Wednesday, April 22, 2015

California is running dry. Serious drought continues.


Nestlé

Kaytee Riek, SumOfUs.org


4/19/15


 Newsletters
To: Joseph Raglione

NASA just gave California a dire warning: it only has one year’s worth of water left. Meanwhile, Nestlé is bottling huge amounts of water from the parched desert to sell for profit.

Tell Nestlé to stop selling water from drought-stricken regions.
Click here to sign the Petition
Joseph,
California will run out of water very soon.
According to NASA’s new report, California only has enough water to get it through the next year. People are under strict water-saving measures; farmers are struggling to keep their crops alive.
Yet, Nestlé is bottling water from at least ten natural springs throughout California, including from some of the most drought-stricken areas of the state, and selling it for profit. In places like Sacramento, it’s paying less than $0.14 per gallon. This is bananas.
We can stop this. Nestlé’s already feeling pressure in Canada -- last month, we hit front page news for our campaign to stop the giant corporation from withdrawing Canadians’ groundwater at dirt cheap rates, and political parties in Canada are debating the policy. If we're to stop Nestlé from sucking California dry, we have to keep up the pressure.
As California's water supplies dry up, Nestlé continues to make millions selling bottled water. Nestlé's Sacramento water plant is sucking water at a rate of 50 million gallons of water each year from the city's water reserves, and that's just one of the billion dollar company's five bottling plants in California. And Nestlé isn't even following the rules -- a new investigation shows that Nestlé Water's permit to transport water across the San Bernardino National Forest for bottling expired 27 years ago.
The biggest victims of this unprecedented drought are California's food crops and the minimum-wage workers who grow them. More than 80% of the world's almonds and nearly half of the USA's fruits and vegetables come from California. As crops sit withering on the vine and tens of thousands of farm workers lose their livelihoods, it's a travesty that precious water is being bottled and sold for profit instead of feeding our crops. 
SumOfUs members have stood up to Nestlé exploiting our natural resources for profits, and the company has heard us loud and clear. After hundreds of thousands of us called on Nestlé to stop exploiting Pakistan's water supply, we took the message straight to the company's annual meeting. And now we are making front pages in Canada. We can stop Nestlé's water-guzzling ways in California, but we need to speak out before the state completely runs out of water. 
Thanks for all you do,
Kaytee, Kat, Angus, and the rest of the SumOfUs team

**********
More information:
Nestlé called out for bottling, selling California water during drought, Reuters, April 2 2015
California only has one year’s worth of its water supply left, NASA scientist warns, Raw Story, March 13 2015

How to make drinkable water out of thin air

CLEAN TECHNOLOGY
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published 
Last updated 
California is drying up. Its current drought is ringing alarm bells across the state and the country, but it is far from being alone globally in facing water shortages.
Developed economies such as California already rely on sophisticated irrigation systems to utilize what sources it has. But what’s needed now are even smarter, 21st-century solutions.
One constantly evolving technology is desalination, which is being deployed successfully around the world, even as engineers work toward better systems that will use less energy.

