Born from the complex minds of ambitious often difficult men the new dawn of aviation heralds an age of austerity; dominated by the new breed of robber barons, or conceptual geniuses, all depends on the observers, social, political, and environmental focus.

There is no doubt that since, though not directly correlated to; Lockerbie and the demise of Pan Am the business model has moved and those who have pushed the model and risked their shirts have changed the way we travel and the choices available forever! Risking all…..those who have traded silverware for plastic forks have created businesses which have forever ended the comfortable cartels.

Too late for Skytrain, but from one pioneering Knight to another the advise of Sir Freddie Laker to Sir Richard Branson, has meant that with Virgin there has grown a new big boy in the airline sector; and he does not need or want to join the club, nor is he afraid to challenge them in the courts when he knows they are wrong. It’s not just in the glamorous international codes that we see new livery, indeed if your well heeled and patient, round trips to the stars can be purchased, and what’s more you don’t have to bribe the Russian government.

What does all this consolidation, liquidation , and reinvigoration mean for the frequent flyer. There is no doubt that this has resulted in differentiation, but more than that it has brought the airline industry into mainstream. Industrial battles, competition, and strategies are played out in the evening news….., and unlike many industries this means their business becomes our entertainment.

From comedy stylings playing the well trod boards of British snobbery we compare the scent of exotic spices and precious silks of Virgin Upper premium long haul, to the plastic forks and microwave pizza of Steerage….”apologies value optimising carriers”. Come fly with me………gurr reality T.V. Let’s not go there; I read it as a cautionary tail, but never before have we been soo well informed about such a wide if fast changing fleet of options, in an industry which has infiltrated our psyche.

Guest Post: Sky Traveller is a blogger interested in tech and travel and currently working on a few posts for Sir Richard Branson on behalf of Virgin Atalantic.

When you stay in a hotel, a concierge may be available to assist you with tasks such as setting up spa services, making reservations at restaurants, and booking transportation. Whether you need a limo, a boat tour or an airplane flight, a concierge can help. He or she may also recommend clubs, help you get tickets to popular events, and advise you of tours of the local attractions in the area. In the most expensive hotels, your concierge may be expected to fulfill virtually any request you might have, using contacts with local service providers and merchants.

Concierges are local people who have connections, and they can help you find spots of interest locally, and off-the-beaten-trail places to visit. Your Virgin holidays will have more leisure time available if you use the services of a concierge. They can help you plan parties, and hook you up with tickets, trips and tours. You can basically ask them for whatever you want, and if it can be done, they’ll do it. You can usually contact the hotel concierge when you arrive, if not before. They will almost certainly have at least one mobile phone, and they should also be available by IM or email.

As a general rule, the best hotels will have the most efficient concierges, because the people who stay at these hotels are more accustomed to having people take care of time-consuming things for them. They are used to paying someone who will take care of arrangements for them.

Concierges are not new, but if you are a business traveler, one might very well be helpful for you, especially if you are hosting a convention at the hotel where you are staying. If you book your hotel stay with your Virgin credit card, you may be able to make a connection with a concierge through the hotel.

More hotels than ever before are offering concierges to their guests. The demand is clearly growing across many areas, and you may be more likely to find a concierge at a smaller or lesser-known hotel than you used to be able to. People who help to organize events and meetings for you can also help to keep track of things you need for the event.

Taking care of everything you need for travel requires organization and time. Some travelers may simply need more help than others, as long as they stay at a hotel that offers concierge services. If you are saddled with more work than you can handle, it’s handy to be able to have a person who can handle some of the details for you. It’s helpful to have a professional who can keep you organized, run errands for you, and make sure that all obligations for your event or conference are met.

As more and more business people are traveling for business, concierges may well become more available to everyone. As things stand now, though, you probably won’t find a concierge at your hotel unless it’s an upscale hotel.

I think this speaks for itself

1) Palin offered a bounty of $150 for each left front leg of freshly killed wolves

2) Palin promotes aerial hunting of wolves even though Alaskans voted twice to ban it (VIDEO)

3) Palin used $400,000 of state money to fund a propaganda campaign in support of aerial hunting

4) Palin believes man-made global warming is a farce

5) Palin strongly supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

6) Palin is a champion for big oil and her slogan has become “Drill, baby, drill!”

7) Palin is suing the federal government to prevent listing the polar bear as an endangered species

Palin sues the federal government over listing Cook Inlet beluga whale as an endangered species

National Express the Green way

I do almost all of my travelling by train and bus, the main reasons being that the public transport where I live in Brighton is very good, with buses running every 2mins and the cost of parking extreamly high. When I visit my parents or pop into London for the day I take the train, and although i think that prices of train travel are far too high, it is the greenest way to travel by far.

