Another small step in a positive direction:


New Zealand bans plastic bags for fresh produce in supermarkets
wrote:

New Zealand has become the world's first country to expand its ban on plastic bags in supermarkets to thin bags, which are typically used to hold fruits or vegetables.

The move, which took effect on Saturday, is part of a wider government campaign against single-use plastics...

... The new move is expected to prevent the usage [and waste] of 150 million plastic bags per year...

... Critics have raised concerns that shoppers may just place groceries in disposable paper bags, which are still available in supermarkets.

"It's still worth doing this, but we really want to reduce single-use anything packaging," Ms Brooking said. "So we want people to be bringing their own bags, and supermarkets are selling reusable produce bags," she added...

More positive moves needed! And more widespread and sooner!!


Myself, I've been using (unbleached) small brown paper bags for loose unwashed produce from my greengrocer for a few years now. The covid pandemic boosted their trade and that looks to be holding up against the Big Supermarkets that are not-too-far away. After use, the used paper bags get composted.

We can positively do so much more yet...


All on our only one planet,
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

We are moving in positive directions:


‘Game changing’: spate of US lawsuits calls big oil to account for climate crisis
wrote:

Next week the first constitutional climate lawsuit goes to trial amid signs fossil fuel companies are facing accountability tests...

... The number of cases focused on the climate crisis around the world has doubled since 2015, bringing the total number to over 2,000...

... “I don’t know of another time in history where so many courts in so many different levels all over the globe [have been] tasked with dealing with a similar overarching issue,”...

China on course to hit wind and solar power target five years ahead of time
wrote:

China is shoring up its position as the world leader in renewable power and potentially outpacing its own ambitious energy targets...

China is set to double its capacity and produce 1,200 gigawatts of energy through wind and solar power by 2025...

... as of the first quarter of the year, China’s utility-scale solar capacity has reached 228GW, more than that of the rest of the world combined...

... In addition, the group identified solar farms under construction that could add another 379GW in prospective capacity, triple that of the US and nearly double that of Europe...

A virtuous race is on!

All on our only one planet,
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Here is quite a positive mix!

Enjoy a better more fun future with:


UK poised to drop plans to replace home gas boilers with hydrogen alternatives
wrote:

Energy secretary indicates cooling of government aspirations as concerns grow over costs, safety and efficiency...

... Shapps said he believed hydrogen would form part of Britain’s overall energy mix but predicted it was “less likely” that the gas would be routinely piped into people’s homes, amid growing concerns about cost, safety and perpetuating a reliance on fossil fuels.

Trials have been under way as part of a government move to phase out natural gas boilers by 2035 amid a broader effort to decarbonise domestic heating, which accounts for about 17% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions...

... Despite being more combustible and leakier than natural gas, energy firms have insisted that hydrogen can be made safe and have engaged in concerted lobbying of both the government and Labour to convince them of its merits...

... Hydrogen is derived either from splitting fossil fuel gas at extreme temperatures (known as blue hydrogen) or by splitting water using electricity from renewables, with minimal emissions – known as green hydrogen.

Critics argue that creating green hydrogen for home heating is six times less energy efficient than using heat pumps powered by electricity, and say that switching from gas boilers to heat pumps could save money as well as cut emissions...

... Energy analysts have also warned that hydrogen could be up to 70% more expensive than [natural (methane)] gas for homeowners...

Hornsea Four offshore windfarm given green light after five-month delay
wrote:

Fourth phase at giant project off Yorkshire coast is expected to have 180 turbines and generate 2.6GW...

... generating the equivalent of enough green electricity to power 1m homes...

... “If we want to be energy secure, if we want to slash energy bills and if we want to drive growth and create jobs, we have to speed up the time it takes to get major clean energy projects, like Hornsea Four, up and running,”...

Could an ancient, climate-friendly crop be the future of beer?
wrote:

There’s a certain magic to fonio, a tiny golden grain believed to be Africa’s oldest cultivated cereal...

