Ever thought about the toxins in your sex toys?

So you’re an Enlightened Green Consumer. You buy organic food and carry it home from the local market in string...

Tax gas more and other stuff less

Not so long ago, it seemed like gas at $2.33 a gallon cost an arm and a leg; now it seems like a bargain. And not surprisingly, high prices at the pump have spawned a backlash against fuel taxes across the U.S. -- and have added fuel, so to speak, to the campaign to repeal Washington state's most recent gas tax hike.

As a general matter, I think responding to high gas prices by rolling back taxes is misguided. The specifics get murky, of course, since a lot of the money raised by gas taxes is slated for dubious highway projects -- so a vote for higher gas taxes isn't always a vote to reduce gas consumption. But in general, gas taxes are too low, not too high: Right now, they don't even pay for roads, let alone incorporate all of the other external costs (pollution, greenhouse gases, noise, collisions, congestion, etc.) caused by driving and burning fossil fuels. A stiff & sustained gas tax would do a lot more to reduce gas consumption than all the preaching in the world.

Two books explore the perks and perils of corporate social responsibility

Coturri Winery in Sonoma County, Calif., could be a poster child for socially responsible business: The family-owned company farms organically,...

Could chain stores actually be good for the environment?

To some environmentalists, the shoppers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains. If only people stopped spending...

Who would have thought?

When I wrote about robots months ago, it didn't occur to me that robots could be used to grow our food. And if it had, I probably wouldn't have thought they would be doing it so soon. Ah, but they are! I guess Todd is right: the future is now.

Thanks to Wired, I give you OrganiTech:

Tens of thousands of empty storage containers are stacked in towers along I-95 across from the harbor in Newark, New Jersey. They're heaped there in perpetuity, too cheap to be shipped back to Asia but too expensive to melt down.

Where many might see a pile of garbage, Lior Hessel sees, of all things, an organic farm. Those storage containers would be ideal housing for miniature farms, he believes, stacked one upon another like an agricultural skyscraper, all growing fresh organic produce for millions of wealthy consumers. And since the crops would be grown with artificial lighting, servers, sensors and robots, the cost of labor would consist of a single computer technician's salary.

...

OrganiTech can supply a complete set of robotic equipment plus greenhouse for $2 million. A system the size of a tennis court can produce 145,000 bags of lettuce leaves per year -- that's a yield similar to a 100-acre traditional farm. According to the company, it costs 27 cents to produce a single head of lettuce with its system, compared to about 18 cents per head of lettuce grown in California fields. Factor in the transportation costs and suddenly the automated greenhouse grower saves as much as 43 cents a head.

Journalist Jacques Leslie on dams

Hydropower is one those issues that can make a good green go pale with contradictory impulses. Abundant clean energy, sure, plus all that Woody Guthrie populist goodness. But also the potential for massive destruction to land and landscape, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people displaced, and all sorts of downstream ecological and economic disruptions. About 140 countries have major dams, which generate about a fifth of the globe's electricity and enable a sixth of its agricultural output. So while the idea of just tearing them down can have a lot of emotional appeal for some, it just ain't that simple anymore.

Five years ago, jounalist Jacques Leslie wrote 12,000 words on the politics of water for Harper's: "Running Dry: What Happens When the World No Longer Has Enough Freshwater?" He was intrigued enough to keep investigating once that assignment was done -- and the result is a new book, Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment. Just one of his insanely alarming findings: "The world's dams have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth's rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field."

(And here I've been freaking out about a little thing like global warming!)

An ongoing interview with Leslie is the current feature over at The WELL's open-to-the-public inkwell conference, where readers from the wide world can send in questions for Leslie to tackle. His hopeful view is that big dams will someday be relics. Asked about the alternatives, he says:

... there's a substantial list that includes both traditional and new technologies, including rainwater harvesting, water recycling, drip irrigation, desalination (for water supply) and solar, wind, fuel cells, and pump and turbine redesign (for energy). In the Indian state of Rajasthan, a fellow named Rajendra (my spelling may be off) won the Magsaysay Prize (a kind of Nobel Prize for the developing world) by developing a system of ponds and rainwater harvesting that recharged groundwater, revived streams, and rejuvenated villages in an arid area. I hope to write about this work some day.

This is a conversation worth checking out.

(Full disclosure: I've been a volunteer community host on The WELL for about a decade. This plug for inkwell may net me a warm "thanks!" in e-mail.)

Soil Ain’t Green

British soil is losing carbon — and may be contributing to global warming Dirt may be one of the world’s...

A roundup of green plans and brown bills proposed post-Katrina

Resourceful environmental leaders have unearthed opportunity amidst the wreckage left behind by this year’s record hurricane season and the battering...

Review of car safety and gas mileage somehow fails to include hybrids

CNN's Gas Gripes page includes a link to a review of "safe" cars that "save on gas." The "safe" label is based on the results of side crash tests, and the article assumes 27.5 mpg on the highway to be "reasonably good." Somehow, neither article includes the word "hybrid" anywhere in it...