With New York City going through one of the hottest years on record, Mayor Bloomberg has given the green light to install a series of swimming pools in the city made from repurposed dumpsters.
A successful pilot project in Brooklyn last summer from the urban redesign group Macro Sea has convinced the city of the feasibility and three of the pools will be installed on Park Avenue in the middle of Manhatten this August.
Earlier this week Bill Murray christened one of the pools on David Letterman. Looks like fun!!
Luckily for me newish online resource, “Low Tech Magazine” features technologies and solutions that are either very low tech and/or were created in the years gone by. It’s a fascinating read and candy for my brain.
It’s interesting to consider how the internet has been able to teach people those everyday skills that we all used to take for granted.
Some scientists now believe that the released weight of millions of tonnes of melting ice may trigger geologic catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis.
A conference in London last September outlined the threat: As humanity continues to produce global warming pollution, the rapidly heating atmosphere melts glaciers and ice fields, creating large displacements of weight as the solid ice masses melt and flow away into lakes and oceans.
The result: changing stress points on the Earth’s crust, which may affect lava and volcanic activity in very unpredictable ways.
(Image: Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland; from NASA)
Meanwhile, Northern Europe is going through a killer heatwave. Russia is going through its worst drought in 100 years and roads in the Czech Republic are melting in the heat.
The air conditioning units in some trains in Germany broke down and some poor souls were baking inside at 50ºC.
A report by the Environmental Law Institute outlines how energy is subsidized in the United States from 2002 to 2008. Not only are fossil fuels subsidized by nearly $60 billion more than renewables, but for every dollar that conventional fossil fuels are subsidized directly more than $3 are given to companies in the form of tax breaks.
So here’s the question: would the fossil fuel industry be self-supporting if there were no direct or tax subsidies from governments?
