It’s a libertarians-gone-wild type of thinking that can make for juicy news-hour soundbites, and sells well with a segment of the voting public. But it makes no sense in today’s increasingly energy-constrained reality.

Just as nonsensical, though, is the idea of trying to legislate into reality something that isn’t currently feasible.

Like, oh, say, mandating the use of a fuel that doesn’t yet exist as a commercially available product.

But that’s exactly what the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing with fuel suppliers that aren’t meeting federal requirements to blend gasoline and diesel with cellulosic ethanol, a next-generation biofuel with great promise in theory but essentially unobtainable in meaningful amounts in reality. And, as the New York Times article on this silliness reports, the fines being assessed for failing to use cellulosic ethanol in 2011 will be even higher this year … with no commercial supplies of the biofuel in sight.

The explanation from the EPA for why this is so is even more Orwellian. The cellulosic ethanol blending mandates make sense, an agency spokesperson is quoted as saying, because, they aim to “avoid a situation where real cellulosic biofuel production exceeds the mandated volume.”

Huh?

That makes as much sense as setting quotas for unobtainium.

Jordan Diplock and Darryl Plecas, researchers at Canada’s University of the Fraser Valley, conducted a study that found illegal growing operations in British Columbia alone might be responsible for up to $154 million a year worth of stolen electricity from the utility BC Hydro.

In addition to lost electricity supplies and revenues, marijuana-growing operations pose other threats to the energy infrastructure, the researchers report:

“Indoor growing operations consume much more electricity than normal residential homes as they run multiple large wattage lights and other equipment (Garis and Plecas, 2007). This increased need for electric power means that the typical grow operation exhibits electrical hazards that can increase the risk of fire and other harms (Garis, 2008). The many electrical hazards combine to make indoor marihuana growing operations at least five times more likely to catch fire than normal residential homes (Plecas et
al., 2009).”

That’s one justification for a smarter energy grid that we’ve never heard from IBM, Siemens or the IEEE.

“That’s weird”, you say, “That’s a bit leftfield for Greenbang.” Well the truth is that we have a lot of companies pitching us luxury products. And from our last round of reader research, it’s something you said you’d like to hear more about to help with informed buying decisions.

So from now on we’ll be regularly featuring some of the best luxury green goods going. Think of it as your weekend section

The trainers

To give them a run for their money, I walked the trainers over a ten-mile hike – a true test for Timberland’s Mountain Athletics range. I love my usual walking boots, so I was skeptical anything could do a better job. But I was pleasantly surprised.

The Run-offs feel more like running trainers than heavy mountain shoes, so I did wonder how they would be on trail – for which they’ve been designed.

My feet were well cushioned by the supportive arches. I’ve got flat feet, so I have to wear very strong shoes for running, but these did the job very well. So well that it was easier to place my feet carefully instead of clumsily plodding as I usually do in my boots. Apparently this is something to do with the compressed midsole material that’s built for lightweight cushioning,

The shoe is a snug fit, so you get a lot of stability when walking without all the weight of a boot. I didn’t get any blisters either (and I usually do) because they were very comfortable.

I go through shoes very fast. Often after a week or so, I can already see where they are wearing. I walked with a 15Kg pack and had to jump and climb up and down all kinds of terrain (including bogs and streams) and they stood up to the test.

Claire (my other half, who tried the women’s version) liked the fact they looked good with a pair of jeans. The womens’ version is slightly less chunky than the men’s but have all the same features. The silver/grey colour is deceptively cunning – as they are super-reflective in the dark, and certainly more fashionable than the local ramblers’ club are wearing this year.

From a sustainability perspective, the real benefit of the run-off is that they are made from recycled materials, particularly rubber (47%) – and to a very high level. The PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) lining is 50% recycled and the laces are 100%.

The verdict:

The Run-Off is a strong trainer that Timberland has designed well. You can run, walk, climb and mess around in these shoes while looking every bit the hiker about town. As always you can find out more and view the range at the official site.