Green train travel

• It is Greener, a plane trip from London to Newquay produces as much as 135kg carbon dioxide, but if you travel by train you use just 72 kg of carbon dioxide.

• The train takes you exactly where you want to be. Stations are nearly always in the centre of town; airports are usually on the outskirts, making another journey essential to get to your destination (and adding more carbon).

• You can watch the world go by, not just clouds.

• You can stretch your legs, sit opposite someone and have proper chat, surf the internet and use your phone.

• You can take as much luggage as you like, including your bike, often at no extra cost.

• You don’t have to check in hours ahead.

• Some trains have FREE WIFI allowing you to work in compfort and prepare for meetings and conferences.

Taken from the friends of the earth book… “how can i stop climate change?”

Emma Thompson and Alistair Macgowan are some of the first to buy up plots of land on the ear marked site of Heathrows 3rd runway.

The government would use its powers to issue compulsory purchase orders for the plots but lawyers said yesterday that the existence of thousands of owners would make this process time-consuming and expensive. Similar tactics have been used successfully to protect tropical forests.

Emma Thompson said: “I don’t understand how any government remotely serious about committing to reversing climate change can even consider these ridiculous plans. It’s laughably hypocritical. That’s why we’ve bought a plot on the runway. We’ll stop this from happening even if we have to move in and plant vegetables.”

McGowan said: “The government is sticking two fingers up to the environment and the people of this world. By giving this runway the go-ahead Gordon Brown is effectively holding a giant blow torch to the polar ice-caps and saying ‘Melt, Melt !’”

At full capacity, an expanded Heathrow would become the biggest single source of C02 emissions in the country. It would emit nearly 27m tonnes of CO2 every year â?? equivalent to the emissions of 57 of the least polluting countries in the world combined.

Yesterday, Greenpeace said that it took them nearly a year to identify the land and buy it from under the nose of BAA. “We had to have a cover. We pretended we wanted land to set up a donkey sanctuary.”

Thousands of green protestors from ‘climate rush’ are set to stage a picnic protest tonight in the middle of terminal one, in an on going protest against the airports affect on climate change.

BAA spokesman Damon Hunt said yesterday: ‘We’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get in contact with the protesters to find out things like how many people will be there so that we can facilitate a proper and peaceful protest as they are planning to do it in a terminal at an operational time.

‘But they refuse to speak to us or the police. They are hard to get hold of and do have a Facebook page which BAA have used to try to contact them but we’re getting nothing back at all.

hundreds of passengers delayed at Heathrow

One activist, who declined to be named, said: ‘If BAA has heavy security checks at the entrances, that will delay thousands of passengers anyway and the disruption will attract the media attention we seek.

‘This is not meant to be a ‘picnic’ for the authorities. The environment is too important to ignore.’

Another said: ‘If we fail to get noticed, then we have failed.’

The group say that they will be staging their protest in the terminal from 7pm tonight until the government make their decision about the new runway.

Eco Concrete

Just got back from a Geeky SEO pub quiz (Search Engine Optimisation) for those who arent geeky, and i decided to browse the news. After all those search questions i fancied a little culture and stumbled across an interesting article about a statue by Louise Scullion unveiled today in Dundee, the sculpture is of a lifesized car draped in a sheet as shown below.

At first glance the the artist in me began screaming “not another concept artist with cash’.. until is read that the sculpture is made of a concrete that in Italian is called something like “cemento mangiasmog” which sounds a bit like a super hero and is basically “a concrete that absorbs pollution”.

This sparked my interest immediatly and suddenly the rather cumbersome looking blob of art took on its own unique beauty as it not only existed for itself but for a reason. You can read more about the story on the BBC news site.

But i wanted to find out more, more about this odd elemental concrete that eats pollution, basically what i found is that it is the concrete is coated in titanium dioxide and that this layer captures UV radiation causing a catalytic reaction that distroys pollution from car fumes that come into contact with it.

Treehugger said – a coating of titanium dioxide on concrete surfaces has the ability to turn common pollution into non-hazardous waste. A Swedish-Finnish collaboration is setting out to create these multifunction materials for civil engineering. I think this is just the start of beautiful friendship between nanotechnology and green living.

Another site business week said: In large cities such as Milan, with persistent pollution problems caused by car emissions, smoke from heating systems, and industrial activities, both the company and outside experts estimate that covering 15% of all visible urban surfaces (painting the walls, repaving the roads) with products containing TX Active could abate pollution by up to 50%, depending on the specific atmospheric conditions.

Of course, this approach isn’t meant to replace efforts to curb pollution, but it can significantly magnify their effects. Here’s how it works: The active principleâ??basically a blend of titanium dioxide that acts as photocatalyzerâ??can be incorporated in cement, mortar, paints, and plaster.