Another path to drinkable water

Desalination takes undrinkable seawater and removes the salt to provide potable water. It works by pushing salt water at high pressure through a superfine membrane, which blocks salt molecules and lets the water through.
Africa’s first desalination plant was built by GE in Algiers, Algeria in 2008. The plant supplies 53 million gallons of freshwater every day, a quarter of the city’s needs. 
Netherlands-based Dutch Rainmaker BV has come up with an alternative, and novel, solution to water shortages. The company, with partners in Canada and other countries, has developed a technology that can deliver water out of thin air. Its technology uses wind turbines to conjure up H20, in some cases with no access to any inflowing sources.
The company’s air-to-water system, called AW75, is already operating in extreme desert conditions in Kuwait and in the cooler Netherlands. It works without access to the power grid, with minimal operation and maintenance and no waste.
“We combine technologies that are already known,” says Piet Oosterling, Rainmaker’s founder and Chief Technology Officer. The system deploys the wind via a turbine, but instead of generating electricity it creates thermal energy to cause condensation. It works because air always contains a certain amount of water, though this varies according to temperatures and humidity. When it’s 20 degrees Celsius and the relative humidity is at 50 per cent, the air contains about seven grams of water per cubic metre of air. If the temperature climbs to 30 at the same humidity, the amount of water doubles.
“The air-to-condensation process effectively heats and cools the air to the dew point. It basically creates condensation and makes it rain,” says Michael O’Connor, Rainmaker Worldwide’s Peterborough, Ont.-based CEO. The condensed droplets are collected into a storage compartment.
The heart of the air-to-water unit is the device’s wind-fed power unit. Inside the nacelle at the top of the tower there’s a proprietary compressor (heat pump). The system converts wind energy to thermal power, which, in turn, feeds the water production unit attached to the tower. The turbine forces air through a heat exchanger, cooling the air and forming condensation. When the temperature falls below its dew-point, water droplets will form. These are collected in a water storage compartment.
The company’s prototypes in Kuwait and the Netherlands each produce an average 7,000 litres per day of water. The unit in Kuwait has managed to produce 8,700 litres a day at temperatures of 28 degrees and 40 per cent relative humidity.
The company will not say where else it is testing the technology – there is a French company testing a rival system - but says it has potential in countries such as Saudi Arabia, China, Indonesia and India.
Prototypes of the air-to-water system are installed in both Kuwait and the Netherlands. (DUTCH RAINMAKER)
Air-to-water technology is not viable for colder climes, such as remote communities in Canada’s North, some of which have suffered from polluted supplies or have to truck in water via ice roads. For such climates, Oosterling says Rainmaker has another technology that the company calls water-to-water.
This unit also uses wind to produce thermal energy, but rather than pull moisture from the air it heats water from existing supplies and sends it through a membrane. It’s different than conventional reverse osmosis (RO) membrane filtration because it only allows water vapour to pass through, by varying the pressure on each side of the membrane.
The water-to-water unit can be used to desalinate and to filter brackish water; the first model can produce up to 95,000 litres of water per day, enough for a town of between 1,800 and 4,000 people.
Oosterling says he is discovering that producing clean water from the wind may be useful in ways he didn’t anticipate, for example in the mining sector. “It’s something I never envisioned,” he says.
But for now, he is focused on trying to serve the needs of the 783 million people who don’t have regular access to clean water (according to the United Nations). “It can be used where the infrastructure is not tremendous,” he says. “It has to be simple and people have to be able to understand it.”
To enlarge image click here
For more innovation insights, visit www.gereports.ca
This content was produced by The Globe and Mail's advertising department, in consultation with GE. The Globe's editorial department was not involved in its creation.

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Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Our wonderful international web site index.


  This week I recommend you visit: 

18. = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhLa6O1OP0Y
30.= http://www.iTooch.com  How to greatly improve our school systems.
49.  http://eol.org/
50. http://www.seedsavers.org/onlinestore/
51. http://www.human4us.net/
53. http://www.popsci.com/chiles-calbuco-volcano-erupts-spectacularly
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Gentle People:

 We need to strengthen the United Nations and allow that organization to create a world wide peace force. Such a force, when created, must be deployed quickly to stop cruel dictators and blood thirsty anarchists from murdering innocent human beings. A world peace force based on protecting human rights and the environment and comprised of peace keepers from every nation on earth. They would not only be trained for fighting but they would also have medical training and would be utilized for emergency disaster relief anywhere on the planet.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Dear Mr. Nelson Raglione

We have received your request for media accreditation and have provided you with ID Number 35329. 

Please retain the ID Number for your records as it will be required to check on the status of your accreditation and to complete the accreditation process.

If you have not already done so, please forward your duly signed letter of assignment by fax to 1-212-963-4642 or as a scanned document in jpeg format or as a PDF to malu@un.org.

