Earth Hour

I hear that 4000 cities took part in Earth Hour this year.


Even London's Big Ben had it's lights turned off for the event.
[comparison photos]

3rd Degree

With many people anlready conceding that the world will warm by 2 degrees (which is more dangerous than it sounds) the title of Murray Hogarth's book refers to what we can do from stopping it going further.


He talks a fair bit about politics and business, but also about what we as individuals can do. It appears that the trickiest thing is a change of attitude. Sourcing the world's electricity from renewables is already do-able. Hogarth sees the challenge in doing things like "putting quality of life above dollars" and "taking our values shopping".

110% Solar

I read today that the installations of solar panels in 2008 were up 110% on the previous year.

Thanks mainly to European countries, the yearly installations totalled 5.95 gigawatts (5,950,000,000 Watts). By comparison a typical rooftop system is about 1000 Watts.

Extreme Conditions

Saw this pic on the ACF website. One of those cases where a picture really does tell a thousand words.

ACT starts FIT

Over the weekend the ACT's gross feed-in tariff came into effect. This means households that generate solar power into the grid get paid 50c per kilowatt hour produced (3.88 times the normal electricity rate).

Importantly, it applies to all the solar power produced, unlike the situation here in Queensland.

The Greens, in particular Ronan Lee, have been promoting such a feed-in tariff for Queensland. You can download a copy of his petition.

"Clean" Coal

Reality and the Coen brothers have teamed up to produce the following spoof ad about "clean" coal.


In other news, I see that even Malcolm Turnbull has admitted that clean coal doesn't actually exist.