IAASP: Information & Articles About Saving our Planet

As the temperature rises during the summer season, many households turn to more than just ice-cold drinks to keep them cool. Air conditioning was once regarded as a residential luxury, but has become something of a necessity throughout the United States. Not only will air conditioning cool a room to a bearable temperature during balmy, humid summer days, but also uses the same techniques as a refrigerator to provide ventilation and dehumidification for indoor air.

Brief Air Conditioning History

The concept of cooling spaces by using natural elements is one that can be traced to the times of ancient Egyptians, who circulated aqueduct water through the walls of various structures to produce a cooling effect. Even in those times, since water was scarce, wealthy residents were only able to enjoy this luxury. During hot weather, medieval Persians created wind towers to cool down buildings. It wasn’t until the early 1800s that a British scientist started to experiment with the compressing and liquefying of ammonia. He learned that liquefied ammonia could chill the air when it evaporated.

In 1842, an American doctor named John Gorrie created ice to cool the air of hospital patients and had dreams of using this technology to create a cooling machine for buildings. He tinkered with the plans of constructing an ice-making machine with the help of a financial backer. When his support was no longer available, he could no longer finance his experiments. When he passed away in 1855, the idea of air conditioning was also laid to rest for about 50 years.

After the attempts of Gorrie, industrial air conditioning was created in the early 1900s with the first modern electrical version of air conditioning. Throughout the years, a shift was seen in the use of air conditioning, as automobiles and households began to benefit from the invention. The Carrier Air Conditioning Company began to lead the way in bringing the concept to the public, and during the 1950s, it was a contagious residential dream.

The Pros and Cons

The benefit of enjoying a cooler atmosphere during heated weather is not the only advantage gained when turning on the air conditioner. A household, vehicle, and other building environment becomes cleaner and safer for breathing when air conditioning is able to prevent the growth and spread of harmful microorganisms. Individuals who suffer from allergies and asthma are especially thankful for the better atmosphere an air-conditioned room provides, as less dust and dander are present. In seriously hot weather, babies and the elderly also benefit from air conditioning as heat waves have been known to take the lives of those whose immune systems and health might not be the strongest.

One of the most controversial topics attached to the subject of air conditioning deals with some of the materials that are used to produce the cooling affect of these machines. Fluorocarbon refrigerants also contribute to global warming concerns, which serves as one of the main ways that air-conditioning impacts the state of the environmental world. Fluorocarbon refrigerants also add to the problems concerning ozone layer depletion.

While the temporary relief that air conditioning provides makes hot summer nights and heat waves a more bearable event, many question how much the world will pay in the long run after the environmental damage has settled. Today, scientists are working on making more environmental friendly products, but for now, individuals are reluctant to part with their instant cool during the thick of summer.

Kimpton were the first company of our size in the North West to achieve quality assured status.

The world will never be quite the same. High oil prices are not only changing the political and economic landscapes but they could also change energy itself, because they are stimulating the most widespread drive for technological innovation this sector has ever seen.

The political shifts are striking, wherever you look. Russia was so flat on its back at the end of the 1990s that Western banks and companies competed to see who could close its Moscow offices faster. Today, even though Vladimir Putin says he does not like the term, Russia certainly appears to be an energy superpower, using oil and gas to restore its position in the world.

Balances of political power are shifting in other ways. In 2006, after his nonstate lunch with President Bush in Washington, China’s President Hu Jintao took off directly for state visits to Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.

Meanwhile, that other balance, in supply and demand, has been extremely tight. Even without actual disruptions, possible threats to supply from the war in Lebanon and from rising tensions over Iran’s nuclear program were enough last summer to push oil prices above $78 a barrel, accompanied by forecasts of $100 a barrel.

But then a slowing U.S. economy and growing inventories, and the prospect of rising non-OPEC production, sent prices down. That was enough to alarm OPEC into cutting production in order to stem the downward trend and keep prices above $50 to $55 a barrel. That’s not exactly a low price; it’s still double the OPEC price band of just a few years ago.

The flow of funds illuminates how much has changed. OPEC’s revenue has tripled over the past four years, from $199 billion in 2002 to about $600 billion in 2006. The Mideast’s trade surplus is 50 percent greater than that of emerging Asia.

While oil states are recycling a good deal of this resurgent wealth back into the United States and Europe as they did in the 1970s this time much more is going into investments in Asia and local and regional financial markets and development. What used to be said of Shanghai that it employed up to a quarter of all the world’s building cranes is now being said of Dubai.

Petrodollars are also fueling political assertiveness in countries such as Iran (where oil revenue rose from $19 billion in 2002 to $60 billion in 2006) and Venezuela (from $21 billion to almost $50 billion over the same period).

But there are two big economic questions. What do high prices mean for the economy? And what do they mean for the future of world energy?

