Water Water Everywhere But Not A Drop To Drink
If you cant read this map, it basically shows that people in most of Africa, Much of Asia, and a fair part of South America have very poor access to clean water. Even though most of the Earth is covered with water, hardly any of it is drinkable. With over pumping of aquifers, pollution, and over use for industrial use, it is even harder for many people to find clean water to drink.
This lack of clean water leads to millions of deaths each year from easy to cure water born parasites and bacteria. The man who invented the Segway thinks he might have one answer.
Combined with solar power, or a wind turbine this machine could revolutionize the way much of the world gets water. The obvious problem is that these sort of machines most likely contain complicated parts, parts that can break, parts that cost a lot of money, and parts that are hard to get to places that need them. This doesn’t even take into account the problem of training people how to use them. But I would hope that a country (ours) that can spend more than a trillion dollars on killing people (the Iraq War) could find it in its heart to spend at least a couple billion brining clean drinking water to the world.
More info here.
Of course its not as cool as this.
Wind Power: It’s Baaaack!
We have reported on the beluga sky sail system before, here is a nice video of it in action. More videos and info here. Wind power was good for moving ships around hundreds of years ago, just because we have fossil fuel engines doesn’t mean that it still isn’t a good way to move ships around.
Elephant Picasso
This elephant was probably trained to do this, but the simple fact that it can remember how and that it was able to be trained to do this shows that humans are far from the only species on this planet who are intelligent.
Ching Hai: Supreme Master…Of Hypocrisy
If I’m not here tomorrow, do not weep, I will have been struck down — in my disrespect — by Ching Hai, Supreme Master, and self-styled “God’s Direct Contact”. A mere lightning bolt will not be sufficient: I expect a plague of SUVs.
A few day’s ago I received an e-mail from Shaam Ven, presumably a follower of GDC (well, if the leader of the industrial West is GOP, then why not?) and a believer that any message of concern is a good message:
Hi.
I read about your website. I wanted to email you immediately about Supreme Master Ching Hai’s efforts to halt global warming. Supreme Master Ching Hai is a God-Realized, living, enlightened Master, who initiates Truth Seekers into the Quan Yin meditation. To learn more about Master and the Quan Yin meditation, please go to www.godsdirectcontact.org or www.godsdirectcontact.com.
Master’s message is simple: if we human beings don’t take steps to halt global warming within the next two years, after that, it will be too late and we could see all of life vanish from this planet by the year 2012.
[Read the rest at The Unsuitablog]
Heathrow Airport Chaos : Good!
Here is an open letter to anyone involved in the air industry, or anyone in the media reporting the failed opening of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5 as bad news. The letter is purposefully short and easy to understand: it seems as though the increasing numbers of people who fly — living in a blinkered, rose-tinted world in which the worst thing that can happen is that you lose your luggage — can’t understand the simplest of messages.
To Whom This May Concern
A welcome side-effect, which ironically had nothing to do with the Flash Mob third runway protesters, is that the 34 cancelled flights at Heathrow yesterday prevented around 2,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. That is the equivalent of the total annual emissions of 2000 people in India, just from one day’s cancellation of a fledgling terminal at one airport.
Despite claims to the contrary by the air industry, I have a Freedom of Information letter in front of me from the Department for Transport, which says that in 2003 aircraft emissions were responsible for 5.4% of the UK’s total emissions. This has since risen considerably and will go on rising.
I have sympathy with those passengers who could not make emergency flights, such as seeing sick or dying relatives. I have no sympathy at all for those who still think that flying is an acceptable form of transport for leisure or business: put side by side with the news of the crumbling West Antarctica ice sheet (which garnered a few columns of coverage in the papers), the cancellation of a few flights is hardly worth mentioning, except in positive terms.
Yours
Keith Farnish
Environmental Campaigner and Writer
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