Category Archives: Global warming

Boston drivers: Fill-up at ten cents per gallon

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Converted: This tank, in the trunk of a converted green grease car, holds waste vegetable oil. (Photo: Ben Falk, from the Green Grease Monkey website.)

by Mark Baard

As gas prices pass four bucks per gallon, green grease has never looked so good.

And with more entrepreneurs entering the Boston biodiesel and waste vegetable oil market, prices for the stuff are plummeting.

“The grease wars have begun in earnest,” Green Grease Monkey Patrick Keaney told me in an email this week.

The Boston Globe’s Robert Gavin today reports that premium is already way over four bucks, “while diesel hit a whopping $4.72 a gallon in Massachusetts.”

But if you own a car converted to run on waste vegetable oil (WVO), you can fill your tank (the plastic one in your trunk, that is), for as little as ten cents per gallon.

“I can’t keep the stuff on site,” Keaney said of his own, filtered, WVO product. “It’s crazy.”

Keaney is selling WVO, which he gathers from local restaurant kitchens, for $1.50 per gallon.

Now New Hampshire companies are coming to Boston, “offering $0.10/gal. for
grease!” said Keaney. “And some guy on Craigslist is offering $0.20.”

If you already drive a diesel, the Green Greasemonkeys and Boston Biofuels are offering B100 (100 percent biodiesel) at a very reasonable $4.00 per gallon.

You can pour biodiesel straight into the tank of your diesel car — no conversion necessary.

Spring is a good time to take a chance on WVO or biodiesel. The warm weather means you won’t have too warm up your tank in the morning. (WVO and biodiesel can gel at low temperatures, one reason WVO cars have a switch that toggles between the veggie oil and diesel tanks. Continue reading →

Why just help a neighbor…

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…when you can take his money, too?

Zilok.com, a new service launched today, is not only a stupid idea for anyone who owns a home (granted, it might help apartment dwellers in a pinch), it is a depressing sign of hard economic times.

The service suggests that — instead of sharing your lightly-used weed whacker with a neighbor, for example — you can charge him for it.

The car safety seat pictured here, for example, is available for rent in the San Francisco State University area for eight bucks per day, which makes no economic sense whatsoever.

Zilok also says (natch) that you will be doing right by the environment, because your customers will be buying less stuff. (One reason: By renting everything, and never owning anything, they will stay poor.)

No Boston-area items were available for rent as of noon today. — mb

Zilok Official USA Launch!
Keep it local and be a green hero
By simply renting things you aren’t using to people in your area, you cut down on conspicuous consumption and encourage the reuse of everyday household items and electronics. With Zilok you help save on the natural resources needed to produce more stuff.

“Inspired by conservation and green movements in Europe, Zilok is the fun way to tackle over-consumption while expanding everyone’s access to the things they want and need—whether that is a scooter or Wii, a ratchet set or a tuxedo” offered Gary Cige, Cofounder and CEO of Zilok.

Food Revolution 2030

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The food riots anticipated by military experts have already started. Now the Royal Institute for International Affairs is talking revolution, as a way to approach world hunger.

The Royal Institute for International Affairs is calling for something “close to a revolution” in agricultural efforts to meet the world’s hunger for food by 2030. A report from Chatham House (link, below), says we may already be at a point where a global middle class of fatties is taking food from the mouths of the poor.

Chatham House – Publications – Reports and Papers – View Paper
In the longer term, the key challenge is to increase the supply of food: the World Bank estimates that demand for food will rise by 50 per cent by 2030, as a result of rising affluence and growing world population. Achieving this challenge will require something close to a revolution, and a massive investment in agriculture in developing countries.

Rich leave the biggest CO2 footprints

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Before you blame yourself for not carrying your own grocery bag, it’s important to note that Bill Gate’s CO2 output (think private jets) is way bigger than yours. — mb

Leaving our mark – MIT News Office
The students conducted detailed interviews or made detailed estimates of the energy usage of 18 lifestyles, spanning the gamut from a vegetarian college student and a 5-year-old up to the ultrarich–Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates. The energy impact for the rich was estimated from published sources, while all the others were based on direct interviews. The average annual carbon dioxide emissions per person, they found, was 20 metric tons, compared to a world average of four tons.

Think tank: depopulation, brain-chipping on the horizon

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One of the lucky ones, according to futurists.

An organization headed by a former World Bank president the author of “Future Shock” predicts a dismal future for Americans.

24 million disabled Americans, most suffering from diseases caused by excess consumption, will require special public transportation to go to treatment centers, according to the World Future Society.

The WFS, whose directors include former World Bank president and U.S Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, and the futurist author Alvin Toffler, also predicts that the able-bodied will flee to other parts of the world, such as China and India, for work.

And healthy or not, young or old, most can look forward to being brain-chipped, and connected permanently to a global computer network, according to the WFS.

The WFS portrays the brain-chipping scenario as one of the few pluses on its list.

More of the WFS’s grim forecasts for the next 25 years: China’s drinking water supply will be virtually depleted, and global warming-generated super storms will cost hundreds of billions of dollars in damages annually.

Link and excerpt, to some of the predictions, are below.

clipped from www.wfs.org
WFS Image
Forecast #1: Generation Y will migrate heavily overseas.

#2: Dwindling supplies of water in China will impact the global economy.
#3: Workers will increasingly choose more time over more money.
#4: We’ll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing by 2030.
#5: Children’s “nature deficit disorder” will grow as a health threat.

Weather warfare: Chinese trigger snowstorm over Tibet

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Here to help? Chinese say cloud seeding improves climate

Mainstream media stories such as this one (see excerpt and link, below), invariably describe cloud seeding as “controversial” and “unproven.”

The Chinese have shown their ability to use weather as a weapon, however. The government says it wants to combat the effects of global warming on the Tibetan landscape. It recently dropped 1/2-inch of snow in the highlands, at 15,000 feet.

But cloud cover, on demand, can also provide the “sanctuary of poor visibility” to military targets on the ground.

Weather warfare and cloud seeding are among the topics I cover at parallelnormal.com.

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk
Chinese make first artificial snowfall

 

By Richard Spencer in Hong Kong

Last Updated: 2:25am BST�19/04/2007

 

China claimed yesterday to have caused a snowfall for the first time as part of its increasingly ambitious attempts to control the weather.

Officials in the meteorological bureau in Tibet said they had used “rain-seeding” techniques to trigger a snowfall over the city of Nagqu last week.

 
China is the world’s largest practitioner of rain-seeding, a controversial procedure that involves releasing silver iodide as a catalyst into clouds either by aircraft or by firing cannon shells into them.