Warmer weather has allowed pine beetle populations to spread far and wide across British Columbia’s Central Interior region, turning a once effective forest-based carbon sink into a carbon smokestack. The article quotes estimates that the beetle will wipe out 80% of the pine forest in the next five years. And what does that mean?…

Canadian Forest Service scientist Werner Kurz estimates the beetle’s devastation will release almost a billion megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2020. That’s equivalent to about five years of emissions from Canada’s transportation sector, said Kurz.

What’s it going to take to start moving information like this from the science page to the front page? (More info here.)

What I like about this story is where the money comes from. Including this snip:

While Gore declined to quantify his contribution to the effort, he has devoted all his proceeds from the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” the best-selling companion book, his salary from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and several international prizes, such as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which add up to more than a $2.7 million.

Read more here and see the video below.

Last night Montreal hosted ‘Nuit Blanche‘ a sort all-night winter party that wraps up the Montreal High-Lights Festival. The ‘festival’ itself is really just a glossed-up bundle of disjointed cultural events that would be going on festival or no festival, but it still manages to turn into a pretty good exercise in city-wide cohesion. When you’ve got stuff going on all night, free shuttle buses, communal breakfasts and disco dancing at City Hall, you’re obviously heading in the right direction.

Since I’m interested in the future, the environment, oil and the end times, I decided to head down to the Canadian Centre for Architecture to check out a program that they were offering that included DJs, an outdoor bar made of ice and exibits on the looming global oil problems and a look back at the energy crisis of 1973. It was pretty fun to wander around the exhibit at two in the morning reading about a series of experiments in off-the-grid living that took place in the late 70s.

I’d never heard about the “New Alchemy Institute“, for example, who from 1971 to 1991 conducted a series of experiments whose aim was to discover new sustainable living techniques. They used fish and rabbits and worms. A quote from New Alchemy co-founder John Todd:

We asked ourselves the question: Is it possible to grow the food needs of a small group of people in a small space without harming the environment and without enormous recourse to external sources of energy and material? Could we design a system that is self-sustainable?

We’ve been in trouble before when it comes to expensive energy and the effects hit the Western world hard and fast. We started to put our heads together to work towards practical solutions and then we totally stepped on our dicks, forgot our lessons and were suddenly building McMansions to house our boxy SUVs. A truly huge wtf? moment in human history.

You can catch the “1973: Sorry, Out of Gas — Architecture’s Response to the Global Oil Crisis” exhibit in Montreal until April 20th.

An unprecedented exploration of the architectural experimentation following the 1973 oil crisis, when the value of oil increased exponentially and triggered economic, political, and social upheaval across the world. Sparked by the combination of reduced oil production and drastically increased prices, the oil crisis marked the end of a period of constant growth in Western countries following the Second World War. Along with social and economic adjustments came the understanding that unlimited development based on unrestricted oil at low prices was no longer feasible. Taking its title from familiar signs at gas stations throughout North America during those years, 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas features over 350 objects including architectural drawings, photographs, books and pamphlets, archival television footage, and historical artefacts to map the global response to the shortage and its relevance to architecture today.

The New York Times has an excellent piece up about:

[the world’s] first secure, deep-frozen repository for backup supplies of seeds from hundreds of thousands of plant varieties that underpin agriculture

I know I’m a sucker for apocalyptic end-times talk but you’ve got to admire human ingenuity when we’re doing stuff like this.

The new repository is intended to be an insurance policy for individual countries and also for humanity more generally, should larger-scale disaster strike (anything from pestilence to an asteroid impact).

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault’s official site is here.

One of the things you notice as you drive around the Danish countryside is the awesome amount of wind turbines everywhere. I learned that because Denmark took Kyoto seriously, they became a world leader in this type of technology and that more than 20% of their electrical grid is now supplied by wind power (from turbines that are largely owned by small groups, that reap the monetary rewards that come from limitless “free” energy).

The turbines are programmed to keep rotating in low wind (to prevent lock-up) and to lock-down during big windstorms. Here’s what happens when the locking mechanism fails:

Jeanne and I recently became proud owners of a 100% electric Vespa-like thrill ride fun ride called the EVT-168. And if we ever hit the big-time, we hope that the electric vehicle upgrade path leads towards the ready-for-purchase beast above.

I recently wrote about the Tesla Roadster for Lycos and I don’t think they’ll mind if I reproduce the text here where no one will ever notice it (links embedded in the text)…

Tesla Roadster

If the future of transportation looks like this, let’s hit the fast-forward button pronto.

Even though the Tesla Roadster is working through some prototype issues (like trying to find a transmission that can withstand the kick-assedness of an over-powerful engine that supplies continuous torque) the stats on this vehicle are pick-your-jaw-off-the-floor incredible:

0 to 60 mph in under 4 seconds in a 220 mile range, zero-emission, 2¢/mile thrill-ride.

It’s electronic, guilt-free automotive sexiness.

Tesla is planning to offer more modestly priced versions of their cars in the future (the Roadster retails at about $100,000) and is also going to sell fun add-ons like solar panels that can be installed on the roof of your garage that give enough juice to power you through about 50 miles per day. That’s 100% off-the-grid sweetness. George Clooney already has one, shouldn’t you?

(Don’t have the scratch for that kind of electric ride? Why not look into one of the many, ever-improving, electric motorcycles and scooters that are coming down the pipe?)