After becoming a renewable energy entrepreneur (think massive kites), Saul Griffith started wondering about the greenness of his own life—so he started counting. The exercise became an exploration, which resulted in the website WattzOn.com, a powerful opensource tool for personal impact calculation. Using the Embodied Energy Database, you can finally determine “the impact of wearing underwear versus taking holiday in Europe.” Griffith explains how WattzOn works (and how you can help perfect it), and why we miss the point when we obsess over
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Tagged with “green”
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Saul Griffith on Living the Examined Life and Flying Giant Kites (Part One)
Tagged with treehugger radio ecology green innovation
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Science Friday Archives: Listening To Wild Soundscapes
Science, technology, environment and health news and discussion from the makers of the NPR public radio program Science Friday with host Ira Flatow.
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Science Friday Archives: Digital Sampling and Remix Culture: Creativity or Criminality?
Science, technology, environment and health news and discussion from the makers of the NPR public radio program Science Friday with host Ira Flatow.
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Innovation’s Heroes & Villains
Mike Green, author of ‘The Nearly Men’, delves into the dark side of technological advance, looking at the bitter rivalries, tales of treachery and acts of deceit behind the inventions and scientific discoveries which defined the modern age.
Mike Green, author of ‘The Nearly Men: A Chronicle Of Scientific Failure’.
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KQED Forum - Biodiversity and Our Future (w/ E.O. Wilson)
Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson joins us to discuss his new book, "The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies." Wilson is faculty emeritus in the department of entomology at Harvard University and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction.
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R905110900?itemMD5=ae221a42440d262171d77ea407e7ca58
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Growing Green Cities
We look at the world’s greenest cities and how a greener planet can start where population is most dense.
Tagged with environment cities urban green
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Stewart Brand: Rethinking Green — The Long Now
This talk was given at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, California on Friday October 9, 02009.
Brand built his case for rethinking environmental goals and methods on two major changes going on in the world. The one that most people still don’t take into consideration is that power is shifting to the developing world, where 5 out of 6 people live, where the bulk of humanity is getting out of poverty by moving to cities and creating their own jobs and communities (slums, for now).
The second dominant global fact is climate change. Brand emphasized that climate is a severely nonlinear system packed with tipping points and positive feedbacks such as the unpredicted rapid melting of Arctic ice.
Global warming has to be slowed by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases from combustion, but cities require dependable baseload electricity, and so far the only carbon-free sources are hydroelectric dams and nuclear power. Brand contrasted nuclear with coal-burning by comparing what happens with their waste products.
Moving to genetically engineered food crops, Brand noted that they are a tremendous success story in agriculture, with Green benefits such as no-till farming, lowered pesticide use, and more land freed up to be wild. The developing world is taking the lead with the technology, designing crops to deal with the specialized problems of tropical agriculture. Meanwhile the new field of synthetic biology is bringing a generation of Green biotech hackers into existence.
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Cities, Design and Climate Change
With cities contributing upwards of 75 per cent of global carbon emissions, urban design is increasingly important when planning for climate change. This discussion examines the creative urban design solutions coming out of the world’s cities. Saskia Sassen is Robert S Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Richard Sennett is professor of sociology at LSE and NYU. Jonathon Porritti s the chair of the sustainable development commission and founder and director of Forum for the Future.
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Stewart Brand’s ‘Ecopragmatism’
In the 1960s, Stewart Brand became one of the country’s first and most famous champions of a new ecological awareness. His Whole Earth Catalog spoke to a generation of hippies and back-to-nature commune dwellers.
Now, at 70, Stewart Brand is calling on environmentalists to reframe their understanding of the problem — and solutions. It’s too late for back-to-nature, he says. Global warming is beyond that.
To survive now, Brand says, we need nuclear power, genetic engineering, giant cities. We must manage nature or lose civilization.
This hour, On Point: In the face of global warming, Stewart Brand redefines green.
http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/10/stewart-brands-ecopragmatism
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Oscar Fever
Introducing the Fireland Podcast.
Tagged with fireland joshua green allen funny humour