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Unlocked: GREENAROO [was: yay! my new job!!] [May. 31st, 2006|08:10 am]
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[this was actually posted April 1st, but was "friends-only" because the PR had yet to be made P, now the word is out! Bonnaroo is going green (and this year is only the first step, i can assure you of that! So, I figured I might as well let the P see the post. I'm going to have a ne wupdate very soon, and then commencing in about 12 days, I'll be reporting from the frontlines... so for anyone who didn't knwo, enjoy! And for everyopne else, well there will be something about Rona Ambrose, soon, I guearantee it!... ~lee]
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The Bonnaroo Music Festival just hired me to green the whole festival


What a killer gig! I just got back from Manchester Tennessee where in another 10 weeks or so, 100,000 kids will descend into the south to soak up the tunes and good vibes provided by the 6th annual Bonnaroo festival. And it's my job to work it so that it's the greenest rock festival ever! :DDD

OK first off who's playing:
Radiohead, Beck, Cypress Hill, Matisyahu, Blackalicious, Oysterhead, Death Cab For Cutie, Bright Eyes, The Streets, Damian J-Rock Marley, Ben Folds, Steele Pulse, Sonic Youth, Cat Power, Medeski Martin & Wood, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Seu Jorge (the life Aquatic guy), Dios (Malos), Common, oh and like 50 other bands (there's 12 stages on 700 acres!) ...its fun too! there's also a movie theater, a dj academy, a silent disco (?), a vending mini downtown, and then oneamy faves PlanetRoo: an earth conscious hands-on space (with and organic cafe and bike powered smoothies)!!

My job is the kinda thing you'd expect from me. I work within each department making sure that the products they choose and materials they use are as green as possible. So all cutlery and cups will be those new compostable ones (we plan on having a few tons of compost, like 6 or 7!). The electricity used to come from Diesel, now (for this year) it will be Biodiesel (in future years with more than 10 weeks to go we will get it to fuel cells), all the tshirts are going to be made from organic cotton and hemp, the tickets and posters >hemp, and even for the CDs and DVDs (they sell them on site) we're going to use my buddies hemp plastic cases. And many many more little ways to minimize waste, reduce footprint, and create a supa green festi!! Woo Hoo I'm pretty stoked, you might imagine. Yay.
700
700 acres of sun, fun, rock n' hedonism and: green propaganda and solutions!

Personally if you have a bunch of 17-25 year olds who don't really know about ecological issues, this is a great way to reach them. Have fun, enjoy and see how easy it is to be green! The planetRoo will also have a lot of hands-on tables and exhibits, how to convert your vehicle to run on used french fry oil, solar DIY panels u can make, car races with little toy hydrogen powered cars (the H comes from little teensy solar panels), and still looking for some more booths, but he! it's a brand new job!!
planetroo
Well I just wanted to share that good news with y'all (Y'all as in "Y'all come back now yhea") southern hospitality, an amazing team ready to make a party for 100,000 and green green green!!! :DDD
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greenSTAR and the 2 minute biodiesel converters! [May. 27th, 2006|10:21 am]
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GreenStar
GreenStar Biofuels announced this week that they have developed and successfully commercially tested their advanced biodiesel reactor. Three different sizes of the proprietary biodiesel reactors were tested from January 2005 through February 2006 at their Bakersfield Biodiesel Plant. Most biodiesel plants processes require from one to one-and-a-half hours for complete chemical reactions to take place between vegetable oil, alcohol (methanol) and the catalyst. The GSPI reactors take less than two minutes to complete the reactions. Wikked!
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Veg My Ride! [May. 5th, 2006|06:18 am]
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new DIY S.V.O. dvd trailer up, and watch it now!
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Extenginize your mind, and your sass will follow... [May. 4th, 2006|05:35 am]
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Novel new solution to reduce NOx from Biodiesel engines!!
logo
Attention all DIY SVO & biodiesel peeps! ...and for that matter anyone who still uses regular diesel fuel in their diesel car (but why?):

...Sure, you like not-relying on foreign oil. And for you SVO'ers it's that mix of doing something better for the environment, and getting to drive for free. But as we all know, biodiesel still has emissions. There is some carbon monoxide, there's lots of carbon dioxide (which if you grow your hemp oil, or even rapeseed, you will be 'cycling' the carbon), and of course, it's no laughing matter that there are NOx emissions i.e. laughing gas (but in the air its damaging and another greenhouse gas). But now you don't have to!

