Two reports from world bodies have been published week saying that the world has ample capaicty to feed its projected increased population.

The first report, from the OECD and the UN Food & Agriculture Organization, projects ten years from the food price increases of 2008. It concludes that "Some 1.6 billion hectares could be added to the current 1.4 billion hectares of crop land [in the world], and over half of the additionally available land is found in Africa and Latin America."

The second report, from the UN Food & Agriculture Organization and the World Bank, concludes that 400 million hectares, spread across 25 African nations are suitable for farming.

The report cites Thailand as a model for agricultural development. In Thailand, land originally deemed agriculturally unpromising, due to irrigation problems and infertile soil, has been "transformed into a cornucopia" by smallholder farmers.

The report says that, as in Thailand,  future success will come by using agriculture to lift Africa’s smallholder farmers out of poverty, aided by strong government measures to guarantee their rights to land, say both reports.

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Treehugger has published a post which points out that, when all of the factors such as transport and production of the container, are taken into account, it takes 200 litres of water to produce a take-away latté.

So, how much water do some of the other "necessities" of modern life consume?

• A pair of jeans - 6,800 litres
• A cotton t-shirt - 1,500 litres
• A hamburger - 4,900 litres
• A serving of french fries - 22 litres
• A glass of cola - 38 litres
• An egg - 454 litres
• A loaf of bread - 570 litres
• An apple - 60 litres
• An orange - 83 litres
• A kilogram of paddyfield rice - 1,550 litres
• A kilgram of beef - more than 50,000 litres
• A plastic bottle of water - 7 litres

It seem like french fries are our best option!

(Based on data from the US Geological Survey)

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The Scottish parliament has committed to a binding goal to cut greenhouse gases by 42 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels.

In April, Britain formally adopted a legally-binding target of reducing greenhouse gases by 34 percent. Scotland, whicch has some local autonomy has gone further - surpassing the German target of 40 percent, which was previously the world’s most ambitious.

One of the key elements in Scotland’s plan is the use of offshore wind. The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change has released a report showing that offshore wind has the potential to meet more than a quarter of the UK’s electricity needs, create up to 70,000 new jobs and generate £8bn ($au16 billion) a year in revenue.

While praising Scotland’s commitment, green groups have criticised plans by countries such as Japan and Australia which have announced plans for cuts of just 8 percent and 5 percent respectively.

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A Hamburg-based company, Thermodyna, has developed an air-conditioning system that uses only the sun’s heat to produce hot or cool air as required.

The core of the system is a Schukey motor. For cooling, a solar panel uses the sun’s heat to produce steam which is converted into mechanical energy. This drives a pump which sucks damp, warm air out of the room, compresses it and then allows it to expand. According to Thermodyna, the process can cool the air to around 20 degrees Celsius.

"There are no electronics and hardly any components," says Thermodyna boss Volker Bergholte. The company plans to begin selling the units in 2010.

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When the third-generation Toyota Prius was released in Japan a month ago, Toyota’s sales target for the month was 10,000 vehicles. Actual orders reached 180,000!

The Prius was the top-selling vehicle in Japan in May - the first time that it has achieved the top spot. Honda’s hybrid Insight, released in February, was the third best selling vehicle.

The new Prius is selling for just over two million yen (about $au26,000) in Japan; the Insight is 1.89 million yen ($au24,500). Toyota is also selling the previous model Prius for the same price as the Honda Insight. Sales of the old model are not included in the 180,000 orders.

Hybrid vehicles are now free of sales tax in Japan, saving about $au2,000.

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Chinese vehicle manufacturer, New Power, claims to have developed a full-sized electric four-seater with a range of 400 kilometress which will go into production in China next year. The company plans to bring it to the UK “within the next couple of years”.

Known as the Zhong Tai, the vehicle has lithium-ion batteries that can be recharged in 6-8 hours from a conventional socket, or in two hours from a high-power recharging point. With a top speed of 120 kilometres per hour and an estimated price tag of between £16,300 and £20,500 ($au33,000 and $au40,000) in Britain.

The car is based on the 4×4 Daihatsu Terios which New Power manufactures under licence in China.

The Chinese Government is offering generous grants towards the production of electric vehicles, and has a policy that all car companies should be producing at least one green vehicle by 2011.

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Siemens and StatoilHydro have installed what they say is the world’s first large-scale floating turbine. The installation off the coast of Norway will undergo testing for two years.

To date, wind turbinrs could only be installed in relatively shallow offshore locations - up to about 50 metres deep. The floating wind turbines, which have a ballast that is tied to the sea floor with cables, can be installed in waters up to about 670 metres deep.

The turbine off Norway will be about 12 kilometres offshore where the water is 220 metres deep. It is a utility-scale turbine able to generate 2.3 megawatts of electricity.

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Inventor and entrepreneur, John La Grou, hasdeveloped a "smart" electrical power outlet, called a Safeplug, containing a  microprocessor. The main reason for the invention was to prevent electrical fires by giving the wall socket sufficient intelligence to detect that an appliance was drawing too much power and shut it off.

However, the Safeplug also has the potential to save massive amounts of energy by switching off appliances and even allowing whole areas, such as hotel rooms, to be switched off remotely when not in use.

John La Grou describes his invention on this TED Talk video:

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Chemical engineer, Dr Andrew Harris amd his research team at Sydney University’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions have been awarded a research grant from the European Energy Company, E.ON, to investigate materials like silicon carbide and alumina for building synthetic sponges, which would be grafted with calcium oxide to absorb carbon dioxide.

Dr Harris is using a group of marine creatures known as echinoderms, which includes starfish, sea urchins and sea cucumbers, as his source of inspiration. He says that these creatures have an "awesome" calcium carbonate skeleton, ideal for absorbing C02. He hopes to mimic the structure of their skeletons to produce a synthetic sponge.

Dr Harris hopes that the technology will be used to absorb CO2 released during the manufacture of hydrogen. Currently, most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels but Dr Harris believes that, in the future, it will be sourced from biomass, such as crop waste.

"We did an experiment a couple of years back and found that if all the forest waste, left over crops and wood waste sent to landfill in Australia was converted into hydrogen there would be enough energy to run every bus in every city for a year on the waste," he said.

Several members of the team are working on ways of re-using the CO2 captured by the synthetic sponges.

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Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario have developed a prototype of a lithium-sulphur rechargeable battery that can store three times the power of a conventional lithium-ion battery in the same volume while being significantly lighter and potentially cheaper to manufacture.

As with lithium-ion technology, lithium-sulphur batteries store the electrical charge in one electrode during the charging phase and release it to the other during the discharge phase. To achieve high performance, sulphur needs to remain in very close contact with a conductor, such as carbon. The research team used mesoporous carbon, a material that has a highly uniform pore structure at the nano-scale, to achieve this. Sulphur was melted and made to fill the tiny voids in the carbon using capillary forces. All the spaces were uniformly filled with sulphur, thus maximizing the surface area in direct contact with carbon and boosting battery efficiency.

According to the leader of the research team, Professor Linda Nazar, the energy density of lithium-sulphur batteries is "about a factor of 3 to 5 times more than a conventional lithium-ion battery" while the raw materials are cheaper.

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