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…)
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…)
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).
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…)
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.
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.
It looks like Europe continues to embrace electric transportation. According to my colleague Fritz Maffry, the Renault Twizy is selling very well on The Continent. The doors are optional, and windows are unavailable. Good thing it never rains in Europe. Ooops!
Fritz doesn’t say if the product comes with a pretty and adoring girlfriend with long, beautiful legs as standard equipment, but the video implies that the answer is a resounding YES!
Seriously, charging an EV in Europe is becoming easier by the day. ABB is building out the world’s largest network of fast-charging stations, starting in The Netherlands.
Most of us who pay attention to the key environmental issues of the day have some opinion on the legitimacy of the Keystone XL pipeline. At the risk of oversimplifying:
• Hard-core environmentalists say the approval of the project means, in the words of Dr. James Hansen, “game over for the environment,” as the release of that huge amount of previously sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere will cause an unprecedented level of climate change. (more…)
Frequent commenter and 2GreenEnergy supporter Tim Kingston sent me this for comment: an article that asserts that climate change isn’t one of our civilization’s most important problems, and that global poverty is, in fact, at the top.
Sorry to be so blunt, but I find this to be pure silliness, put forth in an apparent attempt to promote the guy’s book – which I’m going to skip. In the first place, the concept of establishing the magnitude of problems of this order, mounting and changing as they are over the course of many decades, is asinine. (more…)
I normally don’t bet against my own longevity, but it seems extremely unlikely that I’ll still be on this planet when the case against Chevron in Ecuador is finalized and the damages are paid. Here’s an article that explains Chevron’s latest tactic to avoid justice, and overturn the judgment against it, in which the international courts have ruled that the oil company must pay reparations to the people whose land – and health – was ruined by arguably the largest and most blatantly deliberate environmental crime in the history of humankind. (more…)
