Green linkalicious: 8/18/06

All manner of green linkalicious news has popping up lately. It's a lot of fun to follow what's going on in the "world o' green" right now; where ideas and innovations are occurring in a variety of flavors:

• The September '06 issue of Scientific American is great stuff; it's educational and frankly, quite inspiring. It lays out a realistic plan for reducing world-wide carbon emissions over the next 50 years. I'm such a fan that I'll take the brazenly commercialistic move of putting an ad for the magazine right here in my post. There's plenty of gems on their Web site, too, like this article about the carbon-offset program at the 2006 World Cup.
• In architecture, the 2030 Challenge encourages architects to design completely carbon-neutral (using no fossil fuel GHG emitting energy to operate) buildings by 2030.
• Planning is underway for power plants that convert chicken poop into energy. The chicken poop comes from factory farms, which can redeem themselves (a bit) through their participation.
• A company called Australian Farmers' Fuels is using animal fat to produce biodiesel.
• You can read and share green information Wikipedia-style at gWiki -- the Green Wiki. Via Treehugger.
• Under talks between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tony Blair, California is cooking up a global warming reduction plan that puts the U.S. federal government -- and most other states -- to shame.
• Carbon sequestration is the growing field of inquiry into how carbon can be captured, to prevent it from entering the atmosphere. Scientists are exploring ancient Amazonian dark soil, called terra preta do indio, for clues about how to capture carbon in the soil. Via Futurismic:

  This rare rainforest soil holds two and a half times the carbon content of normal soils, but no one is entirely sure as to how the ancient tribes of the Amazon actually created the stuff. If the secret can be cracked, we would have access to a carbon sequestration method that would take biofuels from being carbon neutral to carbon negative - in other words, actually pulling out more carbon from the ecosphere than is released by the use of the fuels produced.