Damming Tibet: China's destruction of Tibet's rivers, environment and people The wild yak has gone the way of the bison in 19th-century America. Similar to native American peoples like the Blackfoot Indians, Tibetan nomads have become beggars in their own land, with their culture decimated by the Chinese policy of resettlement. Sometimes you just fall right into a story. In late 2005, I returned to Tibet intent on updating my guidebook to the troubled region, and to check out the completion of the new railway linking China with Tibet for the first time. The new Golmud-Lhasa line was completed at a cost of over US$4 billion, more than the entire budget spent in Tibet on education and healthcare since the Chinese invasion in 1950. My railway investigation got derailed when, out of curiosity, I decided to take a one-day rafting trip from Lhasa. I'd never heard of major dam-building in Tibet. I took as much undercover video footage as I could on this trip not knowing what I would do with it, but shooting anyway. China's reign of terror over Tibet The story chose me.
Why The Solar Roadway Is A Terrible Idea Recommended by Jason Torchinsky Congrats to Jason Torchinsky and Neal Pollack of Yahoo! Autos for n... Hypermiling Is Awful And I Sort Of Hate It [Jason decided to modify his Audi A3 TDI to get maximum fuel mileag... I'm Trying To Go 834 Miles On One Tank Of Diesel And It's Gonna Suck The White Stripes -- Fell In Love With A Girl Did This Online Auction Reveal Preston Tucker's Never-Made Roadster? PETA Is Pissed At Google For Making A Camel Do A Jeep's Job This Simple, Goofy Idea Makes For A Great Car Tumblr Why Are Cars Almost Always Symmetrical? Jalopnik Is Ten! Let's Add Cars To Old Landscape Paintings Check Out The Jalopnik Line Of Super-Sexy Halloween Carstumes! Holy Crap, NASA Is Considering Improvements To Orion That We Proposed A Driverless Audi RS7 Will Do A Lap At A German Touring Car Race Meet Uruguay's Amazing Stillborn Frankenstein Sportscar, The Ultra SP Someone Spray Painted A Dick On The Hood Of A Veyron First Ever Inflatable Space Station Module Set To Launch Next Year
Good Vibrations? California to Test Using Road Rumbles as a Power Source Most energy harvesting schemes are on a human scale, like using your swinging arms to power a wristwatch or your dancing legs to power a nightclub’s sound-and-light show. Why not go big by harvesting the road vibrations caused by cars and trucks? That’s the idea behind California’s newly funded experiment to turn road rumble into watts. A total of US $2.3 million will be invested in two projects. If the experiment proves out, California state officials say the system would be expanded to other roads. The problem is that nothing, not even waste energy, comes for free. It’s all been tried before.
During Fracking Hearing, Nebraskan Challenges Oil And Gas Commission To Drink Wastewater James Osborn pours a mystery concoction into water at a Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission meeting in March 2015. Opposition to a proposal to dump out-of-state fracking wastewater in Nebraska went viral over the weekend, after a community group posted a video of a man offering chemical-laden water to a Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. The commission was hearing public comment on a Terex Energy Corp. application to inject up to 10,000 gallons per day of wastewater from fracking in Colorado and Wyoming into an old oil well on a ranch in Sioux County, in the northwest corner of Nebraska. In the video, James Osborn pours three cups of water for the commissioners, then pours a brown liquid into each cup, asking them, “Would you drink it?” Watch the video by Bold Nebraskahere: During hydraulic fracturing (fracking), large amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, is injected underground to crack shale rock and release pockets of oil or natural gas.
