According to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) the world population is due to hit seven billion by 2011. This occurs as it hit six billion only 12 years ago, and five billion 24 years ago. The current increase of global population poses multiple serious problems.With decreasing water supplies as the Himalaya’s snow is melting and …
For the first post of the year I would like to wish you a happy and sustainable year 2011. I hope this time we will get what we need : a global legal agreement on climate change and clean energy. I also would like to start this year by having a look at what I …
The main problem with renewables today is scale. Even if they are growing faster and faster, we very rarely see projects that will bring more than a few hundred megawatts to the grids. But it is changing. Indeed, to CleanTechies, South Africa will soon build a five gigawatt park where technologies in photovoltaic and concentrated …
Living now in Paris I am able to go easily to conferences. Yesterday I was attending to a conference given by Mr.Paul van Son and Dr. Oliver Steinmetz, the CEO of Desertec Industries and member of the supervisory board, respectively. Their enthusiasm and visionary ambitions are highly communicative. I now compare the Desertec project to …
The United Nations are launching the Decade for Deserts and the Fight against Desertification, an effort to improve the protection and management of the world’s drylands, home to over two billion people. Drylands take up 41 percent of the land surface and are threatened by multiple factors such as soil degradation, climate change and unsustainable …
I once wrote that China planted a great green wall to stop desertification. It seems some African nations are willing to follow this example in order to stop the Sahara from going South. Indeed to the BBC : “The Great Green Wall project is backed by the African Union and is aimed at halting the …
Since Friday millions of people – me included – are following the 2010 Football FIFA World Cup which is taking place this year in South Africa. It will last one full month. This event will have according to EU Infrastructure a carbon footprint of 2.7 millions tons of carbon dioxide. Out of this 1.9 million tons …
It is no news for you if you subscribed to this website : solar thermal alone could provide up to a quarter of global electricity by 2050. The use of molten salt could enable our civilization to store solar electricity for up to seven hours. Morocco is ideally located to harvest all this energy as …
One of the many worrying consequences of climate change and global warming is desertification. To an expert it is currently spreading like cancer in the Middle East and in NorthAfrica. Indeed, to data provided by The United Nations Development Programme’s 2009 Arab Human Development Report desertification is threatening 2.8 million square kilometers of land in …
According to Enerzine [Fr] and other sources the Desertec Project is getting international support as several companies from Europe, America and Africa are joining the Desertec Industrial Initiative (Dii). The US company First Solar was the first to join in and five more companies from Morocco, Tunisia, France, Spain and Italy followed suit. Desertec is …
