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‘Sectoral carbon’ … Eh? Please define
At times certain words become quite fashionable, though nobody is quite sure why. Everyone wants to use them, even as they can have different meanings for different people. In the discussion of climate change in the United States, “sectoral” seems to have achieved this particular honor over the past few months. Before we start, let’s […]
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Ask Umbra on comparing green products
Q. Dear Umbra, I am a consumer who has recently convinced a friend of mine to green his business. I am now in charge of doing all of the research. My question is, how do I go about assessing the life cycle of various products? … Do you know of such a service/website? I have […]
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Electric cars get better mileage
From a study published in this week’s Science Express ($ub Req’d): Bioelectricity produces an average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108% more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosic ethanol… Given the limited area of land that is available to grow biofuels crops without causing direct or indirect land use impacts, bioenergy applications should […]
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A bad idea, plus lots of cash
What’s that in your gas tank?This is a blog post about the intersection of a bad idea and lots of cash–your cash. The bad idea is this: growing crops to ferment and distill them into ethanol for internal combustion engines. A few days ago, the EPA revealed that by its calculations, use of corn-based ethanol […]
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Pinko bastion spawns capitalist solution to solar financing
Berkeley is Fox News’ nightmare. The city’s political spectrum runs from center left to left of Lenin. Malcolm X not only has an elementary school named after him but his birthday is a public holiday. The best pizza in town comes from a workers’ collective (veggie only) located across the street from Alice Waters’ Chez […]
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Behind the scenes at Fortune Brainstorm Green 2009
What’s better than attending the Fortune Brainstorm Green 2009 and hearing Ford Chairman Bill Ford and Founder and CEO of A Better Place Shai Agassi speak? Shaking hands with Former President Bill Clinton, of course! Not too shabby for a couple of days in Orange County. Beyond the speakers and the networking, the artistic angle […]
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‘Clunkers’ debunkers attack Democrats’ auto trade-in plan
Should the clunkers plan be junked?Support “cash for clunkers” as an auto-industry bailout if you must, but don’t call it green. So say the Wall Street Journal, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, and U.K. environmentalist George Monbiot, all critical of the environmental benefits of the proposal President Barack Obama endorsed yesterday. Obama and […]
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Exelon CEO: Really, we want a cap on carbon
The CEO of Exelon Corp., one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, is calling for a carbon cap in a new national TV ad. This comes just a day after Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), who is leading GOP efforts to kill the House climate and energy bill, told business leaders who want climate action to […]
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Cool Companies, Part 1: How the best businesses boost profits and productivity by reducing GHGs
[Please send me any case studies of companies, buildings, and factories in the last 10 years that have cost-effectively reduced and carbon emissions. I am, as always, looking for well-documented cases where a systems approach to energy and carbon achieved deep savings and productivity gains.] Ten years ago next month I published the first collection […]
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House Republicans blow off biz leaders who want climate action
House Republicans are ramping up their campaign against the Democratic leadership’s climate and energy bill — and telling business leaders to get with the program or get out of the way. On Tuesday, a group of key Republicans hosted a summit on Capitol Hill to bash the Waxman-Markey bill as an “energy tax” that would […]
