Cyclist commuting in the Copenhagen neighborhood of Norrebro.
Rain or shine, in the light of summer or the early afternoon darkness of winter, under heavy sleet, unrelenting winds or drifts of snow, people in Copenhagen just bike. They bike in fur coats, they bike in suits and ties. They bike old, they bike young. They wheel their kids around on a cargo bike with a wooden box carrying the children up front, taking them to and from school; this is Copenhagen’s take on a minivan. People just bike, and after arriving in the city myself, I soon found out why: it’s usually the fastest way to get around. So I rented a bike, too.
Today, 60 percent of people in the city’s core commute by bike. In the greater Copenhagen area, over 40 percent do. “We see the same numbers [of commuting by bike] all year round,” says Copenhagen Environmental and Technical Affairs Mayor Morten Kabell.
“It’s not something that’s in Copenhagen’s genes, or that we’re weirder or stranger than any other people on earth,” Kabell says. “Every city can do this.”
Copenhagen has had enormous success getting people out of their cars and onto bikes, public transit and their own two feet. But this development has less to do with Danes wanting to save the planet, and much more to do with saving their own sanity.
An offshore wind farm is seen near the Danish island of Samso
Three turbines sit just offshore at the Avedore Holm wind energy test site near Copenhagen, Denmark. The turbines are operated by DONG Energy.
The Royal Danish Yacht sails past Denmark’s biggest offshore wind power farm near the island of Anholt
One of the turbines at the DONG Energy Avedore Holm test facility, with a coal power plant that is converting to biomass energy in the background.
Standing on the shore of the Baltic sea a few miles outside of Copenhagen, Denmark, the view’s about what you’d expect. Rocky shore, grey horizon, a boat here or there. But this shore is special. Look up, and you’ll see — and hear — three giant offshore wind turbines cutting through the air. Each stands 500 feet tall, with three blades (each close to 200 feet long), spinning non-stop.
“The blades look quite thin, but don’t be cheated,” says Rune Birk Nielsen, with DONG Energy, which runs the turbines. “They each weigh about twenty tons. They are massive.” Each turbine has a capacity of 3.6 megawatts, or enough to power 3,000 Danish homes.
Nielsen guides me through the small offshore wind park — well, technically it’s offshore. The turbines aren’t actually too far from land — each is connected to the shore by a short footbridge about ten yards long.
“For us, it’s kind of a demonstration park,” Nielsen says, “where we are able to test all sorts of things.” With turbines close to shore, they’re easier to fiddle with or repair. The company can safely train their workers without sending them far out to sea, where most of the country’s offshore turbines are.
Denmark is booming when it comes to wind energy. To understand how and why, you have to go back a few decades.Continue Reading →
Cathy McMullen and Tom Giovanetti debate a proposal to ban fracking at a meeting of the County GOP Womens Club.
Update, Nov. 5: Denton voters passed a local ban on “fracking,” an oil and gas production process. 59 percent of voters said “yes” to the ban, with 41 percent voting against. The Texas Oil and Gas Association (TXOGA) wasted no time in filing a request to overturn the vote, saying it violates state law.
Original story, Oct. 21: For Cathy McMullen, the reasons to ban fracking in Denton are as obvious at the drilling rig that sits on the corner of Masch Branch and Hampton Road on the northwest side of town. It’s big, it’s noisy, and she believes it vents toxic emissions into the community. The site is, however, not very close to any houses.
âIâll show you where this exact same thing was sitting by someoneâs home,” she says.
A recent drop in carbon emissions in the U.S. could only be temporary, a new report warns.
Texas will need to make big cuts in carbon emissions over the next 15 years under a mandate from the Environmental Protection Agency.  You can expect to hear complaints about the EPA rule at a two-day meeting of the House Environmental Regulations Committee starting Monday.
The federal agency and state leaders have been at odds for years and many conservatives worry that limiting carbon emission to fight climate change will hurt the economy.
But there are some in Texas who see an upside. Click the player to learn more.
Austin's Decker Lake is used for electricity production and recreations. But it could be re-purposed for municipal water use.
The funny thing about Walter E. Long Lake: most people don’t know it exists.
The lake, tucked into a rural-feeling part of North East Austin is big, by Austin standards. It can hold more water than Austin’s two central city Lakes -Lake Austin and Lady Bird Lake- combined. It was created to host a power plant, which it’s done for for nearly 50 years. That’s how it got its other name: Decker Lake.
