A test done was done on a 545 mile London to Geneva stretch with a BMW 520d diesel sedan and a Toyota Prius and surprisingly, the BMW got 41.9 mpg while the Prius only got 40.1 mpg. Everyone knows the Prius as being the ecofriendly Hybrid car but no one would ever expect a BMW to perform better when it also weighs 500 lbs more and claims to have 66 mpg. The story is on the Sunday Times of London where there is also a video. Both cars attempted to make the trip on one tank of gas but the Prius ran out due to a smaller tank size. Diesel cars are popular in Europe but it is quite the opposite in the US. BMW however iss actually planning to sell diesel cars in the US starting in 2008 with the X5 3.0d and eventually the 530d and 535d. We will see if the diesel versions catch on since there are such strict regulations here.
So it looks like the company Planktos has gone under due to lack of funding. I talked about Planktos here as a bay area company that was dedicated to ecosystem restoration. Below is the letter that is now on the Planktos website. Another similar bay area company called Climos, however, has just announced series A funding. The goal of both companies are to stimulate the growth of plankton in the sea by planting iron compounds. The Plankton would in turn help get rid of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The company Climos plans on making money by selling carbon credits which was pretty similar to what Planktos did. We will have to see whether another company doing the same exact thing will have a better outcome.
Planktos Indefinitely Postpones Ocean Iron Fertilization Project
February 13, 2008
The board of directors of Planktos Corp. (Pink Sheets:PLKT) today announced that the company has been forced to indefinitely postpone its ocean fertilization efforts once intended to restore marine plant life and generate ecological offsets for the global carbon credit market.
A highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders has provoked widespread opposition to plankton restoration in the environmental world, and has caused the company to encounter serious difficulty in raising the capital needed to fund its planned series of ocean research trials.
The company’s wholly-owned research vessel Weatherbird II and crew have been called back from the Portuguese island of Madeira where the ship had been docked awaiting the resources necessary to initiate and monitor its first research plankton blooms.
Management has also radically downsized the company’s staffing while the board of directors has formed a new committee to explore all options currently available. Options include a possible re-launch of planned marine operations, pending additional financing or new partnerships, as well as the possible pursuit of other promising business opportunities in the environmental sphere.
The board of directors continues to believe in the urgent ecological necessity of its ocean restoration plans and the scientific speciousness of objections voiced to date. However, ideological hostility to and misrepresentations of this work will continue to stymie progress until the true gravity of our climatic and ocean crises is more widely understood.
Planktos is a public company; its common shares trade on the Pink Sheets LLC. under the ticker symbol .PLKT..
Solar reflecting mirrors that currently power the village. The heat creates hot air which rises in the tower to spin a turbine which then generates electricity.
A new firm called Torresol Energy is planning on building two of these a year with a goal of generating 320 megawatts over the next 5 years and 1,000 megawatts in 10 years.
Yahoo! founder, Jerry Yang and his wife Akiko Yamazaki (Stanford alum) have contributed $50 million towards the construction of a new science building for environment and sustainability. The building will be known as Y2E2 or Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building. The 166,000 square ft building will be made with recycled steel and other green materials and the building will use 56% less energy and 90% less water than another building with a comparable size. The building will also draw in cool air during the summer and insulate the interior from the cold during winters. The exterior walls have windows that open and close automatically using heat sensors to monitor the temperature insdie the building. It will also take advantage of natural lighting with light collecting spaces called atrias, and light shelf panels that open horizontally to catch sunlight but shade heat from the sun.
In addtion, Jerry Yang and his wife also donated $5 million to a new Learning and Knowledge Center for the School of Medicine and another $20 million for future projects at Stanford. There is never too much news about what Yahoo does for the environment so I can say now that Jerry donated a sh!#load of money to build Stanford’s new ecofriendly environmental building.
The organizers of SF Beta, Room Full of People Inc. and Steve Newcomb (Powerset founder and blogger) brought to Minna Gallery a SF Beta spinoff called SF Green to appeal to the recent Green movement. SF Green is also supported by the California Clean Tech Open. Being the first event, it drew a very successful crowd of 300+ in attendance. It is a great way to bring together people who are interested in learning more about being green and it never hurts to have another Green Mixer. This is definitely not the first Green mixer in the bay area as there are already quite a few. There are several Green Drinks monthly mixers all over the bay area as well as my favorite, EcoTuesdays. (blog coverage of the most recent EcoTuesday event).
Unfortunately, the demos were not too exciting as there were only two booths from Syncromatics and Enverity. Syncromatics is a company that provides real-time bus tracking systems and is currently providing service to several Universities and demoed the current UCSD service. Enverity provides web-enabled business-management software as well as health and safety solutions for corporations. Hopefully, future SF Green mixers will have more demos and presentations.
Organizers of SF Green, Christina Perry, Cassie Philipps, and Steve Newcomb
Organizers of EcoTuesday, Oren Jaffe and Nikki Martinez
