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April 21, 2006--Apple® today announced an expansion of its successful recycling program, offering free computer take-back and recycling with the purchase of a new Macintosh® system beginning in June. US customers who buy a new Mac® through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com) or Apple's retail stores will receive free shipping and environmentally friendly disposal of their old computer as part of the Apple Recycling program. Equipment received by the program in the US is recycled domestically and no hazardous material is shipped overseas.

And now you know.

The spread of Wal-Mart

Yeesh. Here's a short video of Wal-Mart's spread in the U.S. It accompanies a paper called "The Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density" (PDF) by the University of Minnesota's Thomas Holmes.

(via Kottke)

Density is political destiny?

The Poor Man is one of my favorite blogs, but I rarely get a chance to link there, since they rarely discuss green issues.

But this post offers an ingenious (albeit largely wishful thinking) argument. It begins with this delightful 'graph:

OK, so, I'm not saying that this country won't devolve into a fascistic hellscape of race warriors and man-eating rats, disintegrating beneath the weight of its own reactionary isolationism. But even through the first six years of "WPE: The Quickening," I've been able to remain relatively sanguine about our long term prospects for one reason: if you're a Republican, demographics are against you.

("WPE," as PM fans know, is Worst President Ever.)

The argument goes like this:

Readers talk back about Wal-Mart, endorsing Republicans, stupid puns, and more

  Re: Don’t Discount Him Dear Editor: That’s good news that Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. is taking his company down a greener path. But if he really wants to reduce his company’s production of greenhouse gases, he’s going to have to get his customers out of their cars. Retooling the big box is […]

Monday link dump, part two

I've been swamped, blah blah blah, here's some more good stuff to read:

* Engineer-Poet yells at the American people about high gas prices. It's for their own good.

* RealClimate reviews the three big climate-change books of the past year. It picks Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe as its favorite. (Denis Hayes reviewed the book for Grist; I interviewed Kolbert.)

* The Singapore Environment Council created some clever ads about air pollution. (via TH)

* Watthead brings news of a new bill just introduced by a bipartisan (through mostly Democrat) group of senators: the Enhanced Energy Security Act of 2006 (press release here). It is focused on long-term reduction of American oil use. Amazingly, it does more than subsidize ethanol. There are real conservation targets in there, as well as some stuff with light-weight and electric cars. It almost seems like -- dare I speak the words -- a good bill. Naturally it will die in committee.

* Jerome a Paris writes a piece of fiction: The Day of the Oslo Warning. Read it. (via EnergyBulletin)

* Bill Clinton gives good speech:

Not Wade Away

U.S. streams in sad shape, says EPA analysis It’s Monday and most of the streams in the U.S. are in bad shape. Can we go back to bed? A U.S. EPA study finds that 42 percent of “wadeable” U.S. streams are in poor condition, 25 percent are fair, and only 28 percent are good (OK, […]

Mardi Gross

New Orleans opens new landfill without environmental safeguards Without environmental studies or community consultation, a new landfill has been opened on the eastern edge of New Orleans. The site is less than two miles from a community of more than a thousand Vietnamese-American families and across a canal from the largest urban wildlife refuge in […]

Cape of Good Hope

Cape Wind outlook better after Bush administration voices support The controversial Cape Wind project planned for Nantucket Sound has found new allies in a strange place: the Bush administration. On Thursday, Undersecretary of Energy David Garman sent a letter urging Congress to drop a measure that would allow the Massachusetts governor (currently Mitt Romney, a […]

Monday link dump, part one

I've been swamped, blah blah blah, here's some cool stuff you should read.

* The Watt reminds you that gas isn't really that expensive. Soda, however, is.

* Alex has an interesting interview with Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth.

* Robert Rapier loves him some debunking. He takes on a Consumers Union report on how oil companies are ripping off the public (no they aren't) and eviscerates last night's 60 Minutes report on how ethanol is the answer to our energy woes (no it isn't). The latter, in particular, should not be missed.

* Speaking of ethanol cheerleading, Tom Daschle and Vinod Khosla have an op-ed in today's NYT arguing for a "Carbon Alternative Fuel Equivalent" standard (CAFE, get it?). As usual in this sort of piece, everything they say is obviously about corn, but in the throw-away line about carbon-dioxide emissions, there's a token mention of "ethanol produced from perennial energy crops like switch grass." Where is all that switch grass, anyway? Cause all I'm seeing is corn from sea to shining sea.

* OK, well, here's some switch grass:

Jason and Kimberley Graham-Nye, eco-diaper entrepreneurs, answer questions

The Graham-Nye clan. What are your job titles? Cofounders, CEO and president, dad and mum of gDiapers. What does your company do? Manufacture and market the world’s only flushable diaper. Every day in the U.S., 50 million waste-filled diapers go into the landfill where they sit for up to 500 years. Diapers are the third-largest […]