... They decided to make a test batch of fonio beer. “Fonio creates beautiful flavors in beer. I’m sure people have been brewing with fonio for thousands of years,” ... “It’s just a part of the grain that gives the beer a really crisp edge.”

Thiam believes that if more people bought fonio – instead of rice, wheat or barley – it could help alleviate big issues facing west Africa and the world like poverty, food shortages, the climate crisis and drought...

... fonio Ted Talk...

... growing a pound of malted barley has a 327-gallon water footprint while a pound of wheat requires 219 gallons of water, and a pound of white rice requires 400 gallons of water.

Meanwhile, fonio can thrive with just 600mm annual rainfall, and none of the irrigation, pesticides or fertilizers needed by other grains...

... “We call it a small grain with big impact,”...

Live well and prosper!

All on our only one planet,
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

UK poised to drop plans to replace home gas boilers with hydrogen alternatives
Energy secretary indicates cooling of government aspirations as concerns grow over costs, safety and efficiency...

While this finding is compelling, the hope expressed that hydrogen would be suitable for energy storage is less obvious. It requires a cost-intensive infrastructure and it is also extremely inefficient, with most of the energy being lost during injection and withdrawal. Electrical energy should be generated when it is needed or traded and exported via the European grids when it is not (grids have to be expanded and strengthened too, where economically feasible) . Sometimes shutting off wind farms temporally will be the most cost-efficient solution---it's not a sin. No one will want to buy energy stored in green hydrogen as it will most likely always be much more expensive than available alternatives (e.g. grid imports, biomass, solar, nuclear).

The way to save CO2 is by pricing its emissions (certificate trading). Only market principles can enable a cost-efficient replacement of fossil fuels with CO2-free alternatives at hopefully still sustainable costs. Any attempt by governments to PLAN* this transformation, to prescribe or ban technologies is doomed to failure. In Germany, we are pursuing this state-planned economy model with maximum ideological conviction. It's pushed by politicians who can't explain the difference of Power [MW] and Energy [MWh] and who reject warnings by physicists, electrical engineers, economists. It fails, visible to anyone who wants to see it, with maximum economic damage. No one should follow us on this path. We will bitterly regret this decision for decades to come.

Hornsea Four offshore windfarm given green light after five-month delay
Fourth phase at giant project off Yorkshire coast is expected to have 180 turbines and generate 2.6GW...

... generating the equivalent of enough green electricity to power 1m homes...

Offshore wind power becomes a success as soon as people start to look realistically at its (very large) contribution. This project does not power 1m homes, but exactly zero homes when there's no wind. It powers 1m homes within the few hours of the year when wind is continuously very strong, without reaching gale force levels which first force derating; finally safety shutdowns.

... “If we want to be energy secure, if we want to slash energy bills and if we want to drive growth and create jobs, we have to speed up the time it takes to get major clean energy projects, like Hornsea Four, up and running,”...

Empirical experiences in other countries show a linear dependence of the share of wind and solar energy in electricity production at the electricity price for end customers. Electricity is getting more expensive, not cheaper. People shouldn't be lied to, they could get disappointed first, then very angry. Cost efficiency can only be guaranteed by market forces, politically driven or subsidized projects have the opposite effect. Each feed-in priority for less reliably predictable generation and thereby caused additional costs (e.g. redispatch), is a subsidy.

I'm confident we will clean our energy systems and save the planet applying British-style market liberalism, never with French-style state dirigisme.

[*a plan:]
Ja, mach nur einen Plan! (Yes, just make a plan!)
Sei nur ein großes Licht! (Just be a great [guiding] light!)
Und mach dann noch ’nen zweiten Plan (And then make a second plan)
Gehn tun sie beide nicht (Going will neither [of them])

from Bertold Brecht: "Dreigroschenoper" (Threepenny Opera), Act 3, 17. "Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit menschlichen Strebens" (song of the insufficiency of human struggling), Berlin, 1928.

