Climate Technology
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Green doesn’t sell to mouth-breathing Americans, says CEO of GE
GE is making billions of dollars selling the world wind turbines and energy-efficient technology, so it's a little surprising to hear that the biggest regret of its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is all that hippy-dippy talk at the center of the company's Ecomagination campaign. "If I had one thing to do over again I would not […]
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How to profit from the coming ecopocalypse
While a quarter of Americans have a net worth of zero, Jeremy Grantham controls a hedge fund worth $107 billion, and he has a message for the world: Resource scarcity, peak oil, and climate change could mean big bucks for those who can get out ahead of the disaster. Well, okay, not BIG bucks — […]
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Better Place taps China in bid to take over the world, more or less
If a supervillain wanted to roll out a plan to turn the planet's car infrastructure on its head, he could hardly do better than the deal that Israeli company Better Place just announced with the China Southern Power Grid Co. Better Place is a company that wants to replace filling stations with battery swapping stations. […]
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Portland, Maine, to save 50,000 gallons of oil a year with geothermal heating and cooling
Portland, Maine's new airport expansion is to be the first in the country to use a dead-simple but often overlooked technology to significantly reduce its heating and cooling bills. They're calling it a geothermal system, but it's not like the kind that produce power in Iceland; it's more properly called a "ground-source heat pump." The […]
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Care about the forest? Here’s what you can do
Who cares about the forest? That’s the question author/artist Franke James explores in this creative personal story commissioned by the Forest Stewardship Council of Canada. Check out the visual essay below, or watch it as an animated video.
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Meet the world’s most high-tech bike
It's pretty impressive that we're still chugging along on human-powered vehicles only a step more high-tech than a velocipede — olde-tyme bikes look basically like the ones we've got today. Why improve on perfection, right? Well, maybe just for the sheer badassery of it. At least, that seems to be the theory behind the Alpha, […]
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On Coachella’s solar stage
It was a sunny year at the 2011 Coachella Music Festival, and the stage is set for the town’s new concentrating photovoltaic farm.Photo: Paige K. ParsonsAn interesting solar development got buried by Thursday’s big news that French fossil fuel conglomerate Total had agreed to acquire a majority stake in SunPower, the Silicon Valley photovoltaic panel […]
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Want to save the planet? Al Gore has an app for that
An Inconvenient Truth started out as a book and became an Oscar-winning movie. Al Gore’s follow-up book, Our Choice, has now gone multimedia too, but in a whole new way, as a first-of-its-kind app complete with documentary footage and even a trailer set to swelling, melodramatic music. Watch it here: After Our Choice was published […]
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Chamber of Commerce and auto dealer group lose last-gasp lawsuit to stop clean cars
Cross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. The federal court of appeals in Washington today rejected the last legal attack on California’s landmark greenhouse-gas standards for new cars built in model years 2012-16. The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sought to overturn EPA’s waiver giving California the green light […]
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Is the future of solar centralized or distributed?
Solar power produces only a tiny fraction of America's energy, but that hasn't stopped greens — who are always up for expending at least as much energy fighting each other as fighting fossil fuels — from commencing a debate that we'll probably be having for decades, if not centuries to come: Is it better to […]
