Dipping into the EarthFirst.com Archives for Green Sex Toys, Wind Powered Win, Miniguns, and Stupid Americans

Happy Sunday!

EarthFirst.com has been officially live since mid-May when we finally shook the ugly off and put up our current design, but I was writing daily for months before that. We didn’t have many readers at the time and used the space to work on our editorial voice.

I’ll be pulling out the old files from time to time to share a few good posts. This week we’ll be revisiting the archives for green sex toys, badass chain gun tree saws, idiot manchild CEOs, stupid Americans, and a whole lotta f-bombs.

Take a stroll down EF.com memory lane with us…

• 2,250 Minigun bullets to cut down a tree

• The hippies had it right- stop washing your hair!

• What’s better than a good wine buzz? A green wine buzz!

• Fsck Planet Earth. Fsck fsck fsck fsck fsck. But, you know, spelled with a u.

• Garbage, especially plastic, is choking the planet.

• This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone paying attention, but 18% of Americans are very, very stupid.

• How’s that GM stock doing Bob Lutz? Couldn’t have happened to a better guy.

• Break out the glass dildo and get your sexy green groove on chemical free! Yes, organic sex toys.

• OMFGFSMBBQ, do I want one of these all terrain transformer like badass super truck. Yeah, so it’d rip shit up, but damn, take a look at this thing!

Reuters Reporters Can’t Believe Billionaire Oilman Is Investing in Wind to Make Money

With a name like T. Boone Pickens, Jr., how could you not grow up to be a billionaire oilman?

80 year old T. Boone made his billions over the decades by growing his oil company through a flurry of mergers and acquisitions and is now setting his sites on the wind. His plan calls for spending $10B to build the worlds largest wind farm in Texas.

I found this news in a Reuters story, author Chris Baltimore seems blown away that someone actually expects to make money by doing something green. Check out:

But Pickens is not out to save the planet. He intends to make money.

Golly gee, a businessman invests in a green business and isn’t doing it to make the world a happier and shinier place? He actually will make money? Stop the presses, 1999 wants it’s storyline back.

Link [Reuters]

Ripping Off Mother Nature For Design Tips Nets Better Wind Turbines

Biomimicry is the new hotness. Nature has done a pretty damn good job of figuring out the right way to design for efficiency and it’s the smart designer who can pull out those lesson to apply to their work. Wind turbines are now getting the whale flipper treatment. It turns out that the bumps on the edge of a whale’s flippers make it a more efficient paddler. When those bumps are added to wind turbines they are 20% more efficient at moving air and have 32% less drag. Those are huge numbers in efficiency jumps. When you have a wind farm that makes hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars a year, even a 10% jump in output adds up a lot of extra bottom line.

Smart green design is going to make a whole lotta folks a whole lotta money.

Link [Ecogeek]

Video: Danish Wind Turbine Explodes in High Winds

When wind turbines attack!

Check out this wind turbine exploding in Denmark in some kicking high wind. Wind turbines have mechanisms to stop the blades from spinning when it gets super gusty but this one obviously malfunctioned. Yikes!

Windy Leader: Burt’s Bees Offers Wind Credits in Employee Benefits Package

Here’s a quick bit of cool personal news. One of the companies I’ve started in my career as an entrepreneur is Colorado based Renewable Choice Energy, a leading provider of clean wind credits. Me and my two pals Quayle Hodek and Kris Lotlikar started it the week before 9/11 in Quayle’s basement and it’s since grown to be a profitable 50+ person strong leader in their market.

It was great to read that Renewable Choice has partnered up with Burt’s Bees on a very cool new program. Burt’s Bees, which was bought by Clorox for almost $1 billion last year, not only purchased 3,954,000 kWh’s of wind credits as a company, but now reimburses employees for half of the cost of getting wind at their homes. To the best of my knowledge they are the first company to offer wind credits in their employee benefits package.

Very cool.

Link [Environmental Leader]

Stupid Utility Rules: 612 Year Wait for New Minnesota Wind Projects

Tell me how much sense this makes: due to some major old school bureaucratic clusterfuckery there is now a 612 year waiting list to build renewable energy projects in Minnesota. That’s right, if you want to put up a nice clean wind farm up in Garrison Keillor’s home state you have until 2620 to get everything together. What’s the holdup?

The Midwest Independent Transmission System (MISA) is the group in charge of the power lines and decides which power generation project gets to connect to them. Their regulations say they have to take two years to review each application and that they can’t look at more than one app at a time.

Those rules worked back in the day when the only thing going up was big ass coal plants but it got bogged down quite a bit with a flood of new wind farms wanting on the grid. Even with smaller operators bending the law a bit by clumping their projects together in one application there’s at least a fifty year wait. How dumb is that? Dumb enough to expect it’ll get fixed soon, but still… wtf.

Link [Solve Climate] via EcoGeek