Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability – Page 597

Tesla completed its $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity this week, and, to celebrate, the company has announced a major solar energy project: wiring up the whole island of Ta’u in American Samoa. Previously, the island ran on diesel generators, but over the past year Tesla has installed a microgrid of solar energy panels and batteries that will supply “nearly 100 percent” of power needs for Ta’u’s 600 residents.

The project seems intended to show off the potential benefits of the SolarCity acquisition, with Ta’u’s microgrid comprised of 5,328 solar panels from SolarCity and Tesla, along with 60 Tesla Powerpacks batteries for storage. But buying SolarCity remains a risky move for Tesla, with the purchase including billions of dollars of debt for a company that’s far from profitable (SolarCity spends $6 for every $1 it makes in sales). Nevertheless, Tesla CEO Elon Musk describes the acquisition as “blindingly obvious” — a necessary step in his so-called “Master Plan” to integrate clean energy generation and storage.

The project in Ta’u shows the benefit of this. It was funded by American Samoan and US authorities (including the Department of Interior), and Tesla says it will offset the island’s use of more than 109,500 gallons of diesel per year, as well as the expense of shipping that fuel in. Confusingly, the “Factoring in the escalating cost of fuel, along with transporting such mass quantities to the small island, the financial impact is substantial,” said Tesla in a blog post.

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The solar revolution.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the solar roof that will be sold under a combined Tesla-SolarCity will likely cost less than a normal roof to install.

Tesla and SolarCity shareholders voted in favour of the US$2 billion deal Thursday. In late October, Musk unveiled a new solar roof product to show his vision for a combined company with SolarCity, but did not provide specifics on how much it would cost.

On Thursday after the shareholder vote, Musk said its solar roof will likely cost less than a normal roof:

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Immensely concentrated sunlight provides a novel method for the synthesis of many nanomaterials that possess remarkable photonic, tribological, electronic, and catalytic properties.

The solar paradigm of creating singular nanomaterials that possess unprecedented photonic, tribological, electronic, and catalytic properties is arguably far less familiar than the energy-saving paradigms of solar photovoltaics and solar thermal systems. Much of the research in this field has evolved over the past decade from our collaborations (i.e., between researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel).

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Where is Waste Management (WM) when you need them. Looks like a golden opportunity for those in the trash and recycle industry.

BEIJING — China’s Singles Day, the world’s biggest shopping extravaganza that fell on Nov 11, saw bargain hunters spend 10 billion yuan (S$2.07 billion) in just seven minutes on the country’s largest online-shopping site, Alibaba’s Tmall, last Friday after midnight.

But the spending orgy could choke landfills and take a huge toll on the environment, employees of waste-disposal and recycling firms say.

China’s version of the United States’ Black Friday will result in one billion parcels travelling from retailers to customers’ doorsteps over the course of the next few weeks, according to the China Express Association (CEA).

Continue reading “China’s shopping craze turns into environmental nightmare” | >

For example, ordinary baker’s yeast cells normally produce a lot of alcohol, a biofuel, when fed sugar extracted from the edible kernels of corn plants. NetSurgeon designed genetic surgeries that convinced the cells to make more alcohol when fed a type of sugar found in the inedible leaves and stalks.

The research is published in PNAS Early Edition.

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The wealth gap worries Forbes, not your usual wide-eyed socialist.

How do we expect to feed that many people while we exhaust the resources that remain?

Human activities are behind the extinction crisis. Commercial agriculture, timber extraction, and infrastructure development are causing habitat loss and our reliance on fossil fuels is a major contributor to climate change.

Public corporations are responding to consumer demand and pressure from Wall Street. Professors Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg published Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations last fall, arguing that businesses are locked in a cycle of exploiting the world’s resources in ever more creative ways.

Continue reading “Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050” | >