Fullerton CA's Extengine has just released their ADECII Advanced Diesel Emission Control (they still sell the ADECI which is a little more for the self-starter) and it gets rid of your NOx emissions. It spays an ammonia mist into the exhaust before it leaves your tailpipe, and turns the Nitrous back into Nitrogen and Water Vapor (water vapor is still a greenhouse gas.. one day we'll have to cap that and sell it to the dry cleaners or something....). I like these Extengine people, not only do they have many many other great innovations, but like the company name, they all have these cool names like MaxTRAP (removes 99% of particulates from the exhaust) and many more...
diagram
[thanks to linton & Hugg]
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ADM supermarket to the gas tank, extrusion plant, bioChem factory, and um... world (?) [Apr. 29th, 2006|08:10 am]
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The Andreas reign is over. New ADM CEO
is an Oil woman. What could this mean??
chevrondayze
Say hello to Patty Woertz. She's the new CEO of Archer Daniels Midland. ADM is a huge company and their products are in so many products on a supermarket shelf, that if you thought about it your head would spin. Now I was never a fan of ADM founder Dwayne "sleezy" Andreas, and I'm not the only one. But every dark tunnel has a light at the end of it, and Patty might just be that light (Well one can hope). See ADM is a food company, They make corn syrup for soda-pop and food-relief packages, and well, pretty much cornered the corn and (non organic) soy markets so long ago that it's hard to find a conventional farmer who doesn't have a relationship with the "Supermarket to the World." But this appointment, Mrs. Woertz, is a new angle and definitely a glimmer of hope. Maybe. While I am hoping that she will come to terms with alternatives to chemical fertilizer, like rock dust in particular, that isn't where the glimmer comes from.

See Mrs. Woertz used to work in the oil industry. In fact she was executive vice president of Chevron before becoming President of Chevron Canada. She's an oilman. So whats an oil (wo)man doing running a corn stand? three words: bioplastics, ethanol & biodiesel.

See, this maybe good. Sure, this may end up being a HUGE boondoggle (remember there's someone else from Chevron who is seriously fucking the world up right now, they even named a tanker after her) But I'm hoping that this is a good sign. A woman who understands feedstocks (like plastic ones, not like feeding corn to pigs) and who knows how much power this woman can yield. Besides, it's not like Cargil's NaturworksPLA is so hot! And the demand for these materials at the moment is still huge as compared to the supply. So who knows? It may be a god thing after all...

[Chicago Business]
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Story du Jour [Apr. 21st, 2006|04:16 am]
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microreactors make biodiesel on the fly...
BDcc
This creditcard-sized microreactor, invented by OSU's Goran Jovanovic, will one day be making biodiesel as easily as milking a cow. In the world of Biodiesel, they have taken portability, speed, and efficiency to a new zenith. Like going from the ENIAC to an AlienWare. And it being EarthDay/Week/Month (really what day of the year isn't Earth day??), and what with Eco-info being the hot info of the moment (hopefully something that can sustain), and everybody* having a love-in with BioDiesel, you can see why this story, which actually broke a week ago in Oregon, has been spreading like wildfire lately.


I *asterixed "everybody loves biodiesel" up there because that's a little over the top, not "everybody loves biodiesel" (and I'm not even talking about Lee "What's for Dessert" Raymond here), we think it's clean. And if we make the biodiesel out of a new crop, like hemp grown on the side of highways, it can cycle it's carbon. But the reality is that BioDiesel emits carbon dioxide just like regular-unleaded, or nonbiodiesel. It also emits Nitrous Oxide (and that's no laughing matter. well it is, it's a gas really, but not when emmitted into the atmosphere). There's other particulates it emits. Its cleaner than DinoDiesel, that's for sure, but panacea? Nyet. I guess in some ways, it's the best that we can get at the moment. I mean you can convert a car to 100% electric and use it as a city car only. But for the open road, unless you wanna be a wayhardcore rebel and DIY maniac (and take your sweet time electrolyzing on the road), this is it.