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Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Greenpeace Activists Are Refusing To Leave Oil Rig Headed For The Arctic, Despite Legal Threats

BY NATASHA GEILING POSTED ON 
 
"Greenpeace Activists Are Refusing To Leave Oil Rig Headed For The Arctic, Despite Legal Threats"
 
Greenpeace activists hold a banner that reads 'The People vs. Shell' as they scaled the Polar Pioneer drill rig in the Pacific Ocean.
Greenpeace activists hold a banner that reads ‘The People vs. Shell’ as they scaled the Polar Pioneer drill rig in the Pacific Ocean.
CREDIT: VINCENZO FLORAMO / GREENPEACE
On Monday, some 750 miles northwest of Hawaii, six Greenpeace activists boarded a Shell oil rig en route from Malaysia to the Port of Seattle in protest of the oil company’s plans for drilling in the Arctic. A mere 24 hours later, Shell filed a lawsuit in federal court, hoping to kick the activists off of the rig.
“These acts are far from peaceful demonstration,” Shell said in a press release following the injunction, which it filed in federal court in Alaska. “Boarding a moving vessel on the high seas is extremely dangerous and jeopardizes the safety of all concerned, including both the people working aboard and the protestors themselves.”
The protesters, who had been following the rig’s trans-Pacific journey on a Greenpeace ship named the Esperanza, used inflatable boats and climbing gear to approach the vessel carrying the rig — called the Blue Marlin — and scale the rig. The Esperanza, which has several other Greenpeace members on board, is continuing to follow the Blue Marlin, bringing protesters food and supplies as needed.
The 400-foot-tall rig, dubbed the Polar Pioneer, is intended to be staged for Arctic drillingonce it reaches Seattle. It is one of two rigs eventually bound for the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska, an area that Shell — pending federal permits — intends to develop for offshore drilling.
“We are certainly prepared to stay here as long as it takes to get out message out loud and clear that Arctic drilling is unacceptable,” Aliyah Field, environmental activist and one of the protesters currently on the rig told ThinkProgress.
Field said that, despite wind and cold, “everyone is feeling pretty good.” The protesters haven’t had direct contact with the Blue Marlin’s crew, and Field said that the crew hasn’t displayed any clear hostility toward them.
Field had not heard about Shell’s lawsuit, but in an e-mailed statement, Greenpeace USA’s Executive Director Annie Leonard called the injunction “Shell’s latest attempt to keep people from standing up for the Arctic.”
“Shell wants activists off its rig,” Leonard said. “We want Shell out of the Arctic.”
The protest comes a week after the Obama administration reaffirmed Shell’s 2008 lease in the Chukchi Sea, essentially giving the company the green light to begin preparations for drilling in the Arctic as early as this summer. Shell has reportedly spent $4 billion in its effort to drill in the Arctic, but hasn’t been allowed to drill there since 2012, when a key piece of safety equipment used in cleaning up oil spills failed.
Environmentalists worry that, given the Artcic’s remoteness and extreme weather, an oil spill would be a near-certainty. An Environmental Impact Report released by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) — part of the Department of the Interior, which gave last week’s go-ahead — found that, under the current plan for drilling in the Chukchi Sea, there is a 75 percent chance of a major oil spill in the Arctic.
This isn’t the first time that Greenpeace has boarded vessels in an attempt to stop Shell from drilling in the Arctic. In February of 2012, actress Lucy Lawless and seven other activists boarded an Arctic-bound drilling ship while it was in port in New Zealand. A month later, in March of 2012, activists boarded two ice-breakers leased by Shell as they were preparing to sail from Helsikni, Finland to the Arctic.
Following those protests, Shell won a federal court injunction that required Greenpeace USA to stay away from any of their Arctic-bound drill rigs until October of 2012.

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Stephanie Hulse, Greenpeace Canada <stephanie.hulse@greenpeace.ca>

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