Not any more

Robert Grant bought his first van as a weekend getaway and decided to make it my home out of laziness.
” got a job in an outdoor shop,” he told The Guardian. It was there that the idea of slipping away to the margins of society began to creep around my mind. When rent was due for the room in which I felt only fidgety and bored, my frustration helped these thoughts to flourish until I could see myself following the good times and the good weather, shaking sand from my shoes and waking up exactly where I wanted to be, in my own mobile kingdom. (more…)

DIY Biodiesel kit

There is a booming cottage industry of people making their own biodiesel from waste cooking oil. With the help of special equipment and the addition of a several chemicals, anyone can do it. Lower down this story we tell you exactly how to make it.

Remember � it only works in Diesel vehicles. (more…)

Gyanesh Pandey

It could be the start of a new paradigm � The Indian Dream. A local lad chucks in a high-paying job on the West Coast to bring light to a remote village in Bihar, India.

Villagers saw the light when Gyanesh Pandey came home from Los Angeles. Together with friends from the University of Virginia, he raised funds, built a rice husk generator and empowered the village. (more…)

Every village in China has one, but Biodigesters are an unfashionable energy source — now they may be due for a comeback.

Pigs are power stations, too

As a system for getting energy from organic waste Biodigesters have two main components that people prefer not to discuss: human waste and methane. (more…)

The world is their bathroom

As foreclosures mount, the number of people living in cars is exploding, especially in California, Colorado and Florida, the worst affected states so far, followed by Illinois and Nevada. A clickable map of the worst affected areas, per capita, going down to city level detail can be found here.
James Thalman, a reporter for the Deseret News, says car living has been a phenomenon since the 1930’s, but has rocketed recently all over the country, especially over the past six months. (more…)

In the next few years, Ron Taylor plans to drop off grid. His oil-fired furnace is gone, replaced by eco-electric heat, and he is harvesting rainwater at his century-old, five-bedroom farmhouse h near Mushaboom, N.S., a seaside town immortalized by singer Feist.

The next step is to put on a new roof with solar panels, then throw up a windmill on the two-acre property.

It may sound like a save-the-planet, back-to-nature renovation. But Mr. Taylor is a Toronto-based real-estate developer. He has worked on monster projects such as London’s Canary Wharf and the redevelopment of Halifax’s harbourfront. And he is dropping big money to drop off the grid in Mushaboom. The project is budgeted at upward of $40,000.

Barton M. Biggs, a former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley knows why this trend is gathering pace. In his new book, �Wealth, War and Wisdom,� he says we should �assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.� (more…)

Pitch(fork)ing in to compost

Oyster mushrooms grow in coffee grounds, a fig tree thrives on soapy gray water from a washing machine, and electricity is generated by a wind turbine made of old bicycle parts. As the transportation of oil and food grows pricier, sustainability might not mean living off the fat of the land as much as scrounging off the lean spots amid the pavement.
Scott Kellogg runs a course on Radical Urban Sustainability Training, or RUST. This is down to earth environmentalism. (more…)

Why pay more?

Here is the shopping list for a beautiful warm, cheap, off-grid home, as built in Scotland recently by software engineer Steve James.

With straw bale walls, a turf roof, and the rest of the building materials pulled from skips, this is never going to appear on Grand Designs. But the end product is �a warm and watertight cottage which gets its water supplies by gathering rainfall and its electricity from a car battery,� according to a BBC report.

ITEMISED BILL: (more…)

They’re all at it

Surprise, surprise. The media has finally woken up to the fact that the major energy companies are engaged in a major conspiracy to rip off the consumer. The six biggest energy companies meet regularly to fix prices, according to the London Sunday Times. The Observer newspaper also carries a similar report this morning: “the government can’t � or won’t � do a thing about it,” the left-wing paper says.

But it has always been thus, ever since the earliest days of gas and electricity in the UK and the US, the utilities have attempted to defraud the ordinary consumer. (more…)