The risks from high oil prices are clear and manifold: loss of purchasing power on the part of consumers who drive the world economy; a blow both to business and to stock-market confidence and thus to investment; and a painful shock to the balance of payments of non-oil-developing countries.

Most fundamental of all is the possibility that high oil prices will start to drive up inflation, forcing central bankers to jam on the interest-rate brakes. But at what level of price?

A few months ago one of the key OPEC decision makers, harking back to that not-so-long-ago $22 to $28 band, observed, “We thought that the world economy would collapse at $40 a barrel.” But economic growth sailed right on through $40, then $50, then $60 a barrel.

Part of the reason is that the major economies are much less oil-intensive than they were in the 1970s. What this means is that less oil is required for every unit of GDP. For instance, the U.S. economy has grown by more than 150 percent since the 1970s, but oil consumption by only about 25 percent.

The other major explanation is that this time, prices have been rising in response to a “demand shock” (epitomized by 10 percent economic growth in China) and not a “supply shock” (a disruption such as the 1973 embargo or the 1979 revolution in Iran). This is largely true, although not completely. For there has been an “aggregate disruption” a supply cut when you add up the loss of supply from Nigeria because of an insurgency in its delta region, the reduced levels of production in Iraq and Venezuela and the (now mostly healed) loss of supply from the 2005 hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet there was some point at which prices would begin to bite. That appears to have been in the $60 to $70 range. And those effects can be seen, along with the housing decline, in the slowing U.S. economy, with implications for all countries that export to it.

But the most lasting impact of the shift in the energy market may well be measured in energy itself. There is a bubbling and brewing of technological innovation along the entire energy spectrum from conventional supplies and renewables and alternatives, to efficiency and demand management.

Oil and gas companies continue to innovate. Last September, Chevron announced a find in the Gulf of Mexico oilfield at 6,890 feet, and an additional 19,685 feet under the seabed an extraordinary technological achievement.

Around the world, the “digital oilfield of the future” is becoming the digital oilfield of the present. The large-scale conversion of natural gas into high-quality diesellike fuel is getting closer.

Renewables have captured the public’s imagination and are coming into their own. Wind power is the one that is closest to becoming conventional. This is not just the result of market forces. The development of renewable resources is being driven by mandates and subsidies of the European Union and of the federal and state governments in the United States, and by similar programs in countries like India and China. But it is working.

In fact, renewables are growing so fast that they are straining capacity in people and materials. Right now there is a shortage of turbines and blades for windmills. Renewables are a sizable business these days; the worldwide investment in wind and solar sales for 2006 is estimated at $40 billion.

But sometimes the enthusiasm for wind and solar discounts the huge scale of the energy system and the lead times needed to develop any form of energy, as well as the fact that these sources have to eventually establish themselves as economically competitive without government help. Even with all the advances, they are still a very small part of the overall energy mix. But they will continue to grow.

What is also rising is the funding and fervor that are going into innovation. A decade ago, I chaired a task force on energy research and development for the U.S. Department of Energy. It was a quiet period in energy, supplies were ample and interest was subdued.

That would not be the case today. Prices, anxiety about supply and the quest to reduce carbon emissions because of climate-change concerns have turned energy into a major focus for technology investment. Governments and businesses continue to be big players. But they now have company: venture capitalists.

The embodiment of the old model was the centralized Synthetic Fuels Corp., a U.S. government company that was chartered in 1980 with $17 billion to promote such options as shale oil and the conversion of coal into liquid fuels. It was very much in the spirit of the oft-invoked “three M’s” Manhattan Project, Marshall Plan and Man in Space. But when prices went south in the 1980s it was wound down, and by 1986 it had disappeared.

Governments and companies are stepping up their investment in energy R&D, and will remain critical to the development of new technologies. Research-and-development spending by the U.S. Department of Energy is $1.8 billion and is slated to grow 25 percent in 2007.

Now the people who brought you Silicon Valley are also stepping into energy. Venture-capital investment in energy reached $1.7 billion in the first three quarters of 2006, almost five times what it was in the same period in 2004, according to the Cleantech Venture Network. “When we started investing in this area, it was like investing in the Internet in the early 1990s before anyone had ever heard of the Internet,” says Ira Ehrenpreis of Technology Partners, an early clean-tech investor. “Now there has been an awakening in the VC community that clean tech offers as large an opportunity as information technology and life sciences, both of which were revolutionized by venture capital.”

This means growing amounts of money going into energy businesses, operating under the discipline of venture capital. Some of the results are already there. One of the biggest recent tech IPOs, Suntech, made its founder, Zhengrong Shi, the richest man in China.
Of course, many of the new initiatives will not succeed. With this rapid growth comes a degree of hype that has some echoes of the Internet frenzy.

