New "Trend" in Hybird Car

Source: Rustle the Leaf

With high gas prices straining our household budgets, hybrid car has been advocated (both by government, car manufactures and some scientists) as the “best” alternative of conventional petroleum-based vehicles for a long long time. Such advocacy is much more strengthened with these two years due to the striking oil price.

Originally, the rationale behind hybrid car development was to reduce gasoline consumption and reduce air emissions. Fuel efficiency, together with alternative energy source, should be the main concerns. However, new hybrids car model are very focus on power and speed, ther newer the hybrid car model, the faster and more powerful it is. It implies that more fuel/electricity are required pre journey with those newly innovations. It seems to me that there is a risk the hybrid car development is going out of the track.

The current hybrid car development trend is a good demonstration about the “effectiveness” of using technology to fix environmental problems. Technology is one of the solutions but never can be the only solution to deal with environmental crisis. In the hybrid car case, attitudes towards how and why people using car is the more underlying cause that we have to deal with. It is pointless to use an environmentally sounded technology or products in an unenvironmentally friendly way. Similar situation in the nuclear power or other renewable energy development. Shifting energy sources or finding alternative are not able to solve energy crisis if people keep using energy in consumptive and insensible way.

Sadly, the main stream environmental practice is still focus on techno-fixed solution. Although there are heaps of people and studies suggestion and urging about the essential of changing attitudes, behavior and culture, those discussion are still fighting only on paper.

Latest News on Hybrid Car: Scientists Back Plug-In Hybrids

A “Damn” from Space

Caption: Damning the Earth? The Keyhole Nebula NGC 3372 (Source: NASA Image Gallery)

The photo was taken in 2000 by NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team. This Nebula is about 8000 light years away.
When I saw the image first time, I found that this glowing cloud of gas, dust and stars is just like giving us their “middle finger”. Well, it is just a normal astrophysical phenomenon in the outer space. But for a raving person like me, I will say it is a damn to the Earth because those who are living on the globe is not only damaging their own planet but also dumping rubbish to the space. The world currently sends approximately 200 tons of payloads, the equivalent of two 747 freighter flights, into space annually and there is an increasing trend for such “illegal dumpling”. In US, some scientists suggested that to dump the nuclear waste into the space is the best option for nuclear waste disposal!! So, it is very reasonable why the outer space gives us their “middle finger”!!

About the Keyhole Nebula

Ecological Footprint

Caption:What we did and doing is making permanent mark on our planet. (Image Source: http://dieoff.org/Foot.gif)

Ecological Footprints is an environmental accounting tool to estimate the resources consumption, emissions and waster assimilation requirements of a defined human population or economy in terms of corresponding productive land use. A population’s ecological footprint is the total area of productive land or sea required to produce all the crops, meat, seafood, wood and fibre it consumes, to sustain its energy consumption with the biologically productive capacity of the land and sea available to population.

According to the WWF research in 2002, the Earth has about 11.4 billion hectares of productive land and sea space and it is about 1.9 hectares per person. Nevertheless, we consumed 2.3 hectares per person which was 20% above the Earth’s biological capacity. Moreover, due to the wealth gaps between nations, not every one can consume their own productive space. In 1999, the average for North American was about 9.6 hectares per capita, while it was 5.0 hectares per person in Europe and 1.9 for Asian and African. (China is 2.0 hectares per person in 2001)WWF predicted that the humanity’s footprint is likely to grow to about 220% of the earth’s capacity by the year 2050. It means that we need 2 more Earth to sustain our activities at that time!

Yet, there are some limitations to use ecological footprints to estimate the environmental degradation. One major deficiency of this tool is only CO2 emissions are included in land consumption calculation. Other emissions are assumed to be within the carrying capacity of receiving environment but the validity of such assumption is really doubtful.

By the way, I still think that ecological footprints is pretty useful in terms of education as it can help those who do not have science, engineering and environmental background to understand the broad picture of the land required to support their activities on a per capita basis, and of the enormous inequities between nations of the world in access to resources and pressures placed on the planet.

To calculate your own Ecological footprint: Earth Day Footprint
More about Ecological Footprint: Global Footprint Network

Quote of the Day

The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.

Larry Hardiman

(I tried to get more information about who is Larry Hardiman but i just failed to found more about him. What a pity!)

Light and Shadow

This is a photo I took in a cemetery when I went for a walk before. I was so impressed when I saw this view: shadows of different kind crosses form other graves projected on to a grave that with Mary’s statue during the sunset time. It just gave me a strong sense of peacefulness and holiness even though I am not a religious person. (I went to church for a whole year last year but eventually I reckon that those kind of spiritual stuffs do not fit in with my shoes.)

Greenwash

Image Source: Portland indymedia , Green Left

Last week was an extraordinary busy week for me because I had to attend a short course of Environmental Auditing (EA).

Environmental Auditing, by academic definition, is a systematic, independent and documented assessment process to evaluate the environmental performance of an organisation, a facility, a process, a service or a product against a set of pre-agreed criteria. . Performing an EA is suppose to improve environmental performance, identify risks, improve staff and public relations, ensure compliance and contribute to a defence of due diligence. However, the current EA practice seems to me that is being a tool to greenwash a company or a product. (Greenwash, by my word, is an action of giving people a false sense of eco-satisfaction and giving a positive public image to putatively environmentally unsound practices.)

The main reason for an organisation to conduct EA nowadays is to accredit with the ISO 14000 series standard to benchmark their Environmental Management Systems or “environmentally friendly” practices or products. Yet, there has some major flaw of the ISO requirement as it does not assess the real environmental performance and outcome of a company but to assess whether the company has “continual improvement” in their environmental related aspects. So, it is very possible for a company or a product accredited with ISO certification but the company is doing something harming the environment seriously. I heard a story about an environmental audit of a printing company in Australia. They did the audit in order to accredit with the ISO standards. They got the ISO certificate just by improving their printing material treatment and paper usage from “sub-standard” to “below standard. However, once the got the ISO certificate, their customers may just think that their printing activities are in “environmentally friendly” manner!! I dare to say that heaps of multinational corporations or oil companies are doing such “greenwashing” stuff. McDonald’s is a good example and their environmental management system is accredited with ISO 14001.

By the way, EA and ISO are still useful tools to get the company at least to start some improvement and awareness on their environmental performance.

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