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The kids are all right

Emerging From the Stone Age

One week ago today, I awoke to a sun-splashed view of the Flatirons from a travel inn just off of Broadway Avenue in Boulder, CO. These sandstone shelves -- named in the days of Abe Lincoln by intrepid pioneer women who said they looked like the flat, metal irons used to iron their clothes -- emerged some 290-296 million years ago as the earth's crust lifted and tilted. These mini-mountains provide an Edenic backdrop for Stephen King's The Stand, and last week, served as the setting for higher education's non-fictional sustainability Stand at the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit.

While "set in stone" by human standards, the Flatirons represent a true testament to the incredible power of nature, when given time, to change dramatically. These peaks, not there a short 300 million years ago -- 1/15th of our Earth's 4.6 billion year history -- now dominate our modern landscape. But as Arizona State University President Michael Crow noted in the summit's first plenary session, we humans are more impatient.

Crow calls the current University period the "Stone Age" -- more often than not representing the worst in humanity. He pointed out that these rigid, complex social constructs are usually slow to change -- filled with many argumentative, self-focused, egotistical, and hubristic leaders whose actions are more motivated by what they think they are to themselves than what they might be to someone else. Crow closed by admitting his own shortcomings in this area and demanding that the humans running today's institutions of higher education, the thousands of professional employed by them, and the 17 million students attending them, change, and change fast, moving from the "Stone Age" into the "Sustainability Age."

Do you have the right stuff?

Despite any economic or structural barriers you may have encountered on the way to a greener lifestyle, now you can try out for the Solar Power Dance Team! Yes, the sexy squad that supports the WNBA's Connecticut Sun is renewable and holding open tryouts this weekend in Wethersfield. Can't you see yourself in this awesome uniform? (Video below the fold.)

New site tracks Calif. energy innovation

California's an incubator of energy policy innovation. Largest solar program in the nation. First to cap carbon. Electricity usage half the national average due to aggressive efficiency regulations. If you want to push the limits on green innovation, here's the place to try it. And people do. So much so, it's damn near a full-time job just to track what's going on.

Enter EPIC: the Energy Policy Initiatives Center at USD. Their website, tracking legislative and regulatory energy proceedings in Calif., is just what the doctor ordered.

Which way do you want emissions to go?

Here’s a question for you. You know global warming is a serious problem that will have substantial and growing impacts on our economy, health, and well-being. You know global warming is driven by human greenhouse-gas emissions. Over the coming decade, do you want emissions to continue rising, or to start falling? Up or down? Under […]

Green diswasher detergents compare well with conventional brands

After a long week of paper writing and spreadsheet wrestling, I've got a looot of dishes to do this weekend. Good thing Consumer Reports decided to issue their list of the best dishwasher detergents this week. And guess what? Two green brands -- Ecover and Seventh Generation -- made the grade. (Sorry, faithful box of Cascade. Time to go!)

Tips on being a green driver

I haven't had a car for 11 years. Not because I'm particularly virtuous, but because I moved to Manhattan where there's, um, no place to park one.

But my identity as car owner did not go gently into that good night. Before I left Texas for NYC, I fretted almost constantly about leaving my car stereo, my sunroof -- my freedom! -- behind.

And now -- well, now I'm fretting constantly about becoming a car owner again.

This one in North Carolina

I think you have to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal to see this, but I’ll excerpt the relevant bit: North Carolina regulators balked at a big power project fueled by coal, which furnishes half of U.S. electricity but is on the defensive over worries about pollution and global-warming gases. The state utilities commission gave […]

Slim

Continuing on the subject of what Dems should plan in terms of global warming legislation over the next two years, here’s some insight on what conservatives are planning: At the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, right-wing activist and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist urged conservatives not to work to accomplish anything in the current Congress. “Get […]

Guess

… coal is the enemy of the human race!

Yippee

Tony Blair continues to go for the green in an attempt to salvage his legacy: Tony Blair will next week complete a British U-turn over green energy and support an ambitious 20 per cent mandatory target for renewable power as a share of European generation capacity. The British prime minister has overruled his industry minister […]