Monthly Archives: June 2009

Beef: Getting more than you bargained for

Lately it seems that the livestock industry, particularly cattle have been getting some negative publicity. One of the latest articles on this topic, Greening the Herds: A New Diet to Cap Gas from the New York Times highlights the contribution of cattle ranches to world greenhouse gas emissions and a new effort at US dairies [...]
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What’s the trouble with oil? (5/5)

In this final post on crude oil I’ll discuss why there’s so much controversy over oil. In short, using fossil fuels like crude has negative effects on the environment, economy, and therefore everyone. The organic material that is found in crude oil sometimes contain sulfur atoms which if combusted turns into SO2 and then into [...]
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The Next Big Green Thing: LED Lighting

Buckingham Palace is doing it and so are US cities like Ann Arbor and Raleigh. All these cities are installing LED lighting, that is. The New York Times article “Green Promise Seen in Switch to LED Lighting” and a blog post from the Times website discuss the potential benefits and some downfalls of LED lighting. [...]
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The switch to digital television

I only made it about 3 paragraphs into this NYTimes article about the switch to digital television when I thought of a quick article to write for this blog. Okay, so I hope you know the gist of this whole story. The US government decided to end analogue television signals on June 12, 2009 to [...]
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How much oil do we use? (4/5)

Now that we’ve covered where oil comes from, what oil is chemically, and how we refine crude, it’s time to get to the heart of the oil hype – consumption. The cool flow diagram below shows where the USA gets oil from and where we use it. From this diagram we can learn quite a [...]
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