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Radiohead singer called out for hypocrisy.

Thom Yorke, leader of the critically-revered rock band Radiohead, has this to say:

"Climate change is indisputable and we have to do something dramatic. You have a certain amount of credit you can cash in with your celebrity and I'm cashing the rest of my chips in with this. ... The music industry is a spectacularly good example of fast-turnover consumer culture. It is actually terrifying. Environmental considerations should be factored in to the way the record companies operate."

Well, the Sunday Times went and hired the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management to do an environmental audit of the band.

It found that 50,000 trees would need to be planted and maintained for 100 years in order to offset the amount of CO2 produced by Hail to the Thief, the group's last album and tour.

These figures, said the Times with poorly concealed condescension, "highlight the complexity of seemingly simple arguments on protecting the planet."

Umbra on reducing emissions, one person at a time

Dear Umbra, I want to adopt the Kyoto treaty myself and adjust my lifestyle accordingly. No waiting, and to hell with George Bush! If my nation had adopted it, I’d have to be doing it anyway. So what is my per-capita fossil-fuel ration for the next 10 years, how do I measure it, how do […]

Craigslist Foundation turns its energy to green networking

Today: the personals. Tomorrow: the world? Since its founding in 1995, Craigslist has gained a devoted following in cities around the world. As filmmaker Michael Ferris Gibson showed in his recent documentary “24 Hours on Craigslist,” the online community board brings strangers together for all sorts of transactions and revelations. Now the website’s namesake foundation […]

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Build

Brownfield redevelopment increasingly popular in U.S. cities Developers the U.S. over are lately enamored of “Cinderella” properties (aka brownfields). These formerly contaminated sites can transform into luxury real estate, thanks to the magic of fairy godmothers like, um, the federal government. Once upon a time, the abandoned toxic sites were shunned and only a brave […]

Salarymen of the World: Untie!

Japan adopts “no-tie” look for summer to save energy The paradigmatically propriety-conscious Japanese bureaucrat may be loosening up and dressing down, thanks to, well, orders from above. In an effort to conserve energy by reducing air-conditioner use, Japan’s Environment Ministry today launched a campaign urging government workers to leave suit coats and ties at home. […]

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 […]