The U.S. may have some of the cheapest electricity prices in the world but the system is utterly slow at responding to downed power lines and quickly restoring power. Talking with Japanese colleagues of mine, they can’t believe the power actually goes out FOR DAYS in America. These outages are not confined to the summer heat. While living in St. Louis, Eric was once out of power for six days in the middle of winter due to an ice storm. That is unheard of in Japan, where electricity rates are high but responses to outages are quick and efficient and the power is ever only out for a few hours at most.

Perhaps solar panels and Bloom Boxes will one day allow Americans to have a green option for backing up their grid connected electricity supplies or allow for completely independent power generation. Until then, urban camping will be the norm until the power comes back on after violent storms.

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Detailed information and answers about the car that can go 40 miles without using gasoline can be found here.

At first the Volt will only be available in California, New York, Michigan, Connecticut, Texas, New Jersey, and the Washington D.C. area before rolling out nationwide. GetMyVolt.com will let you know which nearby dealers have the car and can start processing your application today.

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Scientific interest in the new map goes far beyond curiosities about tree height. The map has implications for an ongoing effort to estimate the amount of carbon tied up in Earth’s forests and for explaining what sops up 2 billion tons of “missing” carbon each year. Humans release about 7 billion tons of carbon annually, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide. Of that, 3 billion tons end up in the atmosphere and 2 billion tons in the ocean. It’s unclear where the last two billion tons of carbon go, though scientists suspect forests capture and store much of it as biomass through photosynthesis. There are hints that young forests absorb more carbon than older ones, as do wetter ones, and that large amounts of carbon end up in certain types of soil. But ecologists have only begun to pin down the details as they try to figure out whether the planet can continue to soak up so much of our annual carbon emissions and whether it will continue to do so as climate changes. “What we really want is a map of above-ground biomass, and the height map helps get us there,” said Richard Houghton, an expert in terrestrial ecosystem science and the deputy director of the Woods Hole Research Center. One of Lefsky’s colleagues, Sassan Saatchi of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has already started combining the height data with forest inventories to create biomass maps for tropical forests. Complete global inventories of biomass, when they exist, can improve climate models and guide policymakers on how to minimize the human impact on climate with carbon offsets.

The world’s tallest forests are found to be clustered in North America’s Pacific Northwest and areas of Southeast Asia. Shorter forests are found in Eurasia and Northern Canada. LIDAR laser technology measured forest canopy height by shooting pulses of light at the surface. Observing how much longer it takes for light to bounce back from the ground surface than from the top of the canopy yields the forest height. LIDAR can penetrate the top layer of forest canopy, providing a full snapshot of the vertical structure of the forest. It would have taken weeks of counting and measuring tree trunks in the field to yield the same data LIDAR can capture in seconds. The map was based “on data from more than 250 million laser pulses collected during a seven year period.” In order to then create the global map of forest height map, LIDAR data was combined with information from a satellite instrument called a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) that senses a much broader swath of Earth’s surface.

The next generation LIDAR measurements of forests  will improve the resolution of the map considerably. Those measurement “could come from NASA’s Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice (DESDynI) satellite,” which is proposed for several years in the future.

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• save 121 pounds of paper, 1,159 gallons of wastewater and 45 gallons of gas annually.
• Getting rid of paper paychecks would translate to a $57,000 annual savings for a company employing 300 people.
• PayItGreen shows that 72% of employees in the US receive their paycheck via direct deposit
• Only 40% of small business employees use it, as compared to 86% of employees working for large companies.
• PayItGreen claims that 55% of employees using direct deposit find its environmental benefits motivating. But the convenience of not having to cash a check seems to be a larger motivating factor.

Sources: Payitgreen and TechCrunch

Unfortunately, there have been many other environmental disasters in the past and there will, of course, be more to come. Using the current Deepwater Horizon accident as a rallying point, explore.org, “a non-profit multi-media organization, has recently created the the explore/HATCH Short Film Award to be given to a filmmaker who best tells the story of a remarkable individual’s actions in response to a devastating environmental event.” The group has been written about on 2nd Green Revolution before.

Submissions are due August 25th with the winner receiving a full expense trip to the HATCHfest Bozeman in September. Full submission guidelines can be found at http://explore.org/about/explorehatch_award/

If you or anyone you know is dabbling in film, this would be a great way to showcase their talents while highlighting the actions of individuals that have made a difference.

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