Lifeboat Foundation

Just need 400 billion and 1.2% of the land area.

Desertec continues in a smaller form; they’re still building power plants in Morocco to supply the local energy needs of that country. Perhaps a ground-up approach, where MENA countries increase their own solar production in the desert before becoming net exporters, will provide the solution. This project is not the first wildly ambitious scheme to provide for the world’s energy needs that has stalled; historians remember Atlantropa, a scheme to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and use it for hydroelectric power that had some interest in the 1920s.

Yet the prospect remains tantalizing. Surely, when only a tiny fraction of the Earth’s surface need be devoted to energy production to provide us with more power than we could ever dream of consuming, we won’t wreck the planet by getting that energy through dirty and dangerous means. To starry-eyed idealists, it must seem equivalent to being on a raft in a lake full of drinking water—and choosing instead to swig from a bottle of seawater in your backpack. Solar power in the world’s deserts is one of the few feasible, renewable ways of providing energy on the scale we currently demand as humans. Someday, we will make better use of the abundant energy from the sun. We’ll have to.

Continue reading “The Tantalizing Dream of Blanketing the Sahara in Solar Panels” »

SENS Research Foundation co-founder Aubrey de Grey believes in a world in which we no longer age. At a London event, he explained that he believes the first person who will live to be 1,000 has already been born, and we’ll solve this “aging problem” within 20 years.

Aging has plagued biological organisms since life first began on planet Earth and it’s an accepted and universally understood part of life. Sure, things like climate change pose significant threats to society, but aging will almost certainly still exist even if we ever manage to stop damaging our environment.

The Tesla big battery – the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery storage installation to date – was officially switched on in South Australia on Friday, a day after it had already demonstrated its value by injecting energy into the grid during the previous day’s afternoon peak.

South Australia premier Jay Weatherill, whose government has provided the subsidy for the battery to be built on the grid with the largest penetration of wind and solar anywhere in the world, described it as a “landmark moment”.

“This means that, for the first time, clean and affordable wind energy can be dispatched to the grid 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, whether the wind is blowing or not, improving system reliability,” Weatherill said.

Continue reading “Tesla big battery officially switched on in South Australia” »

Zero Mass’s ambitious plan to change water.

A team of engineers and architects from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has won the top prize for architecture in 2017’s international Mars City Design competition, which asks participants to design habitats that could one day be built on the Red Planet.

The competition, sponsored by both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), is one of many that asks participants to come up with creative solutions to the problems these agencies anticipate in the journey to Mars.

Like other contests before it, the Mars City Design competition aims to solve the problem of building livable and sustainable spaces on the Red Planet, from either the limited cargo astronauts would be able to bring with them or indigenous Martian resources. [How Will a Human Mars Base Work? NASA’s Vision in Images].

Continue reading “MIT Team Wins Mars City Design Contest for ‘Redwood Forest’ Idea” »

“Musk seems to be talking about something different, a sports car that could “hop” over obstacles. The emphasis would, presumably, still be on performance and practicality with four wheels on the ground.”

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“Former Executive Secretary to UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres has laid down a challenge to UNEP FI’s banking members, and the wider finance industry to increase their allocations to low carbon investments to avoid a 2 degrees scenario. Watch her recording which she made for participants at UNEP FI’s Europe Regional Roundtable on Sustainable Finance which took place in October 2017.”

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“Former Vice President and Chairman of Generation Investment Management, Al Gore, introduces PRI, UNEP FI and The Generation Foundation’s Fiduciary duty in the 21st century programme. The project finds that, far from being a barrier, there are positive duties to integrate environmental, social and governance factors in investment processes.”

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“Increasingly, sophisticated and costly treatment are available to ever more limited and privileged segments of the population, and this raises questions about the sustainability of health care delivery and about what might be called a systemic tendency toward growing inequality in health care,” the pope said.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Thursday urged lawmakers to ensure that health care laws protect the “common good,” decrying the fact that in many places only the privileged can afford sophisticated medical treatments.

The comments came as U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., have been debating how to overhaul the nation’s health insurance laws.

Continue reading “Pope to lawmakers: Protect all people with health care laws” »