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Showing posts from May, 2020

Are we on track for Paris Agreement ?

The Sars-COV-2 virus world crisis has deeply affected millions of people's lives, unfortunately, the most vulnerable ones. Following the sanitary crisis, we are entering an unprecedented economic and social crisis. The way we'll get out of this crisis will probably determine the Earth's health for the decades to come. Despite thousands of lost lives and millions of people sent back in poverty, this crisis is an opportunity for humanity to do an introspection: what societal model it aim for? what are the limits of the current model? what role as part of the whole earth ecosystem it wants to play?  Air pollution has reduced dramatically in India due to lockdown,  residents in northern India say they can see snow-capped Himalaya 200 km away for the first time in 30 years - source SBS Hind Several Earth indicators (see "the donut" concept in "the facts" page) have significantly evolved during the last three months.      As an example, it

We never really understood the transition before : Watch it

Our project By2Bay.bike was born with our irrepressible desire to move from being a "spectator" of change to an "actor" of transition. A great actor of this transition is the polytechnicien Jean-Marc Jancovici (Partner, www.carbone4.com President, www.theshiftproject.org, Professor, www.mines-paristech.fr , Blog www.jancovici.com, LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jean-marc-jancovici/ The latter gave a magnificent lecture during the inaugural lesson at Sciences-Po Paris 2019.  It lasts about 90', but today, these are minutes that had a return on investment far beyond any financial calculation.   Gery and I have become "shifters" in his project and thanks to the generosity of our friend Eric Hautemont, we can present here the lecture in its English subtitled version. Watch it, you won't be disappointed. Far from it.

Stanford University: a national leader in energy efficiency and carbon reduction

Gery was ending his last post proposing to share our discoveries and exploring the existing energy and food production alternatives. So, as a neighbour of Stanford University, I heard that the University had just completed a transformational campus-wide energy system.   Guess what?  They used to have a 100% fossil-fuel-based combined heat and power plant (co-generation) and today University has replaced it with grid-sourced electricity and a first-of-its-kind heat recovery system. The results are amazing : Greenhouse gas emissions slashed by 68% Fossil fuel use reduced by 65% Water use on campus reduced by 15%  This comprehensive Stanford Energy System Innovation (SESI) eliminates 150.000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually (the equivalent of removing 32.000 cars from the road every year.)  SESI combines an offsite, dedicated solar farm producing 68 megawatts of clean renewable electricity via 150.000 high-efficiency photovoltaic panels; conversion of th