Wow!

Just WOW!!

See:

The Renewable Energy Revolution Happening in Ukraine | Maxim Timchenko | TED



From deadly dirty Russian power, and Putin's missiles and bombs and death, to instead regain freedom with distributed resilient sustainable green clean freedom.

Way to go in all ways!

Slava Ukraine!!


Can the rest of the world do even better without all the bombs?

All on our only one planet,
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Wow!
Just WOW!!

When the cost of power plants is more than the cost of DIY
NO WOW

I would like to disagree. Wind energy contributes absolutely nothing to a reliable, resilient power supply, because it cannot be predicted how much wind power will be available in one or two[*] weeks. The advantage of decentralized wind power generation over traditional power plants is a chimera. Nationwide transmission grids have been in use for more than 100 years, followed by interconnected grids across international borders. These grids have always been decentralized. Wind turbines feed into them. I suspect this video is aimed at a green-spirited, aloof faction of world rescuers who rule in Germany. Their phrases and arguments are repeated in order to raise a lot of money in the future for the reconstruction, conversion, transformation, whatever you want to call it, of the Ukrainian electricity sector.

Ukraine's power supply is best served by stronger, high-performance connectivity to the continental European grid (to which Ukraine has been emergency-synchronized since early 2022). And it depends on the great Ukrainian technicians who repair, patch and improvise substations and transformers within hours or days after Russian attacks. Unbelievable. Otherwise there are three large (soviet) nuclear power plants, which are the basis for reliable, cheap electricity and will enable an economic boom after the war, especially for the energy-intensive manufacturing industry. We Germans are currently driving this industry out of our country.

Don't get me wrong, wind power generates vast amounts of (also cheap) electricity over the year. But one shouldn't propagate it for resilience or safety of electricity supply.
[EDIT:] Ukraine also operates lots of old (soviet) coal power plants. They produce cheap and dirty energy. Ukraine's integration into the EU will clean them (regulations and CO2 pricing) as well.
[EDIT:] All of Ukraines (soviet) coal power plant's are more CO2 efficient than the 3,000 MW behemoth not far from my home in State of Brandenburg, Germany which daily burns tens of thousand tons of lignite (hardly more energetic than peat) mined in very large open pit mines. It still runs the Soviet steam turbines and generators made in Putin's Leningrad (today St. Petersburg).

[*] Forecasts for the following day are used by electricity traders & suppliers, transmission system operators, ..., but large deviations still occur frequently.

Ah, yes. A 25 year monthly moving average tells you how much coal and natural gas to order up. Then having a week supply in storage at each plant. Now you may be okay.

The end of the fossil fuel power plant era grows ever closer with these.

Green Gravity Lab prototype creating renewable energy using old mine shafts launched in Port Kembla.

Along with these.

Australia's energy transition is sparking a search for the new 'glue' to hold the system together.

As well as with all the solar panels and wind turbines already online here these days, and with more to come online, along with other power storage systems coming online, it's no wonder that the fossil fueled power companies are gouging their customers now in their final days as they can see that their end is near.

A very natural solution?

Japan's Population Drops by Nearly 800,000...


Way to go?...

All on our only one planet,
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

A very natural solution?

Yes, but only in theory; not with today's (western) economic and financial system. We need constant economic growth, otherwise we are going to see the financial collapse of national economies. Shrinking populations make economic growth more difficult. Before we can solve ecological problems of overpopulation we first have to completely reinvent our financial systems. We have fiat money, bank money creation by credit granting and other financial mechanisms which are incompatible with shrinking populations.

Just what we really need and more of them.

Ultra-Sustainable Building Technologies Are Hitting the Mainstream.

