A friend sent me a long and scathing attack on the wind energy industry and writes: “From friends in Connecticut—This has a lot of right wing “anti-green” rhetoric, but how much is factual?”
Thanks very much. Good to hear from you again. Here are a few excerpts, along with my responses: (more…)
There now rages a great contest among our species over the nature of our present and future energy infrastructure.
On the one side, we have people and entities aligned with the status quo – these include the vested moneyed interests that have long extracted massive revenue from our existing fossil energy arrangement. On the other side, we have people and entities now warning against our current path, and instead urging us to look forward toward the very real potential of an energy economy based on sustainable modern resources.
Jeremy Grantham (pictured above) is the co-founder and chief investment strategist of Grantham Mayo van Otterloo (GMO), a Boston-based asset management firm, with more than US $97 billion in assets under management as of December 2011. (more…)
I happened to tune into U.S.-based broadcast network CBS’s weekly “Sunday Morning” just now and noticed that it featured a look at the future of humankind, a subject in which I take a keen interest. Not too surprisingly, the piece was almost uniformly optimistic: longer, healthier lives, the possibility of space migration, and the future of consumer product development aimed to render us even more comfort and convenience. There was one segment on the build-up of trash, but (more…)
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…)
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…)
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.
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…)
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).
