Saturday, February 24, 2024

The Great Green Wall of Africa stops the desert

 

One way to fight global warming is to replace desert land with agricultural land.  And it's working!

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Tiny homes catching on!

 https://www.yahoo.com/news/great-compression-151806242.html

 

A decade ago, Jesse Russell was a former reality TV producer looking to get started in real estate. He had just moved back to Bend (his hometown) from Los Angeles, and began with a plot of two dozen 500-square-foot cottages sprinkled around a pond and common gardens. When he pitched it at community meetings, “the overwhelming sentiment was, ‘Nobody is going to live in a house that small,’” he said.

Then the units sold out, and his investors nearly doubled their money in two years.

Russell’s company, Hiatus Homes, has since built about three dozen more homes that range from 400 square feet to 900 square feet, and he has 100 more in development — a thriving business.

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I lived 2 summers in a 400 square foot cabin with an outhouse.  It was fine, but I did need to rent storage space for stuff I had accumulated living in a regular sized house. My home today is 864 square feet with a garage and for a single person that feels just right to me.  I have a spare bedroom for guests and a small back yard.  But most importantly, I can afford it.

Obviously families need larger homes.  But more and more it's single people looking to buy.

 

Friday, February 16, 2024

Now the entire world is stuck with plastic everywhere for thousands of years

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report

 

Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. Another challenge: the material degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can generally only be reused once or twice.

The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.

The research draws on previous investigations as well as newly revealed internal documents illustrating the extent of this decades-long campaign.

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Every living thing on earth is affected by the lies of an industry that would rather make money than worry about the health of the planet.

 

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

new style of windmill

 

https://youtu.be/TX9tN7yFhcE?si=fdXSxYQNp5jzc8NC

 Blades on an oval racetrack instead of blades on top of a tower?  Check it out.