bemoreeco

HippyShopper, the brilliant green blog concerning all things fashionable, green, and sometimes rather quirky, has released a great roundup of this summer’s great green fashion.

If you’re looking for a great read from a reliable source, then Abi and co at HippyShopper is a great place to start. Head on over and read the reviews.

 

We didn’t want to do this, but some of the green ideas we hear about merit special attention. So from now on we’re going to highlight the dumbest green idea of the week. Winning wont be easy, the competition this week has been particularly fierce. Here are the top three entries:

1) Wallace Broecker and his Giant Trees

BBC News reports that Wallace Broecker, the man who coined the term ‘global warming’ has finally found its solution. Why not plant giant artificial trees to pull CO2 from the air? He claims that 20m of these “Carbon Scrubbers” could capture all the CO2 produced in the US.

With just an investment of £303bn a year, 60m of these 50ft high artificial trees could absorb all of the CO2 produced worldwide.

2) The ASUS6 Bamboo Laptop

Abi at Hippyshopper (via Techdigest and Gizmodo) contributes to the debate with a not quite so green laptop from ASUS. You can read about the original idea here:

What began as an environmentally-friendly laptop with a bamboo casing, has become a powerful beast of a laptop with a strip of bamboo glued on top. You can see the remarkable transformation from the two images below.

3) Environmentally Friendly Bombs

This one comes in from Earth First (Via: Yahoo News). Not content with dropping bombs on hapless oil-dwellers, the USA has decided to reduce it’s bad-karma footprint with these environmentally-friendly bombs. Unlike those toxin-spewing, debris-spraying, bombs of the Vietnam/Iraq generation, these ones have these derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon like TNT and most other bombs do. In initial experiments, G2ZT and HBT produced fewer toxic byproducts than common explosives. Still, they did generate some dangerous hydrogen cyanide gas.

And the winner is: The ASUS6 Bamboo(less) Laptop

Yes, the environmentally-irrelevant laptop takes it. At least the environmentally friendly-bombs and giant artificial trees were unflinchingly stupid ideas. ASUS didn’t so much flinch as run and dive behind a giant rock in the face of possible fire regulations. There is a lesson to be learned here, don’t announce and reveal a prototype unless you’re fairly certain it’s not going to catch fire (bonus tip: wood burns). Have some before and after images:

What it was meant to be:

And what it became:

 

Other contenders included the Amsterdam cycle path, Carbon Ration Cards and Recycled Alien Tables.

Greenpeace have attacked Gordon Brown’s calls to increase nuclear production to resolve the energy crisis. Using no less than 7 crisis which have arisen in the industry last week, Greenpeace called upon Gordon Brown to drop the “costly” and “unsafe” nuclear option and focus upon investing in real zero-emission technologies.

“The energy crunch is of our own making. By refusing to embrace new technologies early on, the UK is now dangerously behind its European neighbours in areas like energy efficiency, decentralised energy and renewables. The German renewable energy sector now generates more power than our entire nuclear fleet. In the time it would take us to build a new nuclear power station they will have added gigawatts more. In the time it takes to read this blog, a German installer has probably bolted another few solar energy systems onto another few roofs.

Instead of planning for the future, the government has sat on its hands until the only answer is to repeat the nuclear clarion call in the hope that the public will accept it as an unfortunate, but necessary evil. As experience has shown time and again, expensive, dangerous and unreliable nuclear reactors are not the answer to climate change. Instead, the transition to a zero carbon age will require true vision, political will and massive amounts of courage.”

You can read more of Greenpeace’s response to Gordon’s call for nuclear energy through one of the links below:

• Will there be blood?
• Black Tuesday blights Gordon’s Nuclear vision