But that cycle of boom and bust left a set of technologies that are transforming business and society. And one clear difference is that in the Internet boom the business plans focused on eyeballs and didn’t worry so much about how to make money. Here the market opportunity is clearer.

This diverse but intense focus on energy technology will likely have wide effects. There will be new ways to find or develop conventional energy. The competitive position of alternatives will be enhanced. The boom in conventional, corn-based ethanol, with its overwhelming political support, will nevertheless run into limits of land and food-versus-fuel competition. The current holy grail in liquid fuels is the search for economically competitive cellulosic ethanol, made from crop waste or specially designed energy crops.

Overall, some of the most intriguing possibilities will come from applying biology and genetic engineering to energy problems.

Much else is now on the energy-technology agenda from fuel cells and solar energy to advances, on the demand side, in how we use energy and the ways in which our cars are powered. Technological advances, along with regulations, enabled the United States and Japan to double their energy efficiency in the 1970s. That could happen again. When it is all added up, there has never been so much activity in new energy technologies. If it stays at this pace, expect dramatic results.

Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and executive vice president of IHS, received the Pulitzer Prize for “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power” and the United States Energy Award for lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding. Visit CERA energy reports online.

A couple of years ago our daughter thought we should buy a gas heated clothes dryer. Having moved into partment life during graduate school she thought having to carry the laundry out to the line was just too much work for her mother since she was getting old, or at least older. I reminded her we were only in our fifties and really not doing too bad yet, and besides, I carry the laundry baskets out to the line and back in when everything is dry. It is not her mother that does the lugging.

We have never had a clothes dryer or any kind except the kind that hangs from posts or trees. I will continue to carry the laundry out as long as I can. My mother did the same and her mother also did the same. Why should we use gas or electric to dry our clothes? have you ever used a towel that has dried outside in the sun and wind? The smell is exhilerating.

There is no excuse for not drying clothes outside. Well, actually, there probably are excuses, but not real reasons. Granted if you live in the city in an apartment there probably is no choice but to dry in a clothes dryer. Or, you may be unfortunate enough to live in a community or development that prohibits the hanging of clothes on a clothesline in your yard. These prohibitions have been challenged and overturned.

Prohibitions like the above are an indication of a larger problem that is two fold. On the one hand, people believe energy is cheap and we can use all we want. This is an attitude that may be quickly changing. On the other hand, people are either so self absorbed or simply too lazy to take the time to hang
their clothes outside. They might even be embarrassed to do so.

There are all sorts of devices in our lives that operate on the principle of cheap energy. One of the most glaring are cars, which is a whole other discussion. How about the TV sets that although there is no picture on the screen the thing is actually on and waiting. These devices are made this way so that when you hit the on button you do not have to wait for it to warm up. You have a picture almost immediately. So you can avoid the inconvenience of having to wait maybe 30 seconds for a picture.

Waste is endemic in our society. I take my own cloth bags to the store to buy food. Why should I take plastic or paper bags home every time I buy groceries? Is it too much to ask people to do? Australia is banning plastic bags in stores next year. Why not charge for the bags also. I have seen people with 20 or more plastic bags of stuff heading out the door. Maybe there are 2 or 3 items in each bag. I went in the local grocery store the other day to buy a box of bandaids. Checkout and they put the bandaids in a plastic bag for me to carry home. I took them out and told them I did not need a bag. So they threw the plastic bag in the trash can. I couldn’t believe it.

There is another store I frequent that packs your bags for you as they check things out. I put all my stuff on the counter to be checked out and handed them my cloth bags and they didn’t know what to do with them. Then they tried to put the stuff in plastic bags and then put the plastic bags in the cloth bags. How stupid can you be? The store people seemed to act like it was a major pain to have to change their routine.

And really, here is where we come to the self absorbed part. Americans, for whom I can speak because I am one, just seem to think thinking about what they are doing is an insult. Not all of us are like that but too many of us are. There are all kinds of slogans and little messages built into our culture telling us we don’t need to think about or be concerned about what goes on in the world because we are too important and we deserve to have this or that and should not be bothered with something that really does not affect us. If we only knew.

Michael Dappert is a co-founder of Winco, Inc., a provider of wireless internet access to small communities in West Central Illinois. More articles and discussion can be found at Mike’s Garden Blog and discusses a wide range of topics at Flyoverfolks.com.

The Shoe industry is about to get a wakeup call. A world wide storm named Jinga Shoes is flooding the world with rhythm, style, je ne sais quoi via its own special energy. The eye of this shoe storm was pinpointed by two ladies on a Rio Kombi then exposed to the world at http://www.jingashoes.com.

