Massive international growth potential for UK breakthrough (wildlife creatures) in road maintenance
No commentsBy ASI Solutions ASI Solutions
Potholes claim 1 in 6 vehicle failures Scottish roads the worst, South West the best
Local road lottery is being blamed for a 47 percent increase in car suspension failure during the past five years.
According to analysis by independent automotive warranty firm, Warranty Direct, the number of cars needing suspension and axle repairs as a result of poorly maintained roads and potholes has jumped from 9 percent of all claims in 1999 to an average of 17 percent for the first eight months of 2004.
Either continuous driving over cracked and uneven road surfaces, or the sudden jolting of a deep pothole, can cause damage to shock absorbers, springs, upper and lower arms, and stabiliser bars.
Regionally, Scottish drivers are the most at risk with a staggering 35 percent of all claims attributable to a road defect. The worst region in England during the past twelve months has been Anglia with nearly 1 in 5 breakdowns reporting suspension or axle damage. Greater London recorded a figure of nearly 14 percent, with roads in the South West, currently the least likely to damage the health of your vehicle at just over 11 percent.
Region %
Scotland 35.07
Anglia 19.11
North East 18.77
West Midlands 15.56
North West 15.25
Wales 14.42
Greater London 13.99
East Midlands 13.76
South East 12.40
South West 11.04
=======================
British Average 16.93
The data from Warranty Direct is supported by comments from the Institute of Civil Engineers and the Asphalt Industry Alliance about the state of British roads. The latest ALARM (Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance) survey, reported a 94 percent increase in visible defects over the past ten years, during which time the number of compensation claims against local authorities in England had doubled an annual payout of 85m.
ASI Solutions is author of this article on Infra-red road repair .
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Energy Consulting For Eco Homes
By Dominic Donaldson
In this tumultuous political climate, a time when banks are collapsing, house prices are falling and the planet is warming up; the issues surrounding new housing developments have become entwined with affordability and green living. The Government have set targets for new builds to have a sustainability level rating of six by 2016. This essentially means that these buildings will have to be carbon neutral by using renewable energy, and they will have to be built in a way that minimises energy loss. Embarking on an era where solar panels and wind turbines power our homes, government regulations mean that we are more likely to be calling upon the services of an Energy Consultant than an electrician.
The prominence of Energy Consultants in the construction industry is a reflection of the changing times of energy awareness. Climate change is being discussed in primary schools, and global warming has become a familiar household topic. Recycling cans and glass and composting organic waste has become second nature for most British households, and is a direct response to energy awareness campaigns. As the information filters down to the public, and becomes part of everyday life, the role of the energy consultant takes a turn towards the domestic sector. Energy consulting entails advising clients on how they can save money by saving energy, and how they can help save the environment by using energy from renewable sources.
The new Eco Towns as proposed by Gordon Brown are to be constructed from ecologically friendly materials and the architecture is designed to make them as energy efficient as possible. One such development in Nottingham called the Hockerton Housing Project has been a major success and provides a practical template for future energy efficient communities. By using materials with a high thermal performance, heat can be stored and released efficiently minimising the energy consumption of the household. Using solar panels and wind turbines to generate energy for electrical goods eliminates the need to be hooked to the national grid, and ensuring that all appliances are low energy, the need energy, even from renewable sources is reduced dramatically.
The Hockerton project is the result of a community self-build project. A group of people, with common interests in a low impact living put their enthusiasm and knowledge together to create a sustainable community. The project began in the early 1990s, before most people were aware of the impact our western lifestyle could have on the climate, and before eco-friendly became the buzz word du jour. The members of the project had the knowledge to create a sustainable low energy homestead using thermo-efficient materials and renewable energy technology. The eco-villages and towns that are being proposed by Gordon Brown are not projects initiated by people with a common interest in greener living. There will not be a wealth of experience for sustainable living to be drawn upon should anything go wrong with the system.
Despite the ever increasing interest in sustainable living, these towns will function like any other; they will be reliant on technology that requires professional maintenance and management. This is why energy consulting is going to be so prominent in the domestic sector. In the homes of the future, home owners are more likely to be worried about the house springing an energy leak than a water leak, and if the lights don’t come on the chances are you will call for the services of an Energy Consultant, not an electrician.
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Dominic Donaldson is an expert in the engineering industry.
Find out more aboutabout energy consulting and how an expert on renewable energy could help save you money.
Environmentalists In Books And Movies
By James Nash
In the movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” climate-change scientists turn out to be right - the earth’s climate DOES go bad on us, though the end result is global super-cooling, not global overheating. But that was a work of fiction based only loosely on the facts of climate change. Scientists ALL agree that the events portrayed in the movie could not happen so quickly and are not likely to happen at all, at least not any time soon.
Now comes Michael Crichton with “State of Confusion,” a novel in which environmentalists are so farklempt over inaction on global warming that they start trying to get attention picture of antarctic ice shelf by causing some of the very serious problems they’re warning against - for example, the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf.
These destroy-the-world-to-save-it tactics are about as plausible as the plot in any other “catastrophe” book or movie, but Crichton decides to take himself seriously in “State of Confusion” by including charts and graphs - ostensibly as part of the protagonist’s argument - as well as his own monograph on environmental fear-mongering. Harumph. Apparently Dr. Crichton’s brain is so large that it allows him to be smarter and wiser than the hundreds of climate experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who overwhelmingly agree that global warming IS a major problem.