Trondheim, Norway, a city of 180,000 just 200 miles from the Arctic Circle on the coast of the frigid Norwegian Sea, hardly seems an ideal location for harvesting energy from the sun and surrounding environment. But a new 200,000-square-foot office building there is producing nearly half a million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy per year—twice as much as the building uses. The extra energy is powering other nearby buildings and charging electric cars, buses and boats throughout the city.

Highly sustainable buildings have been popping up around the U.S. and the world over the past decade. But now a confluence of new technologies and improving economics, as well as climate-change-inspired government regulation, are leading to the next wave in big construction: ultra-sustainable buildings. This new generation of green buildings is hitting environmental goals that would have seemed inconceivable just ten years ago—in some cases not just avoiding all harm to the environment, but actually improving it, leading the communities and cities around these buildings down greener paths.....

Until recently nobody in Norway cared about saving electricity. It's only generated by hydropower and has been extremely cheap for many decades. That's why it was wasted. Illumination in offices was left on instead of being switched off during lunch break (witnessed myself in Trondheim, 15 years ago). Norwegians sat comfortably outside in the typically cool weather on their house's terrace which was heated with 5 x 2 kilowatts infrared heaters. Houses were also heated with primitive electric heaters. The average power consumption of Norwegians was many times higher than that of continental Europeans. But in the last 10...15 years several high-capacity power lines have been built to all neighboring countries (more powerful AC links to Sweden and a couple of very expensive HVDC (high voltage DC) subsea cables to Denmark, UK, Netherlands, and Germany). Norway's state-owned energy company is now making a fortune from vast electricity exports. However, this also adjusts the Norwegian electricity prices (especially in the more densely populated south) to continental prices. Electricity is now up to 10 times more expensive there than before. In fact, heating a terrace outside now costs some money that Norwegians don't do thoughtlessly anymore. Only in the very sparsely populated north electricity is still cheap in all seasons. So far, the Nordic power grid has not allowed to increase exports further (and Norwegians are also critical of this).

In general, Scandinavians, that is Norwegians, Danes, Swedes (I know little about Finland or Iceland) are extremely advanced in modern energy-saving technologies. If you want to see the future: visit Scandinavia. We Germans are talking a lot about environmentally friendly technologies. Scandinavians simply build them.

For a political change:


Just stop oil? In Ecuador we have the opportunity to do just that
wrote:

My country could be the first to limit fossil fuel extraction through direct democracy

Nemonte Nenquimo is a Waorani leader and winner of the Goldman environmental prize

On Sunday, the people of Ecuador will vote in a referendum to decide whether or not to destroy my home. I am not speaking of the house that my family and I built by hand, but of the land of my ancestors, the territory and its guardians: the trees, the rivers and jaguars, the people who live there, the soil where my grandmother is buried, the reservoirs of knowledge and medicine, our spirits and those of the forest.

Perhaps you have never heard of the Yasuní national park in the Ecuadorian Amazon. If you were to walk there with me, I could teach you to listen to the wind, to interpret the songs of birds and read the leaves and the bark of trees. But to give you an idea of the place in the language you understand, I’ll tell you that Yasuní, an area of one million hectares, is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. There are more tree species in a single hectare of Yasuní than across Canada and the United States combined. Yasuní is also the home of the Tagaeri and Taromenane communities: the last two Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in Ecuador.

Can you imagine the immense size of one million hectares? The recent fires in Quebec burned a million hectares of forest. And so the oil industry hopes to burn Yasuní...

A whole different world. To burn or not to burn for destructive profits of a few destroying everything else.

Which way to vote?...

Here's hoping!


All on our only one planet,
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

More of a very natural solution:

China's Fertility Rate Drops To Record Low
wrote:

... China has said it will focus on education, science and technology to improve population quality and strive to maintain a "moderate fertility" level to support economic growth in future...

There is hope yet...

All on our only one world...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

An interesting development in the shipping world (or is it a step back to the past?)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66543643

---

Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Thanks for that Rob as that project's been quiet for a few years now.

