconds, it’s best to shut off your engine.

Firm evidence that high gas prices really make people think more and drive less.

At 11 billion miles less in March 2008 than in the previous March, this is the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history.

(via Marginal Revolution)

Grist compiled some interesting numbers recently. For example:

Less than 1: Percent of the earth’s surface covered by cities (1)
75: Percent of global energy consumed by cities (2)
80: Percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions contributed by cities (1)

(via GOOD Blog)

The much awaited and debated decision was finally made, but because this is still the George W. Bush administration, no action will be permitted to actually protect the animals.

But in both cases, the Bush administration has parried this legal thrust, saying it had no obligation to address or try to mitigate the cause of the species’ decline — warming waters, in the case of the corals, or melting sea ice, in the case of the bears — or the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, refineries, factories and power plants that contribute to both conditions.

The Economist’s Tech.view columnist thinks that the time is ripe for disappearing ink (or erasable paper) to replace the old-fashioned kind:

But once we’ve finished with the hard copies, they are often dumped in the recycling container, rubbish bin or even shredder. In a survey of its own printers, copiers and waste-paper bins, Xerox found that two out of five sheets printed were used only once and then discarded after a day.

That seems an awful waste. It takes around 200,000 joules of energy to make a sheet of paper. The average office worker in America prints out 1,200 sheets a month. The energy consumed in manufacturing that amount of paper—not to mention the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process—is equivalent a 100-watt light bulb burning for a month.

Pundits reckon over 15 trillion pieces of paper are printed annually around the world—a figure that is expected to grow 30% over the next ten years. To feed our appetite for paper, whole forests have to chopped down. Surely it would be better if we could reuse our paper—in short, stick it back in the printer or copier rather than trash it.