A device that can transform CO2 in fuel can prove to be revolutionary. The very idea of using the sun’s rays to get rid of CO2 is great in itself – making that same process create a type of diesel fuel is even better. In theory, waste from inefficient gas cars can be used to make cheaper fuel for more efficient diesel cars, which would drive demand for more diesel cars from cheaper fuel.

The researchers housed a 2-centimetre-square section of material bristling with the tubes inside a metal chamber with a quartz window. They then pumped in a mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapour and placed it in sunlight for three hours.

The energy provided by the sunlight transformed the carbon dioxide and water vapour into methane and related organic compounds, such as ethane and propane, at rates as high as 160 microlitres an hour per gram of nanotubes. This is 20 times higher than published results achieved using any previous method, but still too low to be immediately practical.

If the reaction is halted early the device produces a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen known as syngas, which can be converted into diesel.

Cars and car infrastructure cover North America like a bad rash. Car advocates like to argue that this is necessary and that we can’t possibly get rid of this rash because all the cars will become immobile and our economy will crash. The bad news is that the economy crashes even if you love cars, on the other hand, the really good news is that if you remove highways you can improve the economy by revitalizing local neighbourhoods.

Here’s a look at how tearing down highways is a good thing.

Though our transportation planners still operate from the orthodoxy that the best way to untangle traffic is to build more roads, doing so actually proves counterproductive in some cases. There is even a mathematical theorem to explain why: “The Braess Paradox” (which sounds rather like a Robert Ludlum title) established that the addition of extra capacity to a road network often results in increased congestion and longer travel times. The reason has to do with the complex effects of individual drivers all trying to optimize their routes. The Braess paradox is not just an arcane bit of theory either – it plays frequently in real world situation.

Likewise, there is the phenomenon of induced demand – or the “if you build it, they will come” effect. In short, fancy new roads encourage people to drive more miles, as well as seeding new sprawl-style development that shifts new users onto them.

Of course, improving congestion is not the main reason why a city would want to knock down a poorly planned highway–the reasons for that are plentiful, and might include improving citizen health, restoring the local environment, and energizing the regional economy. More efficient traffic flow is just a wonderful side benefit.

Sound dubious? Here are several examples of how three cities (and their drivers) have fared better after highways that should never have been built in the first place were taken down.

I’m not too hopeful in the use hydrogen as a replacement for oil that burns and kills our planet, but there might be hope in the future. Apparently urine can be turned into hydrogen.

Now, as Ariel Schwartz of Fast Company reports, Ohio University researcher Geraldine Botte has come up with a nickel-based electrode to oxidize (NH2)2CO, otherwise known as urea, the major component of animal urine.

Because urea’s four hydrogen atoms are less tightly bound to nitrogen than the hydrogen bound to oxygen in water molecules, it takes less energy to break them apart: Just 0.037 Volts need to be applied across the cell, against the 1.23 Volts needed to break down water.

This means the energy balance of urea-derived hydrogen could be considerably better from start to finish than projections for other so-called pathways for obtaining the highly combustible gas.

Given the early stage of this research, we’re betting that the Honda and General Motors fuel-cell researchers aren’t exactly rushing down to do deals with their local sewage plants.

Mike sent in a note letting us know that the campers at Camp Wenonah are planting trees to make the world a little better. The trees were donated from the business Love Trees which aims to, obviously, plant more trees.

From Mike:

Each camper, POLARIS, and WCIT is planting a tree at Camp this Period thanks to donations from LoveTrees. Neat little idea – they donated 2000 trees to the Canadian Camping Association

More on Love Trees:

Love Trees is a business built on giving.

• giving kids a Wish Tree as an educational tool to as many children as we can;
• giving businesses and individuals a chance to help kids and the planet by purchasing tree planting certificates;
• giving the planet more trees;
• giving environmental charities a portion of every sale

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Love Trees manages a powerful and unique educational tree planting program. We sell Wish Tree Certificates to clients worldwide. Love Trees then donates and distributes tree seedlings to schools and kid’s organizations in North America and Africa so kids can have a Wish Tree to plant and make a wish for the planet. It’s a great way to learn about the environment – and help make the world a better place!

The New Economics Foundation has declared Costa Rica as the happiest place on earth.

The New Economics Foundation looked at 143 countries that are home to 99 percent of the world’s population and devised an equation that weighed life expectancy and people’s happiness against their environmental impact.

By that formula, Costa Rica is the happiest, greenest country in the world, just ahead of the Dominican Republic.

Latin American countries did well in the survey, occupying nine of the top 10 spots.