Interesting development?
Most definitely.
However I would say a dangerous financial development.
Everyone recall the Evergreen in the Suez Canal incident in 2021?
One that we are all still paying for.
1 week that created a worldwide logistical nightmare for several months.

The Pyxis Ocean will take an estimated six weeks to reach its destination.

Another point that report raises.
The West is in a furore over China, yet what do we see?

The innovation has come from the UK but the wings themselves are manufactured in China. Mr Cooper says a lack of government support in reducing the cost of imported steel prevents the company from making them here.
"It's a shame, I'd love to build in the UK," he told the BBC.

Interesting development?
Most definitely.
However I would say a dangerous financial development.
Everyone recall the Evergreen in the Suez Canal incident in 2021?
One that we are all still paying for.
1 week that created a worldwide logistical nightmare for several months.

The Pyxis Ocean will take an estimated six weeks to reach its destination.

The Suez Canal administration has already upgraded many canal sections to increase capacity by adding redundant, parallel canal segments (see north of the Bitter Lakes: Google Maps). With further expansion in the southern section, bottlenecks that can paralyze the entire canal (Evergreen incident) will eventually be eliminated.

Six weeks... so what? When the age of the windjammer ended, some large steel-hulled ones were still built in the 1900s (last: 1926), long after steamships had become established, to operate on routes transporting relatively inexpensive bulk goods over long distances. Transport time wasn't so important. The only cost factor left was the then large crew to handle the sails. Example: South American nitrate trade on the route from the Chilean Pacific coast around Cape Horn to Europe. Some of the Flying P Liners (mostly four-masted barques) of the Hamburg shipping company F. Laeisz sailed there until the 1930s and 1940s (Record: "Potosi" Chile-England in 57 days in 1904). Perhaps in the future we will again be able to separate goods where transit time is important from those where time is not so crucial. That works, e.g. also with parcel services in Europe (truck/train vs. overnight air freight).

Can this idea actually clean up the U.S.'s septic tank by repurposing old fossil fuel infrastructure?

Transforming old oil rigs into seaweed farms could resurrect "dead zones" in the ocean.

As Big Agriculture continues to dump fertilizer and other cattle ranch runoff into the Gulf of Mexico, our aquatic systems suffer. Algal blooms wind up flourishing, killing fish and shellfish alike while causing eye and respiratory illnesses in humans. In addition, the dumping of this pollution into the Gulf of Mexico creates "dead zones," or areas of the ocean where the oxygen is so low that life struggles to survive. Like so many other problems, the pollution in the Gulf of Mexico seems at times to be insoluble. A recent report found that while the dead zone there seems to be shrinking, it's still about the size of Yellowstone National Park, roughly 3,058 square miles.

Yet Kent Satterlee III, executive director of the Gulf Offshore Research Institute (GORI), believes that he may have come up with a solution that will at the very least take a big bite out of this problem: Using abandoned oil rigs to grow seaweed.

"Seaweed needs three primary nutrients in addition to sunlight to flourish — nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon dioxide," Satterlee told Salon by email. "The Mississippi River outflow is high in these nutrients due to fertilizer and cattle ranch runoff, which cause algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico and subsequent hypoxic conditions or 'dead zones,' where low oxygen levels impact marine life." He added that previous researchers had previously found that Mississippi River seaweed had removed "large quantities of these nutrients from coastal ecosystems."

"Seaweed is harvested in many tropical areas around the globe, mostly in Southeast Asia," Satterlee said. "The high nutrient levels in the Mississippi River combined with the use of retired offshore platforms make for an excellent combination to farm seaweed in the Gulf. There are currently about 1,600 platforms in the Gulf, with about 400 ready for retirement. The use of offshore platforms enables the farm to mechanize much of what is currently being done by manual labor around the world, and seaweed can be grown in combination with other aquaculture species such as finfish and bivalves."..........