Lifeboat Foundation

As many as 153 million air pollution deaths would be avoided if governments speed up the timetable for reducing fossil fuel emissions, a new Duke University study finds. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

There is an overlooked benefit to lowering carbon emissions, besides reducing sea-level rise, a new study says.

Reducing emissions will likely save about 153 million human lives if the nations of the world agree to cut enough emissions to limit global temperature rise to less than 1.5°C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), by the end of the century. That is about a degree lower than the target set by the Paris climate accords.

Continue reading “Tougher climate policies can save 153 million lives says a new study” »

Postponing Day Zero in Cape Town for 2018 comes as no surprise. There was no sense to it once the day had been pushed into the winter rainfall period. It also didn’t make sense for the Western Cape and Cape Town governments to continue drafting detailed logistical plans for points of water distribution in the event that taps were turned off across the city.

But Cape Town’s water supplies remain at high risk because the long-term predictions for rainfall in the south-western Cape remain uncertain. Dam levels continue to fall while people are struggling to achieve the city’s target of 450 million litres per day. And yields from new water schemes will only be known in the coming months and next year.

The general perception is that the onset of climate change would be slow and measured. This would afford authorities the time to intervene with considered plans. But climate change is a disrupter and takes no prisoners. Over the past three years, Cape Town and the surrounding regions has experienced successive years of well below average rainfall. The experience is changing the way people think about water and how it is managed.

If we are to have truly smart cities our transport systems will have to be more cost-effective, safer and sustainable. Perhaps most of all they will need to be more integrated, as the EU-funded project MFDS demonstrates.

The stated aim of the EU’s ‘smart, green and integrated transport’ initiative is to build a European transport system that is ‘resilient, resource-efficient, climate- and environmentally friendly, safe and seamless for the benefit of all citizens, the economy and society.’

In contribution, the EU-funded MFDS project has developed a versatile and affordable ‘Intelligent Transport System’ offering several functions including wrong-way driver detection, traffic congestion detection, vehicle counting by vehicle classification and parking accounting. The core innovation of MFDS is the system’s ability to perform its functions simultaneously, while remaining low-cost to buy and install, as well as running on minimum power. The project’s feasibility study has demonstrated that the system will be of interest to multiple EU markets.

Continue reading “Telematics technology steering toward smarter EU roads” »

In the public imagination, the Amish are famous for renouncing modern technology. In truth, many Amish farms hum with machines: milk vats, mechanical agitators, diesel engines, and pneumatic belt sanders are all found in their barns and workshops.

The Amish don’t actually oppose technology. Rather, the community must vote on whether to adopt a given item. To do so, they must agree almost unanimously, says Jameson Wetmore, a social science researcher at Arizona State University. Whereas the outside world may see innovation as good until proven otherwise, the Amish first decide whether a new technology might erode the community values they’re trying to preserve. “It is not individual technologies the concern us,” one Amish minister told Wetmore, “but the total chain.”

It’s an idea that is resonating in Silicon Valley these days, where a debate over technology and its potential unintended consequences is cleaving the industry into rival camps—each with a tech titan as its figurehead.

Continue reading “Musk and Zuckerberg Are Fighting Over Whether We Rule Technology—Or it Rules Us” »

Elon Reeve Musk is a South African-born Canadian-American business magnate, engineer, inventor and investor. He is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors, and chairman of SolarCity as well as co-chairman of OpenAI.

He is the founder of SpaceX and a co-founder of Zip2, PayPal, and Tesla Motors. He has also envisioned a conceptual high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop and has proposed a VTOL supersonic jet aircraft with electric fan propulsion. He is the wealthiest person in Los Angeles.

Continue reading “Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis” »

A report out from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) this month published responses from industry stakeholders on the viability of a concentrated solar thermal (CST) energy market in Australia: Paving the way for concentrated solar thermal in Australia.

Only 5 gigawatts (GW) of CST is deployed globally so far, with remarkable cost reductions for a technology so “young.” Submissions noted that when today’s 300 GW of PV had only 5 GW of deployed capacity in 2004, its LCOE was ten times that of CST.

CST’s dispatchable solar could play a pivotal role in Australia with its need for energy that can meet obligations for both emissions reductions and reliability, because with its ability to store its solar energy in molten salts for delivery later, CST can offer a stable and predictable supply of solar energy at any time of day or night.

Continue reading “Path to a booming Australian solar thermal energy market” »

Saudi engineers whip up a simulated sandstorm to test a solar panel’s durability at a research lab, the heart of the oil-rich kingdom’s multibillion dollar quest to be a renewable energy powerhouse.

The world’s top exporter of crude seems an unlikely champion of clean energy, but the government lab in Al Uyayna, a sun-drenched village near Riyadh, is leading the country’s efforts for solar power as it seeks to diversify.

A dazzling spotlight was shone on those ambitions last week when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled plans to develop the globe’s biggest solar power project for $200 billion in partnership with Japan’s SoftBank group.

Dumping pesticides and using ducks instead. 🦆 🦆 🦆.

Humanity’s brutal and bellicose past provides ample justification for pursuing settlements on the moon and Mars, Elon Musk says.

The billionaire entrepreneur has long stressed that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help make humanity a multiplanet species — a giant leap that would render us much less vulnerable to extinction.

Human civilization faces many grave threats over the long haul, from asteroid strikes and climate change to artificial intelligence run amok, Musk has said over the years. And he recently highlighted our well-documented inability to get along with each other as another frightening factor. [The BFR: SpaceX’s Mars Colony Plan in Images].