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Today’s Stories:

• US leads in Geothermal production
• Brazil talks tough to the big boys
• Bacteria in your parcels! Oh no!
• Britain Poo-poos us once again, but literally this time!
• But Brits are still too wasteful!
• Famous author stirs up swine flu controversy

According to the New York Times, the US currently leads the world in Geothermal power production. With 70 plants across the nation, the US is producing 3,100 megawatts of electrical power. Go USA!

However, this geothermal power still only accounts for less than 1 percent of the electricity generation of the United States. But all is not lost, because recent projections suggest that the US, using only its current resources, could expand their geothermal power another 40,000 megawatts, while the development of new enhanced geothermal systems could bring an additional 517,800 megawatts online.

While these facts and figures are really good, geothermal power currently lacks the investors that wind and solar energy power have. Because it doesn’t traditionally share the spotlight with these competing energy sources, creation of new plants is lagging behind.

Many people think that exploring several different means of creating renewable energy is the right way to go. But only time will tell if Americans and the rest of the world think that geothermal is up to snuff.

Brazil talks tough to the big boys

Sometimes, when the leader isn’t leading, you gotta take the law into your own hands. And that’s what Brazil is currently up to. As a political gesture to the US, Great Britain and other world-leading nations, Brazil has pledged to curb its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

The idea is aimed at pressing rich nations into agreeing to large cuts in carbon. The country’s chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, said Brazil would take proposals for voluntary reductions of 38-42% by 2020 to the Copenhagen climate change summit next month.

Good luck, Brazil! We’re rooting for you!

Bacteria in your parcels! Oh no!

Everyone knows packing peanuts are bad for the environment. You get them with your packages and throw them in the trash, which gets dumped into landfills. Packing peanuts only get used once, but since the majority of them are not biodegradable, they sprinkle the countryside and stay there…FOREVER!

Not if Mareike Frensmeier has anything to say about it. Ecogeek.org reports that Mareike just won third place in the Cargo Packs 2020 challenge for his bacteria wrap idea called Bacs.  The packaging is made by covering an object with a culture of the bacterium acetobacter xylinum, then starting a sugar feeding frenzy.  This creates a “fibrous nano-scaled cellulose network” that encases the object and keeps it safe along its journey.

The Bacs system can be manipulated to offer damp, gel-like packaging for food, dry, paper-like packaging or freeze-dried, foam-like packaging for the most fragile objects. Gross, but genius!

Britain Poo-poos us once again, but literally this time!

From CleanTechnica.com: Want more energy and less waste? Prepare to solve all your problems in the cutest and also stinkiest way possible: Diaper Power!

That’s right. The U.K. companies Versus Energy and Knowaste have teamed up to build the first diaper recyling plant in England. The new recycling plant will power itself with sustainable energy generated from the organic materials recovered from disposable diapers.

Organic Waste accounts for only 2% of the materials in “pre-owned” disposable diapers.  What happens to the other 98%?  It will be dried, sterilized, and separated into reusable paper pulp and plastic. The end use of those materials has not yet been announced but based on Knowaste’s past experience, roof tiles, shoe insoles, wallpaper, plastic “wood,” and industrial thickeners are likely candidates.

But Brits are still too wasteful!

While they are rather cheeky when it comes to their babies’ bums, the country as a whole is still too wasteful with the things they put or don’t put in their mouths. TreeHugger reports that 5.8 million tons of food and drink that could have been consumed goes in the trash every year in the U.K., according to a new report.

Those numbers — (about $20 billion US), (5.8 million tons) and (nearly $1150 US) per family — all add up to about (22 million tons) of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s about 2.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions associated with all consumption, or about the same carbon emissions of two million UK citizens each year.

Britain is taking good steps but they are still far behind.

Famous author stirs up swine flu controversy

Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of “Eating Animals,” a new nonfiction book on the food industry, went on the Ellen Degeneres show recently to talk about his new book. Why does this matter? Because among other things, he claimed that swine flu is a byproduct of factory farming. He said that H1N1 came from a hog farm in North Carolina in the late 1990s.

Researchers at that time did find an H3N2 flu virus in pigs there, but it had a different genetic architecture than the current H1N1 pandemic virus circulating around the world.

However, Dr. Gregory Gray, the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health says, “When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort and recombine into novel strains.”

So the slightly sensationalist claim by Safran Foer that H1N1 was a direct result of factory farming is not entirely true, however the health of humans and the planet does depend on the food we eat and how we create and process that food.

Some of the non-misleading things Safran Foer said about factory farming included the fact that 40% of Global Warming is caused by factory farming, it’s the number one cause of air pollution and the number one cause of water pollution, and it is rendering our anti-biotics less effective.