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How to green your fridge

Tastes great, less energy billing. Photo: Fred Ferand Home is where the fridge is. Whether it’s a top-freezer or side-by-side model, in stainless steel, bisque, or black, that big box in the kitchen is on the job 24-7, rescuing us from hunger, boredom, warm beer, and cravings for Chunky Monkey. Refrigerators made pre-2000, alas, tend […]

Walker/Cat’s coal-happy ads in rural West Virginia

Prompted by Pompey Road in comments, I went looking for some commercials that have been running in rural West Virginia, put out by a company called Walker/Cat that makes heavy machinery for coal operations. (George W. Bush spoke at their Belle plant in 2002.) Turns out they’re right here. They have to be seen to […]

In case you’re wondering

Yes, Thursday night’s Democratic debate will once again be sponsored by the coal industry.

The numbers add up for solar power, whether you’re in Seattle or Albuquerque

The New York Times published an article yesterday titled "Silicon Valley Starts to Turn Its Face to the Sun":

"This is the biggest market Silicon Valley has ever looked at," says T. J. Rogers, the chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor, which is part-owner of the SunPower Corporation, a maker of solar cells in San Jose, Calif.

"The solar industry today is like the late 1970s when mainframe computers dominated, and then Steve Jobs and I.B.M. came out with personal computers," says R. Martin Roscheisen, the chief executive of Nanosolar, a solar company in San Jose, Calif.

Why all the excitement? You need only look at a few numbers and a graph to get the picture.

Cadbury eggs will come with less packaging

Cadbury Schweppes, the maker of the Easter season’s omnipresent sugar-yolk-in-a-chocolate-shell, has unveiled an alleged “eco-egg.” No, the goopy white innards aren’t organic; no, the chocolate isn’t fair trade. The “eco” aspect comes merely from the eggs being sold unboxed, reducing packaging waste. So which came first, the greenwashing or the egg?

The major differences between carbon pricing plans are political

Putting a price on carbon is probably an unavoidable part of phasing out fossil fuels to fight global warming and air pollution. For years, Peter Barnes has advocated a brilliant means of mitigating many of the harmful economic side effects: take the revenue from carbon taxes or auctions and rebate it back to the people, dividing it equally among each citizen.

Barnes advocates doing this via an auctioned permit system. However,the same thing could be done with a carbon tax. Instead of auctioning permits, simply tax those same embedded emissions and rebate that revenue to consumers. Raise the tax periodically to lower emissions.

Inevitably, with either a tax or auctioned permits, the price charged for carbon will be passed down the supply chain to consumers. By rebating the revenue back to consumers, you minimize the impact of those price increases. They have to pay more, but they have more money to pay with. You get the price signals to affect behavior, without lowering consumer net income.

ILSR, spinning like a top

This is really, really sad. A group, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has done stalwart work on relocalizing the economy, has let their pro-local passion overcome their principles.

Now they simply embarass themselves, beating the drums for corn ethanol, using flackery techniques that would do any corporate PR shop proud. Let's start in:

Oil refinery in Texas explodes, four injured

An oil refinery in Big Spring, Texas, exploded Monday for as-yet-unknown reasons, injuring four workers and sending large plumes of smoke into the air. The explosion closed schools, shut down the nearby freeway, and shook buildings up to a few miles away. Fires at the facility were apparently extinguished as of Monday night, but the […]

Fortune mag: widespread poverty and child labor in the cocoa-producing world

While I was waxing euphoric last week about Fair Trade and ultra-fancy chocolate ahead of Valentine’s Day, interesting things were happening in the chocolate world. Regulators in Germany raided the offices of seven corporate chocolate makers — including Nestle, Kraft, and Mars — investigating allegations of price fixing. Six food conglomerates process half of the […]

… and Bush talks big

A year and a half after ceding Cuba’s reins (and reign) to his brother Raul, Fidel Castro has apparently officially resigned after nearly 50 years at the helm. For me, the news brought to mind the eye-opening piece we ran by Erica Gies shortly after Castro first stepped down in 2006. It explores the green […]