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Miami, the Great World City, is Drowning While the Powers that Be Look Away

submitted by Albert Gomez 

       

In November 2013, a full moon and high tides led to flooding in parts of the city, including here at Alton Road and 10th Street. Photograph: Corbis

Low-lying south Florida, at the front line of climate change in the US, will be swallowed as sea levels rise. Astonishingly, the population is growing, house prices are rising and building goes on. The problem is the city is run by climate change deniers

theguardian.com - by Robin McKie - July 11, 2014

A drive through the sticky Florida heat into Alton Road in Miami Beach can be an unexpectedly awkward business. Most of the boulevard, which runs north through the heart of the resort's most opulent palm-fringed real estate, has been reduced to a single lane that is hemmed in by bollards, road-closed signs, diggers, trucks, workmen, stacks of giant concrete cylinders and mounds of grey, foul-smelling earth.

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Study: It’s Cheaper to Shut Down Wind Turbine, Than to Pay for Energy Storage

       

A new study finds that it may be better for the environment to temporarily shut down a wind turbine than to store the surplus electricity it generates. (Credit: Flickr - FranceHouseHunt.com)

dailyfusion.net - by Mark Shwartz - September 11, 2013

Conventional grid-scale batteries are fine for solar farms, but technological improvements are needed for efficient storage of wind power, Stanford scientists say. Renewable energy holds the promise of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. But there are times when solar and wind farms generate more electricity than is needed by consumers. Storing that surplus energy in batteries for later use seems like an obvious solution, but a new study from Stanford University suggests that might not always be the case.

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CLICK HERE - STUDY - The energetic implications of curtailing versus storing solar- and wind-generated electricity

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IEEE Green Tech Conference--Call for Papers Extended

NEWS from IEEE-USA, 2001 L Street, N.W., Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036-4928

IEEE Green Technologies Conference Extends Call for Papers on Current & Emerging Renewable Energy Sources & Clean Energy Technologies 

WASHINGTON (4 November 2013) -- IEEE Green Technologies Conference (GREENTECH 2014) organizers have extended the call for papers on topics related to green technology, renewable energy and clean technology to 8 November.

 Accepted papers will be presented during the sixth-annual conference (http://ieeegreentech.org/), 3-4 April 2014, at the Omni Corpus Christi (Texas) Hotel. They will be published in a conference proceedings CD and available through the digital library IEEE Xplore.

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How The Department Of Energy Is Working To Reduce The Cost Of Solar By 75 Percent

Climate Progress, Katie Valentine, October 24, 2013 

It’ll soon take just one day to get a solar permit in Chicago, thanks to a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s down from the 30-day wait that Chicagoans had to endure previously if they wanted to install small-scale solar projects on their homes or businesses. The grant will also help the city cut fees for solar panel installations by 25 percent, to $275.

Chicago’s grant is just one of $60 million worth of solar grants announced this week by the Department of Energy. The grants are housed under the Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative, a program announced in 2011 with the goal of reducing the cost of solar energy by 75 percent. The grants announced this week will go toward initiatives including increasing diversity in the solar industry, making installing solar cheaper and easier for Americans, and helping kickstart solar businesses. 

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Boston Tops Ranking of Energy-Efficient U.S. Cities

Boston scored highest among 34 citiies in the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy's new ranking of municipal energy savings efforts. Photograph by Shobeir Ansari, Flickr/Getty Images

Image: Boston scored highest among 34 citiies in the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy's new ranking of municipal energy savings efforts. Photograph by Shobeir Ansari, Flickr/Getty Images

news.nationalgeographic.com - September 17th, 2013 - Patrick J. Kiger

Though legislation to promote energy efficiency remains in a holding pattern in the U.S. Senate, there was a glimmer of good news on American cities' efforts to achieve energy savings on their own.

According to a new ranking by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, many of the nation's cities are instituting a variety of energy-saving measures such as requiring more efficient building designs, building electric vehicle charging stations, and promoting bike sharing. (See related story: "Bike-Share Schemes Shift Into High Gear.")

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Solar Crowdfunding a Solution to Energy Poverty

Installing solar panels in a village.

Image: Installing solar panels in a village.

ecowatch.com - August 28th - Justin Guay

We have two broken systems—energy and finance—which conspire to support a coal fired centralized grid that never reaches the poor while driving dangerous climate change. That means 1.3 billion people around the world won’t escape the dark, and we’ll fry the climate, unless we disrupt these systems and deploy distributed clean energy. Three months ago the Sierra Club worked on a pilot project with SunFunder to promote such a potentially disruptive solution: solar crowdfunding for the world’s poor.

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Looking Back on the Limits of Growth

      

Chart Sources: Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972) /  Linda Eckstein

by Mark Strauss - Smithsonian Magazine - April 2012

Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.

Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.

(GO TO THE SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE ARTICLE)

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

The Club of Rome

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US RIO+2.0 Conference at Stanford

If you have an interest in joining the US RIO+2.0 conference on sustainability remotely, go to:

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Resilience Alliance

There are many definitions of resilience from simple deterministic views of resilience anchored in Newtonian mechanics to far more dynamic views of resilience from a systems perspective, including insights from quantum mechanics and the sciences of complexity.  One baseline perspective of resilience sees it in terms of the viability of socio-ecological systems as the foundation for sustainability.  For those that are ready to look beyond resilience as the ability to return to the "normal state" before a disaster, take a look at:

http://www.resalliance.org/

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