Oh, and also smarter than the super-brains at the National Academy of Sciences, who have confirmed the main conclusions offered by the IPCC. Other studies also run counter to Dr. C’s assertions - the 2004 “Arctic Climate Impact Assessment” noted that the impact of global warming on the Arctic is actually turning out to be much greater than has been predicted previously in climate modeling, and that most of the problem is indeed attributable to the human generation of greenhouse gases from automobiles, power plants, and other sources. UndoIt has a detailed refuation of Crichton’s assertions about global warming.
Michael Crichton is not the first author to write about environmentalist wackos out to destroy the planet (or at least out to destroy the “evil humans” on it). In “Rainbow Six,” Tom Clancy picture of hemorrhagic fever viruses on microscope slide writes about environmental villains who are so upset about human overpopulation and the effect that we two-footed folk are having on the good green earth that they plot to release a deadly plague that will kill the vast majority of the earth’s humans. Animals, of course, will be left unharmed, and the “good people” on the planet will get vaccines against the coming plague. Uh, yeah.
1) In the sci-fi book “Fallen Angels,” the plot is based in a future United States where environmental extremists have outlawed most technology.
2) In the Faith Fairchild mystery “The Body in the Lighthouse,” local environmentalists appear to be so anti-development that murder is an option. Similarly, in “Road Rage,” Ruth Rendell features eco-baddies who are so committed to keeping a new highway from going through a fragile landscape that they’re willing to take hostages and threaten murder.
3) And, finally, it’s worth noting that Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” (released in late 2004) was not the first book to have environmental nut-jobs interested in seeing the ice in Antarctica slide into the sea and cause worldwide water damage. The concept was part of the central plot a year earlier in the 2003 novel “Big Ice,” written by Christopher Bonn Jonnes.
In some cases, a writer’s choice of putting environmentalists in the bad-guy role may indeed reflect the writer’s true feeling that eco-fascists are trying to keep decent folk from enjoying the good life. In other cases, it is no doubt just a convenience for their plot.
But what about the overall demonization of environmentalists that is becoming increasingly prevalent in some political and media circles? Is it fair? We don’t think so, and the assertions of environmental extremism are rarely based on facts.
Here’s a way to think about environmentalists: They’re like doctors who specialize in the earth, its ecosystems, cartoon image of a doctor examining the earth its species (including humans), and the biological relationships among them. The air, water, food, and shelter provided by the earth and the resources from her ecosystems are what keep life on the planet healthy, and environmentalists are the health-care specialists pursuing the goal of keeping the whole thing running right.
Healthy ecosystems are necessary for healthy people. It’s a simple concept, but it is abstract enough that many people have difficulty integrating it into their own thinking; or, if they do accept the concept, have difficulty applying it in practice to their own behavior. Thus, you get corporations who put profits over pollution controls, consumers who put “more” over “safer,” and politicians who put campaign contributions and their job security over honest leadership and doing what’s best for the everyone.
Thus, when Dr. Environment comes along and cautions that some of the things we’re doing are not so smart, it upsets the apple cart for these people and threatens their false concept of “how things are.” Dr. Environment may say something like “overuse of unsafe chemicals is causing increased cases of cancer” or “uncontrolled forms of genetic engineering threaten to undermine the global food system.” This is not much different than your family physician telling you that you’re smoking too much, drinking too much, and eating too many Twinkies; that these things are bad for you; and that you really need to control yourself a little if you want to live far into the future.
Skeptics argue that there is no PROOF that global warming will cause the dire problems being predicted by environmentalists, only a bunch of theories and computer models and analytical results that the skeptics choose to discount. Similarly, you cannot say with complete assurance that drinking a half-gallon of rum every week will give you cirrhosis of the liver or cancer, but your doctor would likely predict it. The choice in both cases is the same:
1) We can do as we please now, without regard for the likely (but unproven) consequences; or
2) We can moderate our behavior in a way that reduces the risk to a reasonable level.
Waiting until a possible but unproven scenario is finally, disastrously proven true is rarely the wisest option. Some amount of preventative caution is a smart investment. It’s always easier to fix a problem when it’s small.
Fiction is a great source of entertainment, and it’s no worse to make “environmental insanity” the motivation for a bad guy than it is to base his villainy on money, fame, or power. But it’s crossing the line a little to write a work of fiction in a way that it comes off like a real scientific analysis.
For our part, we’ll stick with Michael Crichton’s other works of true fiction and leave the science of climate change to the people who have studied it most of their lives, not just for a few months in preparation for a novel. Unfortunately, according to these climate experts, the most noteworthy book in the next 100 years may turn out to be a work of non-fiction titled “A Century Ravaged By Global Warming - and the Skeptics Who Waited Too Long To Act.”
James Nash is a climate scientist with Greatest Planet (www.greatestplanet.org). Greatest Planet is a non-profit environmental organization specialising in carbon offset investments.
James Nash is solely responsible for the contents of this article.
Learn About Outdoor Creatures In Wildlife
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