Ok the first Docudharma green goodness diary…

India teaching the young about conservation

What’s the most effective way to teach people the value of water and other scarce resources in a world where they are becoming more and more precious? The solution: start young – or at least that’s what progressive, ecologically-minded institutions such as the Vagdevi Vilas at Munne Kolalu, near Bangalore, India, are trying to do. Other institutions such as the Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan, are also aiming to show the way toward a revolution in the way ecology and sustainability issues are addressed in education and local communities.

Begun three years ago, the school now has 2,300 students on an eight-acre property that performs as a laboratory for putting the school’s ecological education into action

Geek oil?

Yep, some boffins believe they can make what they call a bio-crude oil, using their secret Furafuel technology. Dr Steven Loffler of Forest Biosciences with Australia’s government science research body, CSIRO and his white coated mates at Monash University announced they can, via a chemical process, produce a highly stable oil. This can be readily refined to an equivalent of either petrol or diesel from waste paper, timber and crop wastes.

In fact pretty much anything that is endowed with plenty of lignocellulose. They reckon even forest thinnings, straw and household green garden waste will do the trick. An added benefit of their process is that the bio-crude oil is also PH neutral, so it can be held in storage for a while, before further processing.

You know it is bad when former oil execs are out there condemning gas guzzlers

The former chairman of Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell has called on the European Union to ban gas-guzzling cars, saying they are unnecessary, the BBC reported Monday. “Nobody needs a car that does 10-15 mpg (miles per gallon, 19-28 litres per 100 kilometres),” Mark Moody-Stuart was quoted as saying.

“We need very tough regulation saying that you can’t drive or build something less than a certain standard. You would be allowed to drive an Aston Martin — but only if it did 50-60 mpg.”

Got some old suitcases you hate? Turn them into furniture… Just a small article put the pics are cool.

GO MEXICO!!!

In honor of World Wetlands Day, Mexico added 45 wetlands to an international registry that promotes conservation and sustainable development, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. Ramsar, which now covers more than 1,699 wetlands totaling 375 million acres, was signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971 to coordinate international efforts to conserve wetlands.

Banks applying environmental standards to business loans.

Top U.S. investment banks are set to impose environmental standards that will make it harder for companies to acquire financing for coal-fired power plants, in preparation for government caps on greenhouse-gas emissions, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The report said Citigroup Inc, JP Morgan Chase & Co, and Morgan Stanley, expect the U.S. government to cap power-plant emissions in the next few years, and will thus require utilities seeking financing for plants to prove that those facilities will be viable under new regulations.

Using nanotech to round up atmospheric gases.

Chemists unveil new process for capturing and storing gas; potential spin-offs include improvements to greenhouse gas  management and fuel cell development

A new process for catching gas from the environment and holding it indefinitely in molecular-sized containers has been developed by a team of University of Calgary researchers, who say it represents a novel method of gas storage that could yield benefits for capturing, storing and transporting gases more safely and efficiently.

And finally for now because this is just cool…Have a condo, you could have a fish farm. No really….

Check it out

Big fish are moving into the big city. Recent headlines about contaminants found in the sushi of New York restaurants gives us all the more reason to love Yonathan Zohar’s city fish farms. Perfect for the basements of large condos or parked near a big city market, Zohar’s commercial fish farms solve a number of problems.

“It is clear that the consumption of seafood and fish is on the rise, because of the great health benefits… but now we are over-harvesting,” warns Zohar, director of the Center of Marine Biotechnology at the University of Maryland. “We need to change that practice and become more efficient in a way that is compatible to the earth.”

Using advanced concepts of microbiology, Zohar has entrained special microbes to live in symbiosis with the fish in order to digest their waste, 21c reports. Aerated by plastic plugs that house the microbes, the fish pools are bio-secure and contaminant free.