Overnight News Digest: Green Goodness

Aloha...konichiwa...hola....YO!!

 Happy Sunday...

I LOVE ARNOLD!!! I love this man sometimes...He tells auto industry to stop whining!!

The Republican governor met Thursday with the executives, who requested the get-together. In an interview afterward, he said he told them "the train has left the station" and that they should stop challenging California rules that are intended to help slow the rate of global warming.

"I said, 'While you're whining, you should be creating new technologies. That's how you meet the date," Schwarzenegger told The Associated Press after meeting with members of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

He can have his Hummer that is hydrogen powered, I could care less. It's about time someone consistently stood up to Big Auto and he has. Remember he is serving without pay. He volunteered to not get paid as the state has such financial issues.

California to perserve huge tracts of land (Python reference intended)

A vast mountainous region glimpsed by generations of Californians mainly through bug-pocked windshields on Interstate 5 was preserved Thursday in what conservationists say is the largest, most ecologically crucial acquisition of public land in state history.

The deal saves from development more than 240,000 acres of the Tejon Ranch - a ruggedly diverse stretch of grassland, forest and oak woodland just north of Los Angeles that is known to motorists simply as the Grapevine.

It is, in reality, a unique ecosystem eight times the size of San Francisco. The 375-square-mile expanse of open land combines desert, mountain and valley habitat, a multi-layered wildlife corridor that is home to a wide variety of birds and animals, including the endangered California condor and the kit fox.

The plan is to reroute a 37-mile segment of the Pacific Crest Trail that now meanders through the Mojave Desert so that it goes through the ranch. It would open vast tracts of wilderness to the public and create a natural corridor that would give wildlife room to migrate and adapt in the event environmental changes caused by global warming disrupt their current habitat.

"It is one of the great conservation achievements in California history," said Joel Reynolds, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of a coalition of conservation groups, including the Sierra Club and Audubon California, that spent the past two years negotiating the deal.

"It has been the number one conservation priority because it is the largest private landholding in the state," he said. "It is an opportunity for us to conserve contiguous land on a scale that is unprecedented."

Luring bats to reseed forests

Often, a lack of new seeds is the biggest obstacle to natural forest regeneration in the tropics, research shows. Bats pollinate an estimated 1000 neotropical plant species and are champion dispersers of seeds via their feces. But bats need roosts, which are few and far between on logged-out lands. To investigate the effects of providing this missing habitat link, Detlev Kelm of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Germany) and his colleagues fabricated boxes from sawdust and concrete that mimicked the hollow tree trunks that bats naturally roost in. They installed 45 imitation roosts in two different habitats in Costa Rica: in continuous forest within the La Selva Biological Station and on agricultural land up to several kilometers away. They also set up traps to collect "seed rain" from bats defecating in flight.

After monitoring the study sites from 2000 to 2006, the researchers discovered that 10 different species of bats were quick to take advantage of the new lodgings. They permanently colonized all the artificial roosts, usually within weeks of installation, Kelm reports. The bats' droppings contained seeds of more than 60 plant species and, notably, in the nonforested sites most seeds were from pioneer varieties critical to forest restoration. The findings show that artificial roosts could act as nuclei for forest recovery and help link fragmented landscapes, he says. "The species attracted to the roosts are common and widely distributed, so this method could likely work in many regions," he adds.

Europe a step ahead again....trying to recycle solar panels.

The Solar Industry Tries to Stay One Step Ahead of Regulators
As solar panels become more mainstream and a higher volume of them is produced, they are bound to attract more attention from regulators. Many of the biggest companies that make solar panels have decided to preempt that wave of regulation by voluntarily joining up and creating the first large-scale scheme to recycle solar panels in Europe. The goal is to have the system in place by the end of this year.

"We will be the first in Europe to establish such a system. And I could well imagine that it will become a model for other countries," said PV Cycle President Karsten Wambach, who also heads SolarWorld's Solar Material division.

For you nature documentary buffs.

For the many of you that grew up following Sir Attenborough's escapades (and listening to his captivating voice) around the world, the newly released BBC Natural History Collection will make a welcome addition to your DVD collection. The voluminous 33-plus hour 17-DVD set includes The Life of Mammals, The Life of Birds, Blue Planet and (of course) Planet Earth. It also comes with more hours of special features, and other goodies than you can throw a stick at.

REI to retrofit 11 stores with solar

REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc) figures that this is "one of the largest solar investments for a specialty retailer in the country." In some instances the solar panels will provide 35% of a stores energy. Collectively they’ll generate 1.1 million kilowatt hours of electricity. This is said to be equal to power 117 homes all year or cutting 80 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

The lucky store locations are California (Arcadia, Folsom, Sacramento, San Carlos, San Diego, San Francisco and Santa Rosa), Oregon (Clackamas, Hillsboro and Tualatin) and Round Rock in Texas. The oudoor gear co-op will use these stores as test cases to determine how it approaches solar installations in the future.

Using old subway cars to make coral reefs

After four decades carrying millions of New Yorkers, 44 of the city's subway cars are now home to millions of fish.

The worn-out cars were dumped on Friday into the Atlantic Ocean, 21 miles off the Maryland coast, to create an artificial reef, designed to attract fish for the state's lucrative sport-fishing industry.

Oilman orders $2 billion in wind turbines

Maverick oilman T. Boone Pickens' plan for a mammoth wind farm in the Texas Panhandle is a $2 billion bet that Congress will extend a tax credit critical to the environmentally friendly industry.

Pickens' company, Mesa Power, is purchasing hundreds of wind turbines from General Electric Co. to create the Pampa Wind Project, which will eventually cover 400,000 acres and generate enough power for more than 1.3 million homes. (GE is a parent company in the joint venture that operates msnbc.com.)

"We are making Pampa the wind capital of the world," Pickens said, elaborating on plans he first disclosed last year. "It's clear that landowners and local officials understand the economic benefits that this renewable energy can bring not only to landowners who are involved with the project, but also in revitalizing an area that has struggled in recent years.