The online environmental magazine Grist gave soft applause to Wal-Mart last week in its introduction to a Q. and A. session with H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive. When the company this month signed on to a call by a group of energy executives for caps on greenhouse-gas emissions, “the heart of this monolithic retail Grinch grew three sizes that day,” writes Amanda Griscom Little, a Grist reporter, on grist.org.
News Forum Archives: April 2006
The Next Green Revolution
How technology is leading environmentalism out of the anti-business, anti-consumer wilderness.
By Alex Nikolai Steffen
Wired Magazine
For decades, environmentalists have warned of a coming climate crisis. Their alarms went unheeded, and last year we reaped an early harvest: a singularly ferocious hurricane season, record snowfall in New England, the worst-ever wildfires in Alaska, arctic glaciers at their lowest ebb in millennia, catastrophic drought in Brazil, devastating floods in India - portents of global warming’s destructive potential.
Continue Reading The Next Green Revolution
Posted by Paul on April 30, 2006
Global warming blamed for ‘wrath of nature’
By Thom Akeman
Reuters
Monterey, California - The record Atlantic hurricane season last year can be attributed to global warming, several top experts, including a leading United States government storm researcher, said on Monday.
“The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it’s no longer something we’ll see in the future, it’s happening now,” said Greg Holland, a division director at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Continue Reading Global warming blamed for ‘wrath of nature’
Posted by Paul on April 26, 2006
Wal-Mart Flirts With Being Green
THE sheer magnitude of Wal-Mart’s plans to become more environmentally friendly has been enough to give pause to all but the most vehement of the company’s critics.
Continue Reading Wal-Mart Flirts With Being Green
Posted by Paul on April 22, 2006
Green Goes Mainstream
The Adobe Posada has been featured in CNN Money:A strawbale/adobe house can take the heat of West Texas summers and the cold out of chill desert nights. Straw not only serves as a great insulating material - the walls have an R-50 rating - but it’s sustainable as well. Excess straw was once burned, which contributed to air pollution. Today it more and more is being used as a green building material, both as bales and in composition board.
The house’s design is “Pueblo Revival,” with handmade adobe floors, kiva fireplace and stone patio. The builder, Clyde Curry, incorporated historic windows from an original schoolhouse, and they afford residents desert and mountain views. Energy efficient, the house costs about $65 a month, winter and summer, to heat or cool. It’s on about a half-acre lot.
Read the full article, Green goes mainstream, at money.cnn.com
Posted by noble on April 17, 2006
Life in the Green Lane
If you make your way over to the Javits Convention Center for the New York International Automobile Show — or if you’ve gone to any auto show in the last year or so — you’ll know that hybrid cars are the hippest automotive fashion statement to come along in years. They’ve become synonymous with the worthy goal of reducing gasoline consumption and dependence on foreign oil and all that this means for a better environment and more stable geopolitics.
And yet like fat-free desserts, which sound healthy but can still make you fat, the hybrid car can make people feel as if they’re doing something good, even when they’re doing nothing special at all. As consumers and governments at every level climb onto the hybrid bandwagon, there is the very real danger of elevating the technology at the expense of the intended outcome — saving gas.
Continue Reading Life in the Green Lane
Posted by Paul on April 16, 2006
With Big Boost From Sugar Cane, Brazil Is Satisfying Its Fuel Needs
By Larry Rohter
The New York Times
April 10, 2006
PIRACICABA, Brazil — At the dawn of the automobile age, Henry Ford predicted that “ethyl alcohol is the fuel of the future.” With petroleum about $65 a barrel, President Bush has now embraced that view, too. But Brazil is already there.
This country expects to become energy self-sufficient this year, meeting its growing demand for fuel by increasing production from petroleum and ethanol. Already the use of ethanol, derived in Brazil from sugar cane, is so widespread that some gas stations have two sets of pumps, marked A for alcohol and G for gas.
Continue Reading With Big Boost From Sugar Cane, Brazil Is Satisfying Its Fuel Needs
Posted by Paul on April 13, 2006
The oil in your oatmeal
A lot of fossil fuel goes into producing, packaging and shipping our breakfast
Chad Heeter
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Please join me for breakfast. It’s time to fuel up again.
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, March 26, 2006
On the table in my small Berkeley apartment this morning is a healthy-looking little meal — a bowl of imported McCann’s Irish oatmeal topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet’s Fair Trade Blend coffee. Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home, and the ingredients for this one probably cost me about $1.25. (If I went to a cafe in downtown Berkeley, I’d probably have to add $6 more, plus tip, for the same.)
My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. So for just over a buck and half and an hour spent reading the morning paper in my own kitchen, I’m energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I’ve just added a little butter, milk and a shake of salt) from a different perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one.
Continue Reading The oil in your oatmeal
Posted by Paul on April 10, 2006
10 Reasons to Eat Local Food
www.lifebeginsat30.com
August 2005
Eating local means more for the local economy. According to a study by the New Economics Foundation in London, a dollar spent locally generates twice as much income for the local economy. When businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction.
Continue Reading 10 Reasons to Eat Local Food
Posted by Paul on April 07, 2006
Grow Your Own Oil, U.S.
By Seán Captain
Wired News
Researchers hoping to ease America’s oil addiction are turning sawdust and wood chips into bio-oil, a thick black liquid that could become a green substitute for many petroleum products.
Bio-oil can be made from almost any organic material, including agricultural and forest waste like corn stalks and scraps of bark. Converting the raw biomass into bio-oil yields a product that is easy to transport and can be processed into higher-value fuels and chemicals
Continue Reading Grow Your Own Oil, U.S.
Posted by Paul on April 03, 2006