Tom Friedman, erstwhile Great Green Hope

Tom Friedman of the NYT gets a lot of love around here as the green movement’s great popularizer, someone whose...

At present, offsets are impossible to verify

It is time environmental writers to stop accepting PR spin, and double check claims of "carbon neutrality" whether they come from giant corporations, the Super Bowl, or a really cool film festival.

Carbon offsets are almost always either an honest error or a scam.

Guaranteed true, top to bottom!

In 2007:

1. Prius sales will peak and begin a slow decline as consumers anticipate 2008 models from competitors that will have similar or better performance and therefore higher status.
2. Electric hybrid bikes will become increasingly popular as a commuting tool thanks to improved battery technology.
3. The SUV fad will continue to fade.
4. The corn ethanol pyramid scheme will continue to play out based on the canard that the use of environmentally destructive biofuels is a necessary (but in theory, temporary) evil.
5. Biofuel crops (primarily those used for biodiesel) will accelerate the loss of rainforests and other carbon sinks (and the biodiversity contained within them).
6. More biofuel will be imported than in any previous year.
7. More lifeforms will be declared extinct.
8. The number of hungry people in the world will increase (as it did this year, by 4 million).
9. Mustaches will return as an attractive and stylish fashion statement.
10. Grist will kick some serious ass.

Happy New Year.

With big biz jumping on the green bandwagon, should activists cheer or jeer?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in...

Mercury Retrograde

U.S. DOE backs off plan to sell neurotoxin to rest of world Caving in to critics and maybe, just maybe,...

Small is beautiful.

Here is a fun article from The Green Wombat retelling the "solar-to-hydrogen" car story for the millionth time. I read stories like this in Popular Mechanics decades ago. The article talks about using solar panels to store sunlight as hydrogen to burn in internal-combustion-powered cars. Australia has a lot of sunlight and summers can be hot. It would be far more efficient to use that sunlight to power swamp coolers to air-condition homes than to throw 90% of that solar energy away converting it to hydrogen and then burning it in a 30% efficient internal combustion engine. Passing hydrogen through a fuel cell to power an electric car or light a home would also be a lot more efficient.

Reviving a much-cited, little-read sustainable-ag masterpiece

The real Arsenal of Democracy is a fertile soil, the fresh produce of which is the birthright of nations.— Sir...

Venture capitalist predicts

While I’m turning over the microphone to Vinod Khosla, he also sent along his thoughts on the prospects for alternative...

Malaysian company may build an additional 12 plants

According to recent press reports, a Malaysian company, Pioneer Bio Industries Corp. Sdn. Bhd., is about to begin building what it claims will be the world's first plant to commercially produce fuel ethanol from nipah palms (Nypa fruiticans), also known as the mangrove palm, attap palm (in Singapore), and Golpata (in Bangladesh).

Nipah palms grow in soft mud along coasts and slow-moving tidal rivers flowing into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. They are abundant in Malaysia.