Could it be? Is our species, as the subhead on the article put it, “too stupid” to prevent climate change? Considering some of the news developments from just the past few days, the question might have some merit. While not likely to be signs of the apocalypse or TEOTWAWKI, stories like these make us wonder if the planet has struck peak sanity:

• US Republican Lindsey Graham, historically one of the GOP’s good guys when it comes to supporting clean energy, this week warned that a climate bill might not be in the cards if President Barack Obama names a “controversial” (to Republicans’ eyes, anyway) nominee to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court. Nothing like holding the planet hostage for politics, yes?
• And then there’s the uproar that’s followed US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s announcement that the government will now give equal consideration to bicycles and pedestrians in transport planning and policy decisions. While cycling aficionados cheered, industry howled with cries of “dumb” and “nonsensical.” One Congressman even went so far as to ask whether there was still mandatory drug testing at the Transportation Department. Really? Heaven forfend we should give any weight to low-carbon means of getting around in the future.
• Finally, there’s the mind-blowing conclusion from Standard & Poor’s that the Massey Energy coal mine tragedy that killed 29 miners will be “immaterial” in terms of financial impact to the company. In delivering that assessment, the S&P also upgraded its opinion on the firm from “hold” to “buy.”

If that last tidbit doesn’t make the case for a shift to cleaner — and safer — energy, along with a new standard for corporate social responsibility, we can’t imagine what would.

From IndianExpress.com:

“Once a flashpoint in Indo-Bangla ties, the New Moore island or Purbasha in the Bay of Bengal, which Dhaka called the South Talpatti, has ceased to exist, consumed by hungry tides and the rising sea.

This was announced on Monday by the School of Oceanographic Studies, Jadavpur University after it scrutinised recent satellite maps of the region.”

Researchers in the UK published a study this week that shows insights into how the brain behaves when people asked to make a judgment are given two options: stick with a default response (ie, do nothing) or take action to indicate a different response. Their finding: the more difficult the decision, the more likely it was that subjects would stick to the status quo.

“This suboptimal choice behaviour implies that the status quo bias may disconnect people’s preferences from their subsequent choices,” write University College London researchers Stephen M. Fleming, Raymond J. Dolan and Charlotte L. Thomas, who is also on the faculty of medicine and dentistry at the University of Bristol. They add such a bias explains why “employees often accept a company’s default retirement plan even if it leads to poorer investments” and why “consumers become impassive in the face of overwhelming choice.”

Considering the difficulty of reaching a global decision on fighting climate change effectively, is it any wonder that we’re still pretty much stuck with the status quo?

The tendency to “go with the flow” might also help explain why a new Gallup poll finds people in the US are not only less worried about environmental issues than they were last year, but are the least worried about most of them in any time since the poll first began 20 years ago. With more than ever to worry about — from climate change, peak oil and resource depletion to unemployment, failed markets and shifting economic powers — it seems we become increasingly likely to stick our fingers in our ears and go, “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.”

It’s not as ridiculous a question as you might think. In fact, a team of Japanese and British researchers have found that the lowly Physarum polycephalum — described as a “gelatinous fungus-like mould” (yum) — can create a complex and efficient network that mimics the structure of the railway lines that lead out in all directions from Tokyo.

This is no odd and useless, though fascinating, discovery either. By developing a formula that describes how the slime mould builds its fungal freeway, scientists could provide insights into how to build more efficient and less expensive networks for computing and mobile communications.

Here’s how the research team uncovered the mould’s amazing road-building capabilities: starting with a wet surface for growing Physarum, they placed a small amount of the mould at a spot that corresponded with the location of Tokyo. (How the idea for this experiment arose in the first place has to make for a strange story in and of itself, we think.) They then put a few oat flakes — a favourite food of mould, apparently — at various spots corresponding with the locations of other big cities in Japan, then waited for the mould to find a way to reach its dinner.

Lo and behold, the mould started spreading out in an organised way, colonising each spot of oat flakes it came upon, then branching out to other spots to eventually create a network that resembled Tokyo’s train network in efficiency.

“Some organisms grow in the form of an interconnected network as part of their normal foraging strategy to discover and exploit new resources,” writes researcher Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University. This particular type of mould, he went on to say, “”can find the shortest path through a maze or connect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner with low total length yet short average minimum distance between pairs of food sources, with a high degree of fault tolerance to accidental disconnection.”

