Welcome to another edition of Friday Linkfest, your guide to the week's most relevant news on the present state and future of our planet. Today we bring you the good, the bad and the dubious, as well as the most noteworthy features of the blogosphere and mainstream media. Enjoy!
Good News
- World wind power capacity is predicted to triple by 2015, rising to over 290 gigawatts by the end of 2015 from 91 GW at the end of 2007, mostly due to growth in U.S. and China.
- The EU has announced a it will propose rules requiring biofuels used in the European Union to produce at least a 10 percent saving of greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuels.
- A new manufacturing process is being developed, using supercritical carbon dioxide, a phase of carbon dioxide with both liquid and gaseous traits, heralded as a nontoxic replacement for conventional manufacturing solvents. The new processes help reduce the use of conventional organic solvents, reduce energy consumption, and reduce the loss of costly and sometimes toxic metal catalysts, promising greener and cheaper products.
- Termites might hold the key to second generation biofuels, made from biomass instead of food crops like corn. Researchers have identified a rich reservoir of wood-digesting enzymes exuded by bacteria living in the termites' guts.
- Carbon pollution from industrialized countries rises again, after declining between 1990 and 2000, having increased again to a near all-time high in 2005.
- In the meantime, the UN warns us the world will have to end its growth of carbon emissions within seven years and become mostly free of carbon-emitting technologies in about four decades to avoid killing as many as a quarter of the planet's species from global warming.
- Technology won't be able to stop global warming, despite the many technological advances in the past half-century. Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States may grow faster in the next 50 years than they have in the past 50, and higher energy prices will curb the problem better than technology, two economists say.
- And adding to the problem, industry is proving slow to act on carbon saving advice, as only 12% of large businesses have, so far, worked with UK's Carbon Trust to reduce their carbon emissions, and just 40% of the potential savings identified by the trust between 2003 and 2006 have actually been implemented.
- A new method for reducing global warming proposes building hundreds of water treatment plants that enhance the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The basic idea is to remove hydrochloric acid from the ocean by electrolysis and neutralize the acid through reactions with silicate minerals or rocks, similar to the natural weathering process.
- Ocean plankton has been shown to increase its carbon uptake in response to increased concentrations of dissolved CO2 and thereby contributing to a dampening of the greenhouse effect on a global scale. However, this finding is not without concerns such as the nutritional quality of the plankton, which could have implications across entire marine food webs.
- Gristmill is less than impressed with the new and much discussed Voluntary Carbon Standard.
- The historical link between climate changes and war exposed.
- The story of a grassroots campaign that successfully lowered the cost of solar power for a San Francisco community.
