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  • Symptom: High utility bills; Diagnosis: Full energy efficiency workup

    Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist The red Honda Fit from a local car-sharing service pulls into the driveway of a suburban San Francisco Bay-area home, and two clean-cut young guys in khaki jump out and start unloading a Ghostbusters array of gadgets — something resembling a giant black megaphone, a glowing tube attached […]

  • News flash: More jobs and lower energy costs good for low-income Americans

    Memo TO: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, Heritage Foundation and other industry groups predicting the end of life as we know if America takes action on climate change FROM: Natural Resources Defense Council, Political Economic Research Institute/University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Green for All and the Center For American Progress Subject: Inconvenient New Study […]

  • Blowing the green whistle on sports

    Sports leagues and teams are beginning to take sustainability issues more seriously.If you watch sports on TV, you may be thinking from your perch on the couch that they are a relatively inexpensive, practically carbon-neutral diversion from life’s occupations. But sport is big business, facing many of the same environmental challenges as the manufacturing, agriculture, […]

  • Hot new clean-tech startups are plug-and-play

    You gotta be crazy to start a green-tech company these days, right? Venture funding has fallen off the proverbial cliff since the economy imploded last September, and even established renewable energy companies are struggling to stay afloat until the Obama stimulus cash begins to flow. But it seemed more 1999 than 2009 this week at […]

  • Former PepsiCo exec to take helm at Seventh Generation

    Entrepreneur Jeffrey Hollender launched a mail-order catalog business 20 years ago and nursed it for more than a decade before it became profitable. That company is now Seventh Generation, and there’s no more catalog, but there certainly is a ton of recycled toilet paper — and all-natural cleaning supplies and non-toxic personal-care products. It’s a […]

  • Brookings: Fears that cap and trade will hurt farmers are baseless

    Cross-posted from Wonk Room. A new economic study reveals that concerns a cap on global warming pollution could hurt American agriculture are unfounded. As the Waxman-Markey green economy legislation (H.R. 2454) moves toward passage in the House of Representatives, the farm lobby and rural officials have questioned the bill’s costs to farmers. Last week, Rep. […]

  • Congress introduces twin bills to control drilling and protect drinking water

    ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten reports: In a widely expected move that is sure to draw the ire of the oil and gas industry, Democratic members of Congress today introduced twin bills to amend the Safe Drinking Water Act and give the Environmental Protection Agency authority over the controversial drilling process called hydraulic fracturing. The stand-alone bills […]

  • Clean technology innovation: reaping the rewards

    Business Week has a provocative article this week by Michael Mandel on innovation — or the collapse of it — in America. According to Mandel, many of our current woes stem from a failure to innovate over the last decade since the glory years of the late 1990s. While most Americans still take pride in our innovation, […]

  • Slideshow: The plug-ins and electric vehicles of 2009

    Can’t wait until 2010 for the Chevy Volt (or Coda or Fisker Karma or Chrysler Circuit)? Check out these electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles that are either on the market now or will be by the end of 2009. In slideshow order: Aptera 2e Th!nk City Subaru Stella Toyota Prius extended-range hybrid Mitsubishi i-MiEV smart […]

  • A closer look at problems with the sectoral approach to carbon offsets

    Last month I went home to Barcelona to attend Carbon Expo, one of the major annual gatherings for professionals involved in the global carbon market. There were many interesting conversations and panel discussions over the course of the three-day conference, but one in particular focused on sectoral mechanisms as a way of sourcing international offsets […]