Climate Technology
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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 […]
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Holy crap: giant oil company buys giant solar company
What's Exxon going to do with this years' record-breaking profits? If you said "buy a 60 percent stake in America's largest solar panel manufacturing company," you have wildly underestimated the degree to which its CEO would find that profoundly emasculating. Cheese-eating surrender-monkeys have no such qualms, however, which is why French oil giant Total just […]
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Home tweet home: Twitter chooses the city over sprawl
I spent the last couple of days at a conference about climate, cities, and behavior. One topic that kept coming up among the municipal officials there — from places like New York, Denver, Vancouver, Richmond, and San Francisco — was the importance of walkable downtowns to attracting business and investment. Amenities like good transit, bike […]
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Even an adorable child can’t make KFC eco-friendly
You gotta love 10-year-old Cole, who got into environmental activism after a second-grade school assignment (to "become an environmental activist" — who knew it was this easy? Just get to 'em early and tell 'em to do it). Cole found out that McDonalds was sourcing its paper packaging from endangered forests in his home state […]
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Wellinghoff hypes IT for electricity
In his vision of an America transitioning away from fossil fuels, Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, sees information technology as the basis for tremendous financial and employment opportunities. And with the right policies and incentives, this could happen soon. But in our current political reality, it feels like light years away. Speaking […]
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Arcimoto is an electric car for the Facebook generation
Marketers are learning that kids don't want cars anymore. They blame it on Facebook — kids don't need cars to socialize — instead of facing up to the reality: cars suck. They are boring and dirty and no longer integral to teenage courtship rituals. This car, however, does not suck: Announced just last week, the Arcimoto […]
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High gas prices mean Exxon will make more money than any publicly held company in history this year
Exxon's earnings are expected to go up 50 percent this year, reports the Wall Street Journal. What was Washington's response? The House GOP voted overwhelmingly to protect the billions in taxpayer subsidies oil and gas companies receive. So let's see … you're paying Exxon at the pump, and you're also paying them on tax day. It's […]
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Dirty clouds: Greenpeace ranks tech giants on their data centers’ coal dependency
Tech companies have something hanging over their heads.Photo: The SharpteamAs I sit here at the Local 123 café in Berkeley on Earth Day, a dozen hipsters are transfixed by their Macbooks, their heads lost in the cloud. According to a Greenpeace report [PDF] released this week, all those presumably green and well-meaning digital workers-slash-slackers are […]
