When Timberland, the outdoor clothing company, studied ways to reduce its carbon emissions four years ago, it weighed several options: building a wind farm in the Dominican Republic, buying power generated by renewable resources and setting up a vast bank of solar panels at one of its distribution centers in Ontario, Calif.
It chose to do all those things, but that was the easy part. When Jeffrey B. Swartz, Timberland’s president and chief executive, considered how much carbon dioxide was produced in making leather for the company’s famous boots, the answer came as a surprise.
Continue Reading The Greener Guys
Continue Reading Aging U.S. School Buses Still Fouling Air
“Let’s quit the debate about whether greenhouse gases are caused by mankind or by natural causes; let’s just focus on technologies that deal with the issue,” Mr. Bush told workers at the Limerick Generating Station, a nuclear power plant here in Montgomery County. “Nuclear power will help us deal with the issue of greenhouse gases.”
Continue Reading Solution to Greenhouse Gases Is New Nuclear Plants, Bush Says
The problem was, her four-wheel-drive Toyota 4Runner was her only car, and trains or buses were not an option. So as a half-measure, Ms. Hess, 30, decided last year to start car-pooling with a neighbor who also had an S.U.V.
Now, at least, they could feel guilty together.
Continue Reading Greening Up With the Joneses
Most of the nation’s major food producers are hard at work developing organic versions of their best-selling products, like Kellogg’s Rice Krispies and Kraft’s macaroni and cheese.
Why the sudden activity? In large part because Wal-Mart wants to sell more organic food — and because of its size and power, Wal-Mart usually gets what it wants.
Continue Reading Wal-Mart Is Going Organic, and Brand Names Get in Line
When the price of oil climbed above $50 a barrel in late 2004, public attention began to focus on the adequacy of world oil supplies—and specifically on when production would peak and begin to decline. Analysts are far from a consensus on this issue, but several prominent ones now believe that the oil peak is imminent.
Oil has shaped our twenty-first century civilization, affecting every facet of the economy from the mechanization of agriculture to jet air travel. When production turns downward, it will be a seismic economic event, creating a world unlike any we have known during our lifetimes. Indeed, when historians write about this period in history, they may well distinguish between before peak oil (BPO) and after peak oil (APO).
Continue Reading The Coming Decline of Oil
Sitting at the bottom of the food chain, the planet’s plant life feeds everything from cattle to human beings in one way or another.
With that in mind, a team of researchers have built a map of how much plant-derived resources we humans need to survive using a decade’s worth of satellite observations and some handy computer models.
Continue Reading A Green View: Mapping Human Food and Fuel from Space