Inhabitat

MOVIE REVIEW: The Yes Men Fix the World

Spoiler alert: The Yes Men do actually fix the world– but only on paper. For years this two-man team has been pranking conferences, newscasts, and exhibitions by posing as representatives of the world’s biggest environmental transgressors. While speaking as DOW Chemical, they publicly apologized for the Bhopal disaster. While pretending to be from Halliburton, they demonstrated the Survivaball, a human disaster survival suit: prohibitively expensive and visually ridiculous. In a particularly complicated stunt, they created a fake version of the New York Times announcing everything from the end of the war in Iraq to the creation of a maximum wage law. They have provoked, embarrassed, ridiculed and shocked many captains of industry. Driven, ultimately, by the desire to address serious issues with humor and radical intervention, The Yes Men Fix the World in a documentary that pits itself against unchecked greed.

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Team Inhabitat Sounds off on Climate Change!

Today is Blog Action Day, and team Inhabitat is joining thousands of other sites around the world as we spread shock waves of awareness around the issue of climate change! As the web’s largest blog dedicated to sustainable design, we tackle this issue on a daily basis through our headlines – but today we also wanted to share a more personal response from our team. By nature climate change is an issue that extends to every corner of the globe, and our worldwide team of writers are engaging with it on a daily basis – read on for our responses!

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Top 5 Climate Change Stories of 2009

Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s theme is Climate Change – a topic near and dear to our hearts here at Inhabitat. To kick things off, we took a look back over last the past year’s posts and pulled together a list of our top 5 favorite climate change stories to hit the pages of Inhabitat. The following [completely biased] list is in no particular order. It does, however, attempt to focus on solutions to the problem – because we believe that there is hope for our planet if we act now. Check it out and please, comment copiously. We love a good debate!

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Blog Action Day Takes on Climate Change Tomorrow!

Blog action day is set to kick off tomorrow, uniting thousands of blogs throughout the world to raise awareness around the issue of climate change! Since this is an issue near and dear to all of us here at Inhabitat we’ll be bringing you our favorite climate change stories of the past year and sharing our editors’ thoughts on the state of the …

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France Announces $2.2 Billion Electric Car Charging Network

As the United States government continues to drag its heels on passing climate change legislation, it’s encouraging to see folks in Europe making moves in the right direction. Last week, the French government announced it would dedicate $2.2 billion to creating a network of battery-charging stations for electric vehicles. The plan came as part of a much larger initiative that aims to move France towards a cleaner transportation system involving electric vehicles.

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BOOK REVIEW: $20 per Gallon

I have to admit that when I saw the title of Christopher Steiner’s new book, I scoffed a bit. Twenty Dollars per Gallon of gas seems like an outrageous, unfathomable price, even when you’re a believer in peak oil. But part of the beauty of Steiners’ book is its ability to track the effects of ever-more-scarce oil in believable detail. Whether the author’s predictions of local food, high-speed trains and alternative plastics are correct, they are excellent illustrations of the pervasiveness of petroleum.

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World Leaders Gather TODAY in NYC for the UN Summit on Climate Change

Yesterday marked the start of a very crucial time – the beginning of Climate Week NYC. World leaders are gathered TODAY, as we speak, at the United Nations to discuss what we, as the most influential nations on the Earth can do to solve the problem of global warming. The clock is ticking – there are only 15 working days until COP15, the …

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Win Free Tickets to the NYC Premiere of The Age of Stupid!

WIN FREE TICKETS TO THE PREMIERE OF THE AGE OF STUPID!
In case you haven’t heard about The Age of Stupid yet, it’s the climate change film that everyone has been buzzing about – and the grand opening is next week! We’ll be at the opening at the Chelsea Cinema in NYC to witness the nationwide opening of this fascinating movie on Monday, September 21 and we want YOU to join us. We’ve got free tickets to give away to …

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San Francisco to Have World’s First Airport Carbon Kiosks

Starting today, eco-conscious travelers through San Francisco’s International Airport (airport code: SFO) will be able to purchase carbon offsets for their flight right on the way to their gate! The Climate Passport program is making it super simple for even the most busy passengers to reduce the impact of their flights by conveniently placing carbon offset kiosks in the airport after security on both sides of the International Terminal and in Terminal 3. The offsets will go to support tree planting projects in the San Francisco area.

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Australians Are the Worst Polluters in the World

It’s official. While Americans had long had the honor (or, in this case, dishonor) of being the world’s biggest individual producers of carbon dioxide, Australians have overtaken them to claim the top spot. In a recently released report, British risk consultancy Maplecroft placed Australia’s per capita CO2 output at 20.58 tons a year, which is about four percent higher than the United States. The …

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BOOK REVIEW: The National Parks: Our American Landscape

Education is the key to conservation, and Ian Shive’s photographs in The National Parks: Our American Landscape enlighten viewers with a rare, adrenaline-filled look at the phenomenal beauty of the American backdrop. Shive’s photography offers a fresh outlook on nature, making a hairy tarantula in the Chihuahuan Desert featured in an extreme close-up, appear as a dazzling wild gem, and depicting a giant Sequoia Tree as it reaches deep into the sky, its branches blending with the stars. In the book’s collection of 200+ photographs, Shive manages to both capture the magnificence of too grand for words settings while enabling the viewer to interact with the environment and process moments in time on an individual level.