Jinga shoes, unlike your traditional shoes, brings the whole world a new attitude, brighter smiles, expanded energy and free flowing movement. Rather than devastation and destruction, you have excitement and happiness. You have the essence of life.

Move over “soul”, Jingas are the new “Wow”.

Jingas are made in Brazil on a small scale with many colour runs that are strictly limited. The Jingaholic must keep an eye out to make sure they get their favourite colour before it is sold out. The whole shoe, made of fabric and not mass produced in sweat shops, is made by hand without animal products like leather or animal based glues.

Their light and flexible form makes them the perfect shoe for everyday wear and the natural choice for all kinds of dance and sports. A noted dance instructor said, “They do not rub at the back of your Achilles tendon and they give you lots of range of movement at the ankle joint.” They were originally designed for capoeira.

Jingas are machine washable and come in all sizes from babies sizes up to Jinga size 46 (fits a UK Size 11 – 11.5). They can be worn all year round with or without socks. Unfortunately they are not good for wearing in the rain as they are not waterproof.

The Jinga Shop doesn’t just sell shoes and run away with their profits. They give a percentage of their profits (5% minimum) to funding a social project in a Rio de Janeiro favela (shantytown). This project provides activities and lessons for children outside school and helps keep them away from the criminal gangs that are a fact of life in many favelas.

Jinga is the first storm in history to put a spring in people’s step, help fund a children’s project, make dancing fun and comfortable at the same time, eliminate sweat shop manufacturing and spread across the world as an eco friendly force.

So whether you are walking the dog, cooking with friends, watching TV or doing one of a thousand and one other things, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t get your Jinga “flowing” today.

You can find more information about Jinga Shoes as well as visit the jinga shop at http://www.jingashoes.com.

It is not a secret that we humans have been destroying the environment for years. It is now that some of us are trying to make all people aware of the affects that our lack of care has had on the environment and what will happen if we do not make changes now and try to stop the progress of global warming. Our focus, or drive, is the thought of what type of world are we leaving our children. We also need to be looking at how global warming is affecting our animals now and in the future if we do not stop and make the needed environmentally safe changes.

There are numerous studies that are being conducted and have been conducted where watching animal behavior and traits to measure the status of the environment. These studies are showing that our Earth is changing in unnatural ways and it is disturbing. Think about the fact that right now as things stand, reindeer will no longer wander the places they currently do, they will disappear.

Marmots no longer hibernate the same amount of time that they used to. Actually compared to thirty years ago, they are ending hibernation three weeks earlier. The Canadian red squirrel is breeding 18 days earlier. Studies are showing that the red fox is moving north and invading the territory of its Arctic cousin. Polar bears are not as healthy as they were 20 years ago and they are thinner.

If we look at the sea and our creatures there we also see changes that should cause alarm. Coral reefs are expected to increase by up to a third in size. Elephant seal pups are thinner because their prey is migrating to cooler waters. Our turtles are changing behavior as well, the loggerhead is laying eggs 10 days earlier and the Hawkbill turtle hatchlings are having more females then males due to temperature changes.

Birds are changing their diets to insects that do not consume leaves that have been treated with high amounts of pesticides. What does all of this mean? It means that global warming is going to cause many of our animal species to become endangered if not extinct.

The melting ice, the warm seas, the spreading dessert are all threats to our animals. These changes, no matter how subtle have a dramatic influence on the lives of our wildlife. In the sea the disappearance of the tiny organisms that the larger creatures feed off of is causing the sea life to migrate northward.

Keeping in mind that global warming plays a huge part in our weather and climate, the increased storminess destroys the breeding colonies of the albatross that already battle the possibility of being captured and killed by fishing boats. The rise in sea levels wipe out the nesting sites of the sea turtles, seals and wading birds are also on the list of species to be affected by their habitats being destroyed.

Thought the very source of nature is change, and adaptation, the changes that are taking place in our environment due to global warming are just happening to fast. The speed is what makes it difficult for the animals to adapt effectively and this will cause us to loose a lot of our wildlife. Can you imagine a world with no reindeer? What about the day that the Sahara dessert covers all of Africa and makes migration impossible for birds?

These are changes that we can see everyday and we need to start paying attention to them. The predicted elevation of sea level by an amazing three feet coupled with the disruptions to the Earth life support systems should be our wake up call.

While you can look out your back window and see these changes taking place, the full effect will be seen by the year 2100 if the predictions of scientist come through and we do not change our ways. Think about is, 2100 is less then one hundred years away. You and I would probably not be here, but our grandchildren will and what will we have left for them? Help stop global warming, do your part to save the Earth, our children and our wildlife. They need us.

Are you ready to learn how we can stop global warming? Learn how you can do so by checking out our free report at http://www.factsaboutglobalwarming.info. Find out more about our impact on the environment at http://www.factsaboutglobalwarming.info/videos.