I have been telling you for years now that to prepare for climate change and reduce its impact on Earth we are going to need new technologies that solve problems and meet needs without producing pollution problems. Here is an another example of what I mean. I have seen an increasing number of such reports, and I see this as the good news we need to prepare for our future.
Manufactured glass bricks assembled together in a wall configuration at MIT’s Killian Court. Credit: Ethan Townsend
The technology for 3D printing has come a long way from printing product prototypes from acrylic resin. In recent years, researchers have found ways to use algae as a bioplastic, pea protein to create sustainable plant-based salmon, and even everyday foods like peanut butter and banana to make cheesecake. Even buildings have been made using 3D-printed concrete.
Now, researchers have found a way to reuse old glass by 3D printing it into strong, durable and reusable building bricks that could help lower the embodied carbon in buildings.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), manufacturing construction materials makes up about 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, highlighting a need for more sustainable building materials.
With advancements in 3D printing, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are exploring ways to reduce these emissions by developing reusable construction products with 3D printers that can build blocks from materials such as recycled glass.
Inspired by the circular potential of construction, the engineers used 3D printing technology from […]
A reader wrote and asked if I would find something fact-based that explained how global warming is calculated. That is an important question so I did just that, and here is the report. One of the takeaways after reading this is stop using cans of pressurized aerosols.
We know it’s getting hotter, but just how hot will it get? Credit: The Burtons / Getty
With so many extraordinary heat waves, floods, and storms piling up, one may wonder: Just how much warmer is the Earth going to get?
The answer hinges on two main factors: how much more heat-trapping gasses humans will emit, and how the planet will respond.
Whether humanity continues to dawdle or actually takes aggressive action to cut emissions is the biggest source of uncertainty in the future of the planet since the bulk of the warming we’re experiencing is due to the waste gasses from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’s climate science team, has chalked out five scenarios with different levels of action needed from global leaders to curb climate change to plug into its climate models.
On the other side of the equation, scientists have been working […]
I wouldn’t hire Trump to cut my grass, let alone consider him a viable candidate for the Presidency. I don’t see how anyone can vote for him, though I know millions will. It’s not just that he is a scammer, a rapist, a felon, and a traitor; he is clearly mentally deranged.
Credit: Fox Nation
Former President Donald Trump asserted that the current U.S. education system was “mostly transgender” instead of “reading, writing, arithmetic.”
During an interview on Fox Nation with host Kellyanne Conway, Trump defended his plan to disband the U.S. Department of Education.
“We’re going to move education back to the states where they can run their educational programs, and they’ll do great,” he promised. “And you take states like Iowa and Idaho and so many, they’ll have great education.”
“But we have to get out of this Washington thing. Half the buildings in Washington are occupied by education,” he continued. “And you’ll have to get through it. But we’re going to move it back to the states so that all these states, Indiana, you know, the states that are really well run, they’re going to have phenomenal education.”
“We’ll have like one person and a secretary sitting there to make sure they have English.”
Trump then complained about the current school curriculum.
Daniela Bleil, Contributing Writer - The New Republic
Stephan:
If you are like Ronlyn and myself you recycle everything that can be recycled but, as I have just recentkly learned, what is actually happening with the stuff we recycle, and that you recycle. There is new research showing the whole thing is another corporate scam. To quote this report, which cites two books that report deep research on the subject, “Rather than being a virtuous act or an effective practice, recycling has been a feature of destructive systems that exploit labor and natural resources. We need a better way to think about our trash, and even more so, our consumption.” I am going to see if I can find an ethical legitimate approach to recycling
A ragpicker collects recyclable materials at a landfill in Sidoarjo, Indonesia, in 2022. Credit: Juni Kriswanto / AFP
“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, invoking the ragpicker, a new type on the streets of his native nineteenth-century Paris. “Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot, he catalogs and collects.”
Buried in Baudelaire’s descriptions of ragpickers are processes that historians have recently laid bare. With industrialization came the rise of consumer culture, and with consumer culture came the rise of disposal culture. Add unfettered fossil fuel use and the invention of single-use plastics and we arrive at the ragpickers of today: people in Indonesia climbing mountains of trash, or children scavenging for survival in the slums of Delhi or Manila or northeastern Brazil. Consumer lifestyles in high-income […]
Here is an interesting bit of good news, I doubt many anticipated. Good news that will help the transition out of the carbon era.
The power connections at the Sherco Coal Power Plant in Becker, MN. Credit: MPCA.
Researchers at the Berkeley National Labs have determined that oil, coal, and gas power plants still have a major role to play in America’s energy economy—as electrical sockets.
There are years of red tape needed for renewable energy projects to connect fully with the grid, but because coal and gas plants already negotiated that process long ago, one of their best uses for Americans in the future will be to act like a home electrical socket that the renewables could “plug” into.
In a feature piece on CNN, “experts” say that there are more clean energy projects waiting to be connected to the grid than there is power—from all sources—circulating in the grid right now; a startling statement considering the billions in borrowed money being spent to transition the US electrical grid to renewable sources.
Described by CNN as “seven years of bureaucracy and red tape,” attaching new solar and wind […]
The whole insurance industry is in a kind of self-created crisis that is going to change the lives of tens of millions of home owners and building owners. Here is the reality that most of the media isn’t even paying any attention to.
In this aerial view, vehicles drive through a flooded street as Hurricane Helene churns offshore on September 26, 2024, in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty
Hurricane Helene slammed into the Florida coast on Thursday night, bringing pounding rains and “fierce, whipping winds that sounded like jet engines revving,” according to the New York Times. As it ripped through Florida and moved into Georgia, more than 2 million people lost power. While hurricanes are no stranger to the Gulf Coast, climate change has intensified their destructive impacts, and Hurricane Helene is the just the latest case of the extreme weather events that are rising in their frequency and ferocity.
Over the past year, the corporate media, from The Washington Post to theFinancial Times, have covered a rising crisis for the insurance industry that’s being caused by extreme weather events like Hurricane Helene: the growing risks and skyrocketing costs of insuring homes and other properties across wide swaths of the U.S.. The popular New York Times podcast “