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Pizzly Bears on Melting Ice Rocking Chair

There was a lot of commotion several years back when an unlikely romance unfolded between polar bears and grizzly bears when the melting ice caps caused the habitats of these unexpected lovers to overlap. While most viewed the tale of the pizzly bear (or grolar bear, if you prefer) as alarming and tragic, designer Masahiro Minami was actually inspired by it, crafting …

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THE AGE OF STUPID is coming to NYC – Sept 21st!

IF YOU SEE ONE MOVIE THIS FALL – THIS IS THE ONE TO SEE!
Everyone knows that hindsight is 20/20, but will we regret our lack of action on climate change in the year 2020? That’s what The Age of Stupid, the groundbreaking film epic from McLibel director Franny Armstrong, wants to sink into the minds of everyone in the world. This brilliant movie, which will kick off UN Climate Week, is opening nationwide on Monday, September 21 at 450+ cinemas simultaneously — and we urge all Inhabitat readers to go see it as soon as you can!

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Does Pollution Actually Fight Global Warming?

At first listen, it sounds like something that would go against the core beliefs of any eco-expert, but recent research shows that air polluted skies are helping plants to reduce global warming. A study from 1960 to 1999, led by Dr. Lina Mercado from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, was published earlier this year in the Nature scientific journal reporting that plants stored 23.7 percent more CO2—the leading greenhouse gas causing climate change—thanks to more efficient photosynthesis in plants shaded by smog. Does this mean that burning fossil fuels might actually be the solution to cooling the earth?

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100,000 Synthetic Trees Could Help Combat Climate Change

The field of geo-engineering has launched all kinds of outlandish ideas for combating climate change, from dumping iron into the world’s oceans to shooting mirrors into space. A report published last Thursday from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) suggested that a forest of 100,000 artificial “trees” could be “planted” near depleted oil and gas reserves to trap carbon in a filter and bury it underground. The carbon suckers look more like fly swatters than actual arbors, but researchers say that once fully developed, the “trees” could remove thousands of times more carbon than a real tree.

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Ice Sculptures Mark 100 Days Until Copenhagen Climate Summit

100 child-sized ice sculptures sit in Beijing’s Temple of Earth to represent the 1 billion lives that will be lost in Asia due to water shortages caused by climate change. The art installation marks the launch of the TckTckTck Campaign, a campaign that works to raise awareness of the importance of a fair and ambitious agreement at the upcoming United Nations Copenhagen Climate Summit, taking place from December 7 to 18, 2009, where world leaders will gather to establish a plan to protect the world’s population from climate change.

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Global Warming Could Actually Tilt the Earth’s Axis

Lots of things cause Earth’s spinning top-like axis to shift — earthquakes, El Nino, and even volcano eruptions. Now scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory say that global warming could actually alter the tilt of our planet’s axis due to instability from melting ice sheets! Scientists have long theorized that climate change could cause a negligible amount of movement in the axis, but NASA’s research shows that the problem could be much more severe than was initially thought. In fact, it could be as drastic as the northern pole shifting by 1.5 centimeters every year towards Hawaii and Alaska.

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Futuristic Designs Protect SF Bay From Rising Tides

In the San Francisco Bay, water levels may rise 55 inches over the next 100 years. That doesn’t sound like much initially, but around the coastline, that makes a huge impact. High water levels are a liability. The challenge for the entrants of the recent Rising Tides competition was to take this liability and make it an asset. The winning proposals include inflatable dikes, laser levels, water recycling, habitat restoration, and bioswale street systems.

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OFF Architecture’s Visionary Eco-Bridge Spans the Bering Strait

In one of the most ambitious examples of speculative architecture of the year, Paris-based OFF Architecture recently unveiled an incredible eco-bridge spanning the Bering Strait from Russia to the United States that would facilitate international trade, protect wildlife, mitigate global warming, and promote peace. Every bit as beautiful and eco-conscious as it is quixotic, the project stole the show at the Bering Strait International Ideas Competition.

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Novacem Develops Carbon Eating Green Cement

We use it to build bridges, roads, sidewalks, and just about every structure relies on concrete for its base – wouldn’t it be wonderful if cement actually negated CO2 emissions instead of creating more? Well, now it can! Novacem, a fresh new startup company has actually concocted a cement that eats up carbon as it hardens! And with an annual production of more than 2.5 billion tons, can you imagine what kind of impact it would have if all the cement we used could do what Novacem’s green cement does?

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San Francisco Transforming Toxic Site into UN Global Warming Center

The Hunter’s Point Shipyard in San Francisco is a former naval shipyard filled with radiation and industrial toxins. It’s so dangerous that the U.S. Environmental Agency has designated it as one of the most polluted sites in the nation. But instead of letting the site fester, San Francisco has just announced plans to rid the shipyard of its toxins and build the U.N. Global Compact Center, a world class climate change think tank and green tech incubator. Due for competition in 2012, the new development will comprise over two million square feed of LEED-certified space.

