Latest Articles

Bye Bye Nukie

Sweden starts shutting down nuke plants, despite some reservations At midnight last night, technicians at Sweden’s Barseback-2 nuclear reactor hit the off button (or something), shutting down the country’s oldest nuclear power plant for good. Vattenfall, the state-owned company that operated the facility, will now funnel $1 billion toward building northern Europe’s biggest wind farm. […]

NextBillion goodies

Like everyone else in the sustainable blogosphere, I've been digging on NextBillion.net, the newly launched blog from the World Resources Institute. They sent me to Fast Company's "Change Masters" awards for businesses that do good, which are cool. Then there's this great post on the three steps the business world can take to lead globalization on a more sustainable path.

Best of all, there's this op-ed by Ian Davis in The Economist (cited here) about the silly conflict between two contrasting points of view: corporate social responsibility (CSR) on one hand, and "the business of business is business" -- a mindset that rejects all social concerns as extraneous -- on the other.

Davis argues that both perspectives are limited and slightly naive, and lays out a path to a more integrated perspective through which activists recognize the social goods proffered by business, and businesses recognize the crucial ways that social concerns are already integral to their financial well-being.

I can't do it justice in this hasty post, but do give it a read. It's enlightening.

Washington Monthly considers peak oil.

Blogger Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly has a well-written, informative, and balanced set of posts of the so-called "Peak Oil" theory -- the idea that, while the world may not be running out of oil, exactly, we may be fairly close to the practical limit of how much oil can be squeezed out of the ground in any given year.  After the peak, goes the theory, oil production gradually declines, no matter how high the price might go. 

(By the way, oil production in the United States peaked in 1970.  Even with new production in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, and billions of dollars invested in domestic oil production since then, the US still produces about a third less oil per year than it did at the peak.  The Peak Oil theory is basically the hypothesis that the entire world is about to do the same thing that the US did in 1970 -- reach a physical maximum of production, after which oil supplies gradually and continually decline.)

I've posted on the topic before, and have nothing new to add.  But I think it's definitely something worth familiarizing yourself with -- at a minimum, to put the recent rash of media stories on the subject in context.  The Washington Monthly series is a pretty good place to start.

Japanese dress down to save 81 million gallons of oil in summer

What do you do if your country needs to meet targets under the Kyoto global warming protocol? You dress down.

Yup, the Japanese government is encouraging public workers to wear less in order to use less oil. Since many in Japan don dark suits in summer, they crank up the AC to maintain an average temperature of 77 degrees. Someone figured out that Japan could save 81 million gallons of oil in one summer by setting the temperature at 82. To make the warmer workplace more bearable, employees now have the okay to wear short sleeves and go sans tie.

However, one possible unintended consequence of this move is that shirt sales are up. I'm guessing that they are not organic.

Darth Subsidious

Exxon says it won’t dabble in clean energy — too many darn subsidies With oil prices soaring, Exxon is perfectly happy pumping and refining the black stuff, thanks. Despite persistent pressure from shareholder groups and activists, the company says it has no plans to invest in clean energies like solar and wind. You see, solar […]

Moving Picture

A review of award-winning documentary Oil on Ice The Green Screen Environmental Film Festival will get rolling in San Francisco on Wednesday, alongside festivities for U.N. World Environment Day. Leading off the festival is Oil on Ice, an award-winning documentary about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the many attempts to open it for oil […]

Everything New Is Old Again

Wisconsin power-plant expansion could have long-term eco-consequences The fate of a Wisconsin coal-fired power plant could augur poorly for the environment, say its opponents. At issue is what does and doesn’t count as a “new” power-generating facility: Under the Clean Water Act, new facilities are subject to strict regulations on cleaning technology; an addition to […]

Like a Metric Earth Day

Mayors from all over globe gather to celebrate World Environment Day A five-day gathering to mark U.N. World Environment Day kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco and is expected to bring together at least 70 mayors from cities across the globe. San Francisco is the first U.S. city to host the annual event and will […]

An optimistic op-ed on Washington state climate moves.

A refreshing and optimistic op-ed by KC Golden, policy director of Climate Solutions. Golden points out that 2005 is turning out to be a banner year for Washington--a year that includes both a turning away from energy-dependence and several encouraging steps toward a smarter and more efficient energy-economy that benefits everyone.

In a time when partisanship seems all the rage, Golden's point about ending our addiction to fossil fuels is right on the money:

We cannot rise to this challenge if we stay stuck in the well-worn ruts of political identity -- east vs. west; left vs. right; Republican vs. Democrat; environment vs. economy. We're going to miss the boat if the only story we've got is "us versus them."

It's a familiar story, this battle among special interests. But it's useless. It enriches political consultants and it spices up talk radio, but it gets us nowhere and we can't afford to go nowhere. We've got a fossil fuel age to end and a new, clean energy economy to build. We need a much richer, more constructive story -- a story that multiplies, not divides.

An environmental-justice advocate insists he’s not dead yet

Ludovic Blain. “The Death of Environmentalism” should be called “The Death of Elite, White, American Environmentalism.” A critique of the environmental movement that draws on neither the perspectives nor achievements of the environmental-justice (EJ) movement is, at very best, incomplete. That the DOE interviews and recommendations only focused on white, American male-led environmentalism meant that […]