10 ways to help save the planet

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 35 Comments

From fake trees to showering with friends—these ideas might even save you money

Simple steps to salvation 1. Sell solar power back into the grid

Solar panels are costly, so only the most committed environmentalists have thus far been willing to install them on the roofs of their homes and businesses. But new government programs that permit small renewable-energy producers to sell excess energy back into the power grid are making it easier for anyone to jump on the solar bandwagon. Last week, the Ontario Power Authority launched Canada’s first feed-in tariff program, which will offer a buy-back rate of up to 80.2 cents per kilowatt for solar power—more than seven times the rate paid for other forms of green power, like wind.

Want in? A grid-connected system at home, including installation, will cost about $10 per watt of output. If you installed a 2,000-watt system (at a cost of $20,000), then depending on your energy consumption you could bring in roughly $1,850 in revenue each year, recouping your investment in just over 10 years. And considering solar panels can last 30 years or longer, that’s a fairly sunny long-range forecast.—Jen Cutts

2. Fake trees

Trees, we all know, are carbon catchers. Problem is, they don’t catch enough of the stuff, and the process is slow. So scientists have built a better mousetrap, so to speak. According to a new report out of the U.K., the most effective way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) levels is to construct hundreds of thousands of artificial, greenhouse-gas-scrubbing trees.

Prototypes already exist—they’re made up of a type of mesh suspended between a two-pronged fork, and look like gigantic fly swatters. As air blows through the structure, CO2 binds to an absorbent compound, a process that removes the carbon 1,000 times faster then normal plants.
There are problems: the trees are expensive—more than $20,000 each—and “planting” 100,000 of them would offset only 60 per cent of the CO2 produced by a country the size of the U.K. With enough government funding, though, fake forests could start popping up around the world within the next few years.—Tom Henheffer Continue…

Canada’s sickest lake

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 34 Comments

Living, toxic goo is killing lakes the world over. It may be too late for Lake Winnipeg.

Cisco! Walleye! Whiteﬁsh! From the foredeck of the MV Namao, a scientific research vessel on Lake Winnipeg, student-scientists in rubber boots and banana-yellow hard hats are calling out the catch. They’ve also landed troutperch and emerald shiners, whose weight, stomach contents, skin tissues and isotopic concentrations will help gauge the health of the huge prairie lake. The trawl net—which looks like a bright blue tube sock with a nine-metre hole—was hauled aboard by a yellow crane just before the skies went suddenly dark, unleashing a heavy wall of rain like only the prairies can. Walloped by wind and rain, even the Namao—at 34 m, the biggest ship on the lake—is rocking and rolling on Lake Winnipeg’s dangerous, ocean-sized waves.

Perfect storm conditions are also brewing below the surface. Ironically, the isolated prairie lake, ringed by pristine Boreal forest, tucked far away from industry and major population centres, has become the sickest big lake in the country. What was once a small patch of algae, first noted in the 1990s, now grows to smother more than half of the massive 24,500-sq.-km lake most summers. In 2006, the pea soup blanket covered almost the entire lake, home to 10,000 cottagers, a $100-million tourism and recreation industry, and a $25-million commercial fishery. It’s “like sailing through a sea of green paint,” says Namao head biologist Alex Salki, one of a handful of concerned local lake scientists who founded the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium. The putrid green mat, twice the size of P.E.I. and clearly visible from space, is jaw-dropping evidence of an ecosystem in deep trouble. Already, Lake Winnipeg, the world’s tenth-biggest lake, is in worse shape than notorious Lake Erie, says David Schindler, one of the world’s top water authorities, based at the University of Alberta. Continue…