In other words, that’s one savvy mould.

Putting the mould’s behaviour into a formula humans can reproduce could improve a variety of our network technologies, according to Wolfgang Marwan of Otto von Guericke University.

“The model captures the basic dynamics of network adaptability through interaction of local rules, and produces networks with properties comparable to or better than those of real-world infrastructure networks … ,” Marwan writes in an article accompanying the new study. The work of Tero and colleagues provides a fascinating and convincing example that biologically inspired pure mathematical models can lead to completely new, highly efficient algorithms able to provide technical systems with essential features of living systems, for applications in such areas as computer science.”

Where to begin on the lameness of this comment? First, no one’s really seriously talking about outlawing geoengineering at the moment– climate scientists like Ken Caldeira merely say we need to study it further, just in case we need to use it. There is no Montreal Protocol-type global agreement on banning, or even phasing out, geoengineering strategies.

Second: Really? You really want to put the climate/geoengineering debate on the same plane as that for gun laws? (The “When something is outlawed … ” phrase is most commonly used by pro-gun people.) Not constructive by a long shot.

And, finally, isn’t it all just a bit too snarky? Can’t we discuss these issues like grownups?

The Chicago Tribune reports that the city’s success in becoming a leader in green roof has set off a, pardon the expression, turf war between roofers and landscapers.

According to Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, Chicago stands at the top of the list of North American cities in terms of green roof installations, with 534,507 square feet of rooftop landscaping in place as of 2008.

The city’s roofer-landscaper flap apparently began this past April, when a landscaping firm began installing an 80,000-plus-square-foot green roof on a residential-retail project. Arguing that it takes no special horticultural skill to put down ready-to-plant trays of greenery, the local roofers’ union filed an objection with the city and county Building & Construction Trades Council.

The Tribune article notes that the prevailing wage for landscapers is nearly half that for roofers.

The dispute eventually ended up before the National Labour Relations Board, which decided in favour of the landscapers, pointing out that they are no less experienced but are more efficient at installing green roofs.

The research shows that air pollution levels change dramatically within small geographical areas dependent on wind patterns, the location of traffic queues and the position and shapes of the surrounding buildings. For example, pollution hotspots tend to accumulate on the leeward side of the street (the sheltered side) in relation to the wind’s direction at roof-top level.

The study also revealed that carbon monoxide levels are up to four times lower in parallel side streets compared to the main road.

The research team monitored traffic flow and carbon monoxide (CO) levels over an eight-week period at one of the busiest junctions in the UK — the intersection between Marylebone Road and Gloucester Place in West London.

“CO levels were highly variable over remarkably short distances,” said Alison Tomlin, professor of environmental modelling at Leeds’ faculty of engineering. “As you’d expect, the junction itself showed high levels caused by queuing traffic, but with some wind patterns these hotspots moved further down the street. However, the leeward side of the street had consistently higher concentrations of carbon monoxide than the windward side. The same trends would be expected for other traffic-related pollutants such as ultr-fine particles and nitrogen dioxide.”

“Most people would expect pollution levels to be slightly lower away from the main body of traffic, but our figures show a very significant difference,” Tomlin said. “Pollution can be trapped within the street where it is emitted by recirculating winds. If it escapes to above roof-top level, it doesn’t tend to be mixed back into neighbouring streets very strongly. It would be worth cyclists and pedestrians rethinking their regular routes, as they can massively reduce their pollution exposure by moving just one street away from the main traffic thoroughfares.”

The research also has significance for local authorities and other bodies monitoring air quality levels in urban areas. Currently, every city has a number of sites monitoring pollution levels to ensure compliance with EU standards, but Tomlin said these may need to be looked at in relation to the other factors identified by the research to ensure an accurate spatial picture.

“Monitoring stations tend to be sited in what are expected to be pollution hotspots, but our research has shown that hotspots move depending on meteorological conditions, particularly wind direction,” Tomlin said. “We need to develop models which take these factors into account, so that the data from monitoring sites can be accurately analysed to provide a true reflection of air quality across the whole of an urban area.”

The research was published in the latest issue of Atmospheric Environment and was been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).