After the arrest of a man for piggybacking on a neighbor’s Internet broadband, we are compiling a list of all known “war surfing” hot-spots worldwide. All readers are invited to add to the list by going as quickly as possible to the Off-Grid forum.
The tiny outback town of White Cliffs in far north-west New South Wales can now claim a place in Australia’s engineering history, alongside the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Snowy Hydro scheme.
The opal mining town, where most of the 200 residents live in underground homes, was the first in Australia to be powered entirely by solar energy, and is still a fully off-grid community.
The solar plant is now closed but it has earned a national award that will see it preserved as a piece of alternative energy heritage.
In a feature on companies that will disrupt existing businesses, Business 2.0 cites power company Bloom Energy
THE DISRUPTION: Energy generators in homes and businesses
THE DISRUPTED: Electric utilities
Making electricity in central power plants is so 20th century,says the report. K.R. Sridhar has a better idea: Create energy on the spot, right where it’s consumed. His startup, Bloom Energy (formerly known as Ion America), is developing a fuel cell that could kick-start the distributed-energy industry.
A third eco-home in central Somerset went up in flames this week, following an arson attack at a prototype round house in Moorlinch and a fire that destroyed Glastonbury town councillor Caroline Barry’s well-known straw bale home at Butleigh in January.
Of today’s fashionable causes, the environment is the most fashionable of them all. And no Hollywood activist is more dedicated than Laurie David, who used her ex-husband, Larry David’s wealth to finance Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore lavishes praise on her work: “Laurie David has done more than any one person I know to raise awareness of the climate crisis,” said Gore last year. Gore is a great example of an Econazzi, our new preferred term for celebrity hypocrites and corporate greenwashers.
Econazzi Laurie David reviles SUV owners as “terrorist enablers.” She hangs out with her friend Cheryl Crow who recently warned the world about the perils of using toilet paper.
In her many media interviews, Laurie David details her own contributions to the cause: She uses only recycled paper products and she has made her two children take shorter showers.
Although she owns and operates the Web site, StopGlobal-Warming.com, Gulf Stream-flying tree-hugger Laurie, 49, and her strapping 44-year-old landscaper boyfriend Bart Thorpe, have been all over the place since Laurie split with “Curb Your Enthusiasm” crank Larry David.
Its some time since we reported on Dr Dylan Evans, who resigned as a lecturer on evolutionary psychology from the University of the West of England in Bristol to become Director of the Utopia Project in Scotland. Dr Evans, 41, wanted to test the theory that by 2040, the warming of the Earth and ensuing climate disasters will mean any survivors will live as Stone Age hunter-gatherers. Could man survive a social breakdown, he wondered
To this end, in April he sold his house in the Cotswolds to set up a commune in the Highlands called Utopia. The first to join him was Adam, pictured here in an Airline blanket he acquired on his way to the UK. Members have to live in a post-global warming environment and find a “new way” of existing. That means sleeping in yurts, growing your own veg and developing a series of ruels and practices that others might follow.
Plans are afoot to prepare a $10m eco-palace” as a wedding gift for Prince Charles son Prince William,and his fiancee Kate Middleton. As they holiday in a tiny island int he Seychelles, the palace in Wales is being fitted with a range of eco-features.
Off-Grid Editor Nick Rosen will challenge the UK government to make clear exactly what its plans are on the five eco-towns it proposed building back when Prime Minister Gordon Brown took office in June.
Nick will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at midday talk about his personal journey to a free-er, greener life and to promote his book, How to Live Off-grid: Journeys Outside the System.
Mel Gibson is about to head off-grid on a remote $12m, 400 acre ranch in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, 300 miles from capital, San Jose. Gibson, who achieved Hollywood stardom playing a detective in the Lethal Weapon series, is still serving probation following his arrest for drinkdriving, during which he unleashed an anti-Semitic tirade on a policewoman
“Mel loves the country, ” a source told the London Express newspaper. “He’s planning to live there for much of the year.”