Australia scored third place, but other major Western nations did poorly, with Britain coming in at 74th place and the United States at 114th.

The New Economics Foundation’s measurements found Costa Ricans have a life expectancy of 78.5 years, and 85 percent of the country’s residents say they are happy and satisfied with their lives.

The United Nations and China have started a program this summer that will employ 1,000 youth to talk about the environment. The youth will teach people how to be more conscious about the environment and what individuals can do to protect it.

Through a new training program called “One Thousand Environment-Friendly Youth Ambassadors Action,” eight Chinese ministries, along with the UNDP, hope to educate 1 million people about the actions they can take to preserve the environment and limit climate change.
The program started last month with training for 1,000 high school and college students in Beijing (north China), Shanghai (east), Xi’an (northwest), Chengdu (southwest) and Guangzhou (south).
Each young ambassador is expected to train another 1,000 people, hence one million people around the nation will be informed of professional environmental knowledge. The program is sponsored by the national Center for Environmental Education and Communication, China Environmental Awareness Program, Ministry of Environmental Protection, UNDP and Johnson Controls.

Here’s a novel idea: move all your belongings only using a bike. You can do it regardless of where you live, but in Montreal you can hire someone else to do the hard work for you. Transport Myette is a new moving company in Montreal that uses only bikes.

Myette boasts that his fledgling moving company, Transport Myette, will tow just about anything that can be stacked on his modified bike trailers.
“Pretty much anything, except for pianos, of course,” he said Tuesday at a job, where he and two of his employees carefully pieced together – with the help of duct tape and straps – intricate piles of large household items, including a mattress, a stove and a fridge onto the flatbeds.
The Montreal resident’s inspiration to launch the bike-moving business came while surfing the Internet last summer. Myette stumbled upon the website of an American company that sold mini-trailers.
Up until then, he had been working for a moving company that used a truck.
“I’ve always been a cyclist, I’ve always cared about the environment, so it just seemed natural to me to combine the two,” said Myette, who bought his first custom trailer last fall for $1,000 and now owns three.
Workers pull the trailers with standard mountain bikes equipped with powerful hydraulic disc brakes – for the steep descents.
Outside of peak periods, Transport Myette charges just $25 an hour for one worker with a trailer, $35 an hour for two workers and two trailers and $50 an hour for three of each.

The Big Dig was a transportation infrastructure project for Boston that built a giant underground tunnel for automobiles. An architecture firm got their hands on left over building materials from the insanely expensive underground highway and decided to build a house.

As a prototype building that demonstrates how infrastructural refuse can be salvaged and reused, the structural system for this 3,400sf house is comprised of steel and concrete discarded from Boston’s Big Dig utilizing over 600,000 lbs of salvaged materials from elevated portions of the now dismantled I-93 highway. Planning the reassembly of the materials in a similar way one would systematically compose with a pre-fab system, subtle spatial arrangements are created from the large-scale highway components.

The African country of Malawi is expanding a successful program that gave out free drugs to fight AIDs. The country is founding a new company to make the drugs for their people and to export drugs to their neighbours.

“Some 250,000 Malawians are receiving ARVs. We are doing well because many of these could have died by now,” Mutharika said at an AIDS candlelight memorial on the outskirts of the commercial capital Blantyre.

Describing the drugs roll-out as a “success story”, Mutharika said Malawi would establish a local company to “produce ARVs locally and export extra drugs to neighbouring countries”.

You may already now that Sears Tower is getting a huge energy retrofit costing $350 million because it’s got a lot of media attention. Still, it’s really good to see old office towers see the benefit of spending a lot of money on increasing efficiency of their buildings.

Operators of the nearly 36-year-old, 110-story building say they have cut annual electricity consumption by 34 percent since 1989 and that increased energy efficiency has reduced annual CO2 emissions by 51 pounds since 1984.
Proposed renewables at Sears Tower.
Their five-year renovation plan is expected to bring base building electricity consumption down by 80 percent. The reduction is estimated to be equivalent to 68 million kilowatt hours or 150,000 barrels of oil a year. The retrofit project is also expected to slash annual water consumption by 24 million gallons. And the work is expected to create 3,600 jobs.

The improvements, detailed on the Sears Tower website, are to involve replacing and glazing the 16,000 single-pane windows; and upgrading boilers, elevators, escalators, lighting restroom fixtures and water management systems.
Sears Tower and hotel.
Wind turbines, solar panels to heat water for the building and green roofs are to be installed on various terraces and tiered roofs of the complex.