But .. then i read this and of course it was right:

Kowalski posted – We should always be sceptical of chemo-utopian solutions to macro-scale environmental problems

And he’s right, it is easy to get baffled with science and ooh and ahh over new inventions that promise the earth and yes this new concrete would solve issues with city pollution which is a great thing but, as another forum member gompa pointed out “This’d have lots of potential in reducing toxic smog in cities, which is great and all, but it sounds like it’s largely irrelevant to climate change”.

I’l finish this post with a few words from a post from the find articles site back in 1998:

ONE day, choking on London car fumes in the heat of summer, entrepreneur Dan Morrell remembered what he’d learnt in a biology lesson at school: that trees soak up harmful carbon dioxide emissions by converting them into oxygen and wood.

Trees, funny all this talk of concrete and trees were doing this all along and doing it better, so why dont we plant more tress, why arent there more open spaces with parks and greenery that helps turn all that pollution into breathable clean air? ….

PLANT MORE LOVELY TREES

A little story: Over the past 3 months 3 huge trees out the back of my flat have been cut down, 3 beautyful tall old trees, all culled by ‘tree doctors’ in the space of 3 months. For what? so that the people in the pub garden behind where we live dont have to sit in the shade.. what bugs me more about this is that the squirrels i used to feed at the window no longer stop by, they’ve had to find a new place to live and i see them dodging cars out the front of the flat now… heres a little video about such a squirrel… nite nite. PLANT A TREE .. PAINT A ROAD? (going to look into this tree planting see if i cant get it done)

In the aftermath of PLANE STUPID another runway goes ahead

The manufacturers’ group, the Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF), welcomed the councillors’ decision but the Green Party called it a “disastrous decision”.

Birmingham airport expansion to go ahead

Felicity Norman, Green Party Euro-MP candidate, said: “The nine councillors have bowed to commercial pressure, not looking after the interests of the people they are supposed to represent.

“Extending the runway is going to have a catastrophic and inexcusable impact on climate change, which in itself will have a negative impact on the world economy in the long term.”

You can read the full story on the BBC news site – Planners support runway expansion

The New Scientist has reported that the creation of Biofuel is creating a new generation of Bugs:

The rapid expansion of maize production for biofuels has been criticised for raising food prices, but it is great news for a troublesome species of bug.

Read More about the bio bugs here

Algae Fuel – the holy grail of alternative energies

Algae fuel, also called ‘the third generation bio fuel’ and ‘oilgae’ is made from harvesting algae grown on land that is unsuitable for any other type of farming such as lagoons, mud flats, salt mashes and in snow, thus not replacing any conventional agriculture. It also means that when driving around with a tank full of algae fuel your not burning up much needed food resources or raising the cost of soya and corn in other countries.

There are also various types of fuel that can be produced from algae. Once oil is extracted from algae it can be cultured, harvested and the carbohydrate content fermented to produce the Biodiesel – Bio ethanol and Bio butane. Genius!

Algae harvested for bio fuel

Instead of me blathering on, heres a easily digestible list of Postitives and negatives of Algae fuels:

Oilgae Postitives:

• Algae fuels do not adversely affect fresh water resources and can be cultivated in waste water.
• Placing algae reactors close to factories can reduce emissions created by factories while providing algae with the required carbon-di-oxide to grow and reproduce.
• Algae doubles it mass several times a day so can be grown rapidly
• vehicles run smoother on Bio fuel than on diesel
• It consumes carbon dioxide so could fight carbon emissions
• Could be grown in the desert

Oilgae Negative:

• Its extreamly new technology and therefore could be costly (even though frogs have used it for years)
• Difficult to store for long periods of time
• It can have negative affects to extream cold being thicker than conventional oils
• It reportadly destroys asphalt and concrete
• The military bans the use of bio fuels from any military operation (alhtough bi-sexuals – lesbians and gay men are also banned)

Conclusion

Although algae fuel can help us tremendously, this technology is still new and may be resisted by many skeptical consumers. Even though it is unlikely but for any reason if the price of gasoline reaches $20 per barrel then production of this eco friendly resource may be halted and people may prefer to switch back to exhaustible fuels that strip our planet of precious resources. Do we really want that to happen?

Algae fuel is definitely worth our time and our governments time inreplace of these other fuels that have had something of PR blitz and ordinary fuels that as soon as thier prices drop become the friendly neighbour again. For further information check out http://www.oilgae.com/blog/

I recount a little tale about “when the dog met the algae:’

My chihuhua once thought that a pond in our back garden was grass and came running towards the house like an angry swamp creature (but really teeny tiny). Now, if algae could make her move that fast on such tiny little legs – imagine what it could do to a big old Jeep?.

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