And in that respect these microreactors are pretty cool. Also cool is the whole concept. Each card only processes a small amount of BioDiesel. But you can stack them so you would have something the size of a PC tower with thousands of them and that way, one can process a substantial amount of veggie-fuel! Dr. Jovanovic says that in the future we will be using these micro reactors for a variety of different purposes, so expect to be seeing a lot more of these gold cards around in the future. The good clean positive evolved future!
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Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même [Mar. 6th, 2006|01:12 pm]
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Former CIA head spook R. James Woolsey gets standing ovation from Hippies in Eugene Oregon!
JRW
According to Eugene's Register Guard, North American Industrial Hemp Council board member (and former CIA head under Clinton) R. James Woolsey wows 'em with what imnsho seemed like a piecemeal call to Biofuels and Ethanol... Meh...
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serious class [Feb. 20th, 2006|07:43 pm]
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highschool
thanks to [info]retrofire

the kids are allright!


The kids in a West Philadelphia High School auto shop class build a soy-bean powered biodiesel car!!
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one more ethanol piece.... [Feb. 5th, 2006|08:00 am]
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three ethanol stories in a row then back to the madness....
govCanEth
's funny i used to not like ethanol, a lot. Especially the way megahuge agro- farm companies were sucking up government Pork to basically, well, to basically make more cash.... And when it's all made from corn, it goes from stupid and wasteful to evil (unless we have more food than we need, and no more 40,000 babies starving to death on the planet every day. Until then food turned into fuel is simply evil).

But now there's switchgrass, and as you will see below, a number of positive indicators that you can get more bang with ethanol than the lame corn based ethanol ever could... so that's pretty exciting. Now here's something that will make it even more exciting! it's called the "UW Madison Process" and here's the guy, Dr. George Huber:
drH
As is widely known, traditional ethanol production yields around 1.1 units of energy for every 1 that is put into the system. So sure, good reason to not like it very much...

But Dr. Huber and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (the midwest's version of Eugene OR), have found a way to double the output.

While its most likely going to be used as an additive for biodiesel, it shows great promise for ethanol as well; "It's a very efficient process," says Huber. "The fuel produced contains 90 percent of the energy found in the carbohydrate and hydrogen feed. If you look at a carbohydrate source such as corn, our new process has the potential to creates twice the energy as is created in using corn to make ethanol."

kinda neat, imnsho.... oh and hey, if you want to keep up to date with the whole biofuels issue, you might want to check out C. Scott Miller's BioconversionBlog. I didn't see much about the "UW-Madison Process" there but the guy is a bioconversion nut!
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they were born in Roswell NM... But are now coming to your town!!!! [Nov. 26th, 2005|03:53 pm]
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No, Seriously, this slimy green climate change solution did actually come from Roswell New Mexico. But far from Alien, they're older than us!
algae
There's a company I think everybody ought to be watching. It's called GreenFuel Technologies and in the same way that SVO Biodiesel has far outpaced the old B20, this new technology will take biodiesel to a new level. This technology will actually suck CO2 out of the air, compost half and use the rest to drive people around. Yes it's just that good. What GFT do is grow algae (who love Carbon Dioxide and turn it into chlorophyl about 1500 times faster than the next fastest plant). They grow it in the waste gas of coal-fired electricity plants. I've heard that they are getting between 30-80% reductions of CO2 from their system, which looks very modular, and easy to fit in most coal fired generating plant. It looks like this:
pyramid.
This is quite an evolution! When the technology was first discovered and perfected by John Sheehan and the folks at the NREL, they were getting 90% efficiencies. But of course it was on flat beds of slimy water that went on for acres and acres.... this new systems may not be as efficient (yet!) but is certain to spread.... keep your eyes peeled and tell all your friends!
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