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California solar has a sunny week
A rendering of the future Ivanpah solar plant. Photo: BrightSource EnergyIt’s only Tuesday but two milestones have been reached this week in the long march toward a carbon-free future. On Monday, BrightSource Energy became the first solar power plant developer to complete the financing of a large-scale project in two decades. The United States Department […]
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Google goes all in on solar — to the tune of $168 million
Google has saved you from getting lost, running out of email storage space, and not knowing trivial facts about 90s TV shows. And now it’s going to help save you from a dystopian Mad Max future by investing in solar energy. The company just bet $168 million on solar tech, in the form of the […]
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Pro sports are going greener, and that means the rest of us are too
The Seattle Sounders don’t just have crazy fans. Their facilities have a 57.6 percent landfill diversion rate.Photo: Mike HPro sports may not seem like a natural ally for environmentalists. Players fly from Boston to Los Angeles and back for a single game. Leagues and teams convince cities to build expensive and often unneeded new facilities […]
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FedEx’s Republican CEO wants you to buy an electric car [VIDEO]
Clean energy: not a partisan issue, says FedEx's CEO. That's why he commissioned this slick little promo, which sums up everything that's wrong with our current transportation infrastructure but stops just short of mentioning peak oil. That's OK, because the facts speak for themselves: The U.S. uses a quarter of the world's oil. Seventy percent […]
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The economic case for on-street bike parking
This is the fourth column in a series focusing on the economics of bicycling. Bicycling and driving have one thing in common that is almost universally frustrating, time consuming, friction causing, and potentially expensive. Parking. No matter how seamless your ride across town, no matter how well-timed the traffic lights or low-conflict the bike lanes, […]
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Car parts made out of mushrooms will — wait, what?
Man, is there anything mushrooms can’t do? They make a damn fine fake meat, they make Mario bigger, caterpillars smoke hookahs on them, the whole nine yards. And now, thanks to a company called Ecovative, they can be used to replace styrofoam in some of Earth’s most persistent enemies: packing materials and car parts. The […]
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Ford uses recycled carpet in engines
I was going to write today about Facebook’s efforts to boost the energy efficiency of its Oregon data center by 38 percent. The social networking Goliath did that by redesigning servers and the operations of the facility, then broke with industry convention by sharing its secret sauce with competitors in a new initiative it calls […]
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Facebook’s new campus will simulate real street life, just like Facebook
Facebook’s headquarters will have a new suburban face.Photo: pshabNow that Facebook has eaten the entire world and drunk its milkshake, the company understandably needs more space to let it all hang out. So they’re moving from their offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to a campus of their own in Menlo Park, a corporate park that […]
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Solar-powered wind turbines not just a joke
April fools led to a bunch of fake posts that made us die a little inside, and at least one that seemed like kind of a good idea: the solar-powered wind turbine. Turns out that the notion of harvesting the maximum amount of energy from the immediate environment is good enough that the combo of […]
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Can the Keynes notion of ‘spontaneous optimism’ help U.S. investments in clean energy?
This post originally appeared on the Great Energy Challenge blog, in partnership with National Geographic and Planet Forward. John Maynard Keynes, a giant in modern economic theory, famously wrote, “Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be […]