But Last week, Austin’s city council voted on a plan to wean Austin off Decker Power Plant electricity, opting to shutter the plant to lower citywide emissions. If that happens, the lake could serve as Austinâs a new city reservoir.
âItâs a body of water most people donât know about. Some people use it, youâll see fishing boats out there on the lake,â says Sharlene Leurig, who works at Ceres, a non-profit specializing in sustainability. âBut for the most part itâs the unappreciated stepchild of the lakes we have here in Austin.â
Jennifer Ronk with the Houston Advanced Research Center
Global demand for solar panels could soon create shortages according to Bloomberg News.
In Texas, costs for solar are dropping and the amount of power Texans now get from the sun is up over 30-percent in the past year. But while some housing developments are banning the roof-top solar panels, saying theyâre unsightly, some homeowners in one Houston neighborhood canât imagine life without solar power.
Itâs the hottest part of the day in a subdivision on Houstonâs northwest side. The neatly-kept streets and lawns border several rows of recently-built, two-story homes made of brick and stone. They all look similar but a few of them have one difference: solar panels.
âThey donât even notice them till we tell (visitors) we have solar panels, theyâre like where,â said Velia Uballe, a stay-at-home mom.
They bought their new, solar-panel equipped house three years ago. Â But while Uballe said the panels hardly stand out, what theyâre saving on electricity definitely does.
Houston has the third highest number of CEOs with pilot licenses according to a study assessing risk-taking among executives
Itâs a sign of success: having your own plane and being your own pilot. In fact, Houston ranks third in the nation for the number of corporate chief executives who have pilot licenses. Dallas ranks sixth. But as highlighted by a tragedy earlier this spring in West Texas, there may be an added risk. But is that bad for the companyâs bottom line?
On a Wednesday afternoon this past June, a turboprop plane took off from Aspen Colorado.
Destination: Brenham Texas, northwest of Houston.
As the plane headed southeast, crossing over the Texas panhandle, it encountered a big line of thunderstorms. The on-line tracking service FlightAware shows the plane turned sharply to the south. It was sometime later that afternoon that a rancher would find the crumpled wreckage in an open field just west of Lubbock.
In the floodplain, several inches of fine silty mud sit atop thick, heavy clay. The clay is the finest dust eroded by the river, carried until this point then deposited as the river spreads out across the prairie. The silt is a thick rich mixture of sediment from upstream. The land in the floodplain naturally holds water very well.
In 2012, some farming districts on the Lower Colorado River were cut off from water for irrigation for the first time. Reservoirs were too low to flood tens of thousands of rice fields. Some asked, âWhy would anyone be farming rice in Texas in the first place?â
The answer is long, and it begins with the fact that parts of Texas haven’t always been dry. For farmers like Ronald Gertson, who remembers driving a tractor through rice fields as a child, recent years have been hard to bear.
âItâs just unbelievable that itâs been so bad that we have had three unprecedented years in a row, and I recognize some experts say we could have a couple of decades like this. I hope and pray thatâs not the case,â says Gertson, a rice farmer, chair of numerous water-related committees and, in recent years, unofficial spokesman for the Texas Rice Belt. âIf that is the case then yeah, this whole prairie is going to change.â
Do Hydrogen Cyanide Leaks Show Weakness of Current Regs?
Dave Fehling
Houston's Ship Channel is home to one of the nation's biggest oil refining and petrochemical complexes and is the site of the EPA hearing
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will set up its microphones for an all day hearing Tuesday in Galena Park, a community on Houston’s east side in the heart of the enormous Houston Ship Channel refinery complex. It’s the second of two such hearings with the first held last month in a similar community in Los Angeles.
At issue: new EPA rules that would make oil refineries invest in better equipment to reduce pollution emissions from storage tanks and to improve the efficiency of flares that burn emissions during plant “upsets”. Refineries would also have to increase fence-line monitoring to track exactly what pollution is blowing into adjacent communities.
The beer menu sits on the bar in Luckenbach, Texas.
The drought has tested industries across Texas in the last few years — and it’s even had an impact on beer.
One of MillerCoors’ mega-breweries is in south Fort Worth, and last year it produced 9 million barrels of beer. Environmental and sustainability engineer Lairy Johnson says the plant cut its water use by 9 percent.
Highlights from the Interview with Lairy Johnson:
On how much water the Fort Worth plant uses a year:
“In a year we use about 750 million gallons, but what we like to do is talk about how many barrels of water does it take to make a barrel of beer. In this past month we were about 3.18 barrels per barrel, 3.27 I think was our number last year for the average, and 3.21 is the year to date.â Continue Reading →
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