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Barcoding Millions of Trees Could Relieve Global Warming

It’s a simple idea. While we might not usually think about it this way, tropical rainforests are the world’s giant wood store, and just like shoplifters lurk in your local Target, treelifters scheme to fraudulently help themselves to timber supplies. Your local retailer protects themself by electronically tagging merchandise and keeping a hawk’s eye on inventory, and Helveta, a British tech company, feels that forests can benefit from the same methods. So far, the company has hammered plastic barcodes (or barkodes, if you will) onto a million trees across Africa, southeast Asia and South America to help countries keep track of timber reserves, and they’re not done yet.

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GREEN DEBATE: The Right to Dry

What if someone told you how you could, or could not do something as simple as drying your clothes? That’s the issue that several people and the communities they live in are battling over right now in many separate but similar “clothesline wars” across the U.S. The linedryers’ argument? They want to be able to harness the power of the most eco-friendly “solar dryer” there is – the sun – by linedrying their clothing and believe they should have the right to do so. The landlords, property owners and community boards on the opposing side say that hanging laundry out of windows and in yards looks sloppy and lowers property value substantially. Who do YOU think is right? Sound off in our poll after the jump!

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The Age of Stupid: Film Charts the Future of Climate Change

Pitched to be this year’s most talked-about climate change film, The Age of Stupid is a new movie from director Franny Armstrong (of McLibel) and producer John Battsek (of One Day In September). In this epic tale, Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

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Guardian Climate Change Summit 2009

In the midst of the current global economic crisis, many businesses stand to lose sight of sustainability goals as they focus upon the meeting the bottom line and keeping their staff in employment. However there has never been a more critical time for environmental policy, and the Guardian Climate Change Summit 2009 is a rallying call for businesses to move from environmental awareness to action in these tough economic times. Taking place in on June 15th at London’s Hotel Russell, the conference aims to inspire more businesses to prioritize the environment by showing that meeting the bottom line financially and keeping climate change high on the agenda are far from incompatible.

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Generating Giant Sandstone Walls to Fight Desertification

Desertification, the degradation of land in arid areas, is a growing problem due to deforestation, fires, and climate change. Magnus Larsson, a student at London’s Architectural Association has a drastic solution–a 6,000 km long wall of artificially solidified sandstone spanning the Sahara Desert from east to west. Dunes along Larsson’s sandstone wall will act as a combination of refugee housing and a block against the desert.

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LIGHTS OUT: Earth Hour Goes Global on March 28th!

Earth Hour is a worldwide event that encourages individuals to unite in the fight against global warming by turning off their lights and spending sixty minutes outside with friends and family. Over the past two years the simple idea has grown into a monumental movement, and this year’s event is aiming for 1 billion participants. Earth hour 2009 takes place on March 28th at 8:30pm local time, so save the date, flip the switch, and see how this simple individual action can make a profound collective statement!

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ECO ART: Polar Bears Floating Down the Thames!

Eden TV, a new UK-based natural history TV channel has recently begun broadcasting. To celebrate their launch, the network built a 16-foot-high sculpture of a mother polar bear and her cub stranded on an iceberg. Also meant to increase awareness about the plight of the polar bear and their dwindling habitat as a result of climate change, the sculpture was sent to float down the Thames river. The event took place on January 26th and started at Greenwich, South East London traveling to the Tower Bridge and then to the House of Parliament.

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ECO ART ACTIVISM: Melting Man Challenges Climate Change

It appears that global warming has finally created its own version of the Wounded Veteran. Sitting in a puddle of himself in Buenos Aires’ Plaza Francia, a young man from Red Cross Argentina issued pleas to passers-by: not for spare change, but for action against climate change.

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ECO ART ACTIVISM: Swimming Above a Submerged City

Talk about subliminal advertising. HSBC Bank hired advertising agency Oglivy & Mather in Mumbai to create a campaign for their website, www.globalwarmingsolutions.co.in, designed to call the public’s attention to the reality of global warming. The campaign entailed placing a bird’s eye view of New York City’s skyline at the bottom of a pool located in India’s financial capital, Mumbai. Aimed to capture the attention of unsuspecting swimmers, the stunt is an elegantly simple idea of what climate change could mean for some of the world’s coastal cities.

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Protecting Storm Swept Coastlines With Oyster Shell Seawalls

Photo by Sean Powers, University of South Alabama

Coastal erosion is one of the most daunting problems that a seaside city or county can face. The loss of shorelines and coastal areas due to storm activity can be a devastating event, with damages ranging in the millions of dollars. There are a number of methods used to try and contain such erosion, but a new technique is seeking to establish a thriving underwater ecosystem in process. Marine scientists in Alabama are utilizing tons of oyster shells to create a barrier reef that will serve as a habitat for sea life, filter the water, and protect the coast.

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