World's First Solar Cycle Path Installed In Amsterdam Earlier this year, we heard of a dynamic duo’s ambitious project, Solar Roadways, which wants to replace concrete roads, driveways and parking lots in the US with their innovative solar panels. But it turns out that they’re not the only ones that think this green idea is a smart idea, as a group in the Netherlands has just designed and installed the world’s first solar cycle path. The path, which was developed by the Netherlands’ TNO Research Institute, runs between the suburbs of Krommenie and Wormerveer. The busy 70-meter stretch serves some 2,000 cyclists per day, and is set to open next week (November 12). 70 meters might not sound like much, but it’s a proof-of-concept pilot project to test feasibility and practicality, and it makes sense to test the waters on roads that are occupied with lightweight bicycles rather than hefty vehicles. The SolaRoad was made using prefabricated slabs consisting of concrete blocks topped with a translucent layer of tempered glass. SolaRoad
Solar Roadways passes $1.4 million in crowdfunding: Just short of the $56 trillion required, but not bad for a crazy idea Over the weekend, the Solar Roadways project on Indiegogo reached its target of $1 million. At the time of publishing, that figure is now north of $1.4 million, with five days left to go. The concept is verging on utopian: By replacing the USA’s concrete and asphalt roads with solar panels, we could produce three times more electricity than we consume, instantly solving just about every energy problem we have (geopolitical stuff, reliance on fossil fuels, CO2 production, etc.) It’s not hard to see why Solar Roadways has attracted so much attention and money: On paper, it really does sound like one of the greatest inventions ever. In reality, though, where, you know, real-world factors come into play, it will probably never make the jump from drawing board to large-scale deployment. Solar Roadways, the brainchild of Julie and Scott Brusaw of Idaho, have been in development since at least the mid-2000s. The top piece of tempered glass on a Solar Roadways panel
Whose renewable future? -- New Internationalist In January this year, the energy researcher Jeremy Leggett made a bold claim. He told the Guardian newspaper that we should expect a major oil firm to turn its back on fossil fuels soon and shift to renewable energy. ‘One of the oil companies will break ranks,’ he said, ‘and this time it is going to stick.’ Leggett points to the collapsed oil price, the falling costs of renewable-energy generation and potential government action on climate change as key factors that could persuade an oil corporation to jump ship. But hang on a minute. To answer this question, we don’t need to look far. A renewables revolution? 2014 felt like a big step forward for renewables. These could be early steps towards a better energy future. How much the retail price of solar electricity per KWh in the US has dropped since 1980. In order to avoid runaway climate change, our new cleaner energy sources would need actively to replace fossil fuel generation, not just add to it. What are we up against? At what price?
Belo Monte, Brazil: The tribes living in the shadow of a megadam | Environment By the Great Bend of the Xingu river in the depths of Amazonia, the Juruna tribe is being drowned by what seems at first sight to be a flood of TV game-show prizes. There’s a shiny new motorboat moored by the old canoe, the latest four-wheel drive parked beside a chicken coop, satellite dishes outside every home and wide-screen plasma TVs inside. But these are not the spoils of victory. For three decades, the Juruna have been in the vanguard of the fight against the hydroelectric plant – the world’s fourth biggest – which is being built on the edge of their territory in one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. The community have marched, lobbied, seized hostages, burned buses and taken to their canoes to try to stop the project. Next August, the Xingu river will be closed by a 5km-wide dam. “When they close the river, it will be like they are destroying our lives,” says Giliarde Juruna, the chief of a village in the Paquiçamba indigenous territory. “I used to take 50kg each night.
Explicit cookie consent THE oil price has fallen by more than 40% since June, when it was $115 a barrel. It is now below $70. This comes after nearly five years of stability. At a meeting in Vienna on November 27th the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which controls nearly 40% of the world market, failed to reach agreement on production curbs, sending the price tumbling. Also hard hit are oil-exporting countries such as Russia (where the rouble has hit record lows), Nigeria, Iran and Venezuela. Why is the price of oil falling? The oil price is partly determined by actual supply and demand, and partly by expectation. Four things are now affecting the picture. The main effect of this is on the riskiest and most vulnerable bits of the oil industry. Dig deeper:The economics of oil have changed (Dec 2014)Will falling oil prices curb America's shale boom?