Electric cars that pay

By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

July 29, 2004

So, you’re thinking of buying one of those gas-electric hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius or Honda Insight. They’re trendy, conserve fuel, and reduce pollution. But to really go “green,” some entrepreneurs and academics say, you should try a Volkswagen Jetta.

Not just any Jetta. A dark blue one that a California electric-car company has modified so that it not only uses electricity but generates it for other purposes. So, once it’s parked, you plug it in and sell excess electricity to a utility.

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Helping Hand or Big Fat Fist?

By Bill McKibben

Orion Magazine

July/August 2004

THE SALIENT FACT in this story is as follows: Zambians eat corn as their staple food, usually their only source of carbohydrates. They eat it three meals a day, and if they snack between meals it’s likely to be on corn.

Americans have more and more occasion to wonder why we are disliked around the world—why the polling data routinely shows citizens of other nations listing us as the greatest threat to world peace, for instance, or why so many of the citizens of Iraq say they think our occupation is worse than Saddam’s rule. The Bush administration insists that our critics “hate freedom,” and hence us; many others suspect that they envy our prosperity. I think they mostly resent the toxic (and unnecessary) combination of arrogance and cluelessness with which we treat them. The trouble with being the unchallenged top dog is that you get to win without having to try very hard to persuade, and since you rarely lose you rarely learn. We’re like the pointy-haired boss in the Dilbert cartoons—because we have all the power, we always talk, never listen. We do as we please.

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Forest makes coffee farm richer

by Tom Lalley

WWF Newsroom

August 6, 2004

Washington DC, US – Seven percent of a Costa Rican coffee farm’s annual income — US$62,000 — comes directly from the pollination “services” of adjacent tropical forest, according to a new study appearing this week in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study is the first to quantify in such detail the economic value of pollination services from tropical forests.

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