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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

The sensibilities of our consumer lifestyle are so ingrained in us that the few people we encounter who simply don’t care about wealth and accumulating “stuff” appear quite odd to us.  I was reminded of this yesterday, when I realized it was the birthday of Henry David Thoreau.

And coincidentally, I just got off a conference call with some folks up in Canada talking about a breakthrough in compress air energy storage, during which one of them jokingly likened me to the ancient Athenian Diogenes with his lamp.  (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Here’s an article that echoes a point I make often: bringing renewable energy to the developing world represents arguably the biggest bang for our philanthropic buck.  Here, you’ll learn about the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) and why its executive director Robert Freling agrees with me that this enterprise successfully addresses a myriad of social ills: lack of clean drinking water, deforestation, education, and, perhaps most important, family planning.   (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I thought readers might appreciate these 10 “mind-blowing facts about the solar system.”  If nothing else, they form a reminder of how precisely balanced everything is (or at least was) here on Earth, and how vital it is that humankind respect this concept in our daily lives.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Bartering Gains Increasing Acceptance

Bartering, meaning the practice of people and companies trading goods, is a concept that has been around for centuries. Recently, Internet communications have added a new spin to the classic practice. Niche markets and large-scale bartering websites make it possible to find partners for the most unusual trading proposals. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Many U.S. resorts are choosing to go green.

By making their resorts environmentally friendly, they can save money, as well as the planet.

Whether a resort is located in the middle of a desert or on the top of a snow-capped mountain, there are many ways for a resort to go green and show their visitors they care about the environment. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Like many countries, Canada has been busy making the environment a better place.

Their green movement focuses on finding sustainable agriculture options, families going green by saving on water and energy, switching to solar energy, and more environmental-related jobs.

There has been a green movement in Canada for many years, but it really hit a boom in the last 10 years, around the same time as in the U.S. and nearby countries. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Fossil Fuels

I don’t claim any inside track on what the hugely moneyed U.S.-based companies and the families that underlie them are doing – whether they’re the descendants of the Rockefellers and their 125-year-old oil companies, or the duPonts, or the new winners of the Internet era with their Facebooks and Amazons and Ebays.  But could this really be true?  Is Google really raising money for the re-election of Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the most obvious human reptile of 21st Century U.S. politics?  Could someone please tell me that I’ve misread this?

Here are a few pieces I’ve written on Inhofe, for newcomers to the subject.  Hope you haven’t eaten recently, because it’s a revolting story of rank stupidity (which I’ve come to accept as the norm) but worse, corruption in the extreme (which I will not).

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

This morning, Rebecca McKenzie, one our most talented and hard-working interns, joined me in an hour-long telephone interview with three spokespeople from the Dow Chemical Company on the subject of corporate sustainability.  I’ll link to a transcript of the interview as soon as it’s available, but for now, let me just say that I was impressed.  (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

In an earlier post today I wrote on nuclear energy, I mentioned the average American’s lack of awareness of and interest in climate change.  And while there are a number of reasons for this, most of them political, one could be geographical.  Thus far, the principal effects of global warming have been at the extreme latitudes and in extreme altitudes.

Here’s a report from the New York Times on the melting of the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes – a formation that developed over a period of  1600 years, only to be melted away in the last 25.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Nuclear

A reader asked me to comment on this:

“As the US moves toward a more sustainable energy future, simply maintaining nuclear energy at 20 percent of US electricity supply will require the construction of 20 to 25 new nuclear power plants by 2030. Additionally, modeling of climate change policy scenarios consistently shows that a failure to deploy sufficient nuclear power generation capacity will lead to an over-reliance on natural gas, the result of which will likely be reduced competitiveness for US manufacturers and higher energy costs for all Americans.”

I think it’s not going to happen.  Nuclear is too expensive, the level of public rancor re: nuclear safety and the disposal of waste is too great, and the public understanding of and concern about climate change is too low.

Note also that this quote is confusing and self-contradictory.  Read the second sentence carefully.  Concerns re: climate change cause over-reliance on gas, and that causes reduced competitiveness and higher energy costs?  So you want to build nuclear plants?  That doesn’t make sense.

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