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  • Toyota Prius sales down 55% compared to March ’08

    Today, Toyota Motor Sales reported March ’09 sales numbers, which showed a 55 percent decline for the Prius brand.  In March ’08, Toyota sold 20,635 Priuses, but in March ’09, only 8,924. (Maybe everyone is holding out for the 2010 model?) Overall, Toyota numbers were down 36 percent from March ’08, but up 19 percent […]

  • Seattle’s transit-supporting sales-tax hike goes into effect

    Photo: Seattle Municipal Archives via Flickr If you noticed this week that your bar tab was a bit higher than usual, it’s probably because of that extra shot of tequila you’re now regretting the sales tax hike. As of April 1, residents in King, Pierce, and Snohomish county started paying more for their purchases — […]

  • Every job can be green, part one

    Fortunately for your humble correspondent, Van Jones was so busy when the editors of the new book, Mandate for Change: Policies and leadership for 2009 and beyond, were looking for an author for their chapter about green jobs, that they turned to me instead.  This is part one of three posts that will serialize my […]

  • U.S. government paying industry to pollute

    Chris Hayes has a blockbuster scoop up on The Nation: “Pulp Nonfiction,” about how the U.S. government will pay the paper industry up to $8 billion this year to emit more carbon dioxide. Yeah, you read that right. The horror begins, as it so often does, with well-meaning efforts by Congress to encourage biofuels. The […]

  • Myth: Pricing carbon will destroy the economy

    Legislators from dirty-energy producing states, energy-intensive business lobbies, and conservative think tanks struggle to outdo one another with apocalyptic predictions about the effects of mandatory greenhouse gas emission reductions. See, for example, the Chamber of Commerce’s video showing children shivering in the cold (really). As climate legislation evolves this year, the rhetoric is ramping up […]

  • Does carbon-eating cement deserve the hype?

    I am trying to identify the plausible CO2-mitigation strategies that are scalable — that can comprise at least a half a wedge (see “How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution). So when a new process gets this much hype — as in Scientific American’s, “Cement from CO2: […]

  • Waxman bill threatens children and elderly, says very concerned power industry

    Reactions to the Waxman energy legislation are going to be pouring in over the coming days and weeks. On an early read, environmentalists are enthusiastic. But who is looking out for society’s most vulnerable? Power companies, of course! Says Scott Segal, chairman of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council: … the bill’s silