Green Tomorrow

Energy Efficiency Is So 19th Century

Devereaux House was on the corner of lands owned by the Town of Halton Hills, falling to pieces and due for demolition. In 2004 a citizen’s committee started raising money to renovate it, but when they started looking closely, they found that it was almost entirely original, down to the traditional milk paint. “It was like the Antiques Roadshow,” Ann Lawlor told Leslie Scrivener of the Star, “We had no idea what we had.” So they are carefully restoring rather than renovating, but also demonstrating that old buildings can be green buildings.

You can’t add a lot of insulation to a building like this and you really shouldn’t replace the windows, but one can put in ground sour…

GrandCentral Offline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead

GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. [...]

First Commercial Scale Tidal Energy Turbine Installed

A big step towards the future of tidal power has been taken. The SeaGen tidal energy converter, an upside-down-windmill structure weighing over 1000 tons, has been successfully set into the water off of Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough by parent company Marine Current Turbines. Will Northern Ireland become the “Saudi Arabia of marine energy”? Or will the curse of the Titanic strike another behemoth emerging from the Belford docks?…

What Role Will EPA Play In Climate Action? GOP Stratetgy Announced.

Yesterday we asked our readers an open-ended question about which US presidential candidate was likely to be the best at resurrecting USEPA from the dead. Answers are still rolling in. Meanwhile, a proposed strategy for EPAs future has just been announced by a Bush Administration appointed group.

The larger question is whether the next Administration’s goal ought to be to simply restore USEPA’s historic role, appoint talented policy and technical leaders, boost staff morale, and work with Congress to provide the needed resources. Or, w…

Mississippi Cottages Are Too Nice

Lori Waselchuk for The New York Times

Object lesson on why this never ends: FEMA gets it right, and is testing the “Mississippi Cottages”, which the New York Times describes as having “tin roofs, small porches and are colored like Easter eggs — rose-hip pink, malted mint, cloudless blue. The cottages are on wheels, but the larger models can be put on permanent foundations. All are equipped with appliances, beds, a table and chairs, ceiling fans, even pots and pans, and cost an average of $32,000 apiece to build.” People love them.

But guess what? Local municipalities are resisting them.” They fear people who get cottages will simply live in them and not rebuild their houses…

AlertThingy, The FriendFeed Desktop Application, Launches

AlertThingy, the Adobe AIR desktop application for FriendFeed that we previewed last month, has just launched. It is one of the first applications built on the new FriendFeed API.
The application allows users to see the data stream from people they follow on FriendFeed, and post new messages directly to the service. Users can also comment [...]

Solar4Schools Completes 50th PV Installation

We’ve reported on the UK-based Solar4Schools initiative before. In fact we were so excited about it that we covered it twice. Watching it develop, it certainly seems like our excitement was well-founded – the program has just completed its 50th installation, putting in a 4Kwp system at Cherry Orchard Primary school in South Lond…

Is a 17-foot long Smart Car Still Smart?

We’ve already seen smart cars made to look like monster trucks, but now a British company called Carbonyte UK has taken the diminutive Smart ForTwo, cut it in half, and stretched it to 17 feet. They are calling the end-product a Smaaart car, and they plan on using it as a “promotional vehicle” that includes “a 20:1 scale fibre-glass replica soft drinks can, complete with ring-pull” and plenty of room for schwag.”

If the above photo of the Smaaart l…

Rocketboom Founder Puts His Twitter Account On Sale

How much is a Twitter account with nearly 1,500 followers worth? Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron wants to find out, and launches a publicity stunt that will spark a debate about trust and privacy: He’s selling his Twitter account, including the followers. His explanation for the sale:
I really love my Twitter account but I feel like [...]

First Commercial Scale Tidal Energy Turbine Installed off of Ireland

A big step towards the future of tidal power has been taken. The SeaGen tidal energy converter, an upside-down-windmill structure weighing over 1000 tons, has been successfully set into the water off of Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough by parent company Marine Current Turbines. Will Northern Ireland become the “Saudi Arabia of marine energy”? Or will the curse of the Titanic strike another behemoth emerging from the Belford docks?…