Green Mosh Pits

A fun idea for sustainable energy capture: recycle the energy of people dancing. It's actually not a stupid idea. Dancing releases a lot of kinetic energy into the floor, and if you know a lot of people are going to be moving around, you can rig up induction pads to get them to, say, power the lights where they are. You could probably do something like this in lots of places - roads, maybe? You'd just have to have some method of putting the power back into circulation.

the floor will have a give of one centimeter, enough to generate 5 to 10 watts of electricity per dancer. SDC estimates the eco-club will require about 2,000 people moving at once to keep the place bright.

The move isn't one born purely of ecological altruism. Even as environmentalists are better known for tree-hugging asceticism than night club hedonism, the Dutch are -- like most Europeans these days -- anxious to do their part for the environment. A survey conducted by SDC last year found that fully 66 percent of Dutch clubbers would be willing to dig deeper into their wallets for a green night out. Enviu -- which is also helping the port in Rotterdam, Europe's largest, reduce its emissions -- could do worse than starting in the clubbing capital of the Netherlands. Over 10,000 people go out in the city each weekend.

In a more serious vein, here's a concise and sensible plan for making electric cars viable.

(via metafilter)

Radio is cleaning up the nation

So I'm at work but I had to share this with someone (typing on my lunch break, obviously!):

I'm listening to my Launchcast internet station (which I should stop doing - they are pushing new songs I'm uninterested in hard, and obviously because it's new material that the record companies are trying to sell) and every now and then a commercial comes up, but I don't really listen to that very hard. But suddenly I notice what the woman is saying:

It's a commercial for a company called (I think) Esurance. She's going on and on about how seriously they take the climate crisis, and how Esurance customers are just so climate-friendly because they are saving all this paper, see, because they have all their documents online! "The road to a better tomorrow starts here", she says, all chipper, like. She's all about saving the rainforest.

The road-metaphor turns out to be apt: it's AUTO-insurance they're selling. That's AUTO as in cars. As in exhaust fumes. As in American cars, because it's a US company. That's the US as in the world's largest emitter of climate gases, with over one fifth of all carbon emissions, despite having only 1/50th of the world's population. And yes, that's cars, as in the second-largest source of carbon emissions in the US, providing roughly a third of total emissions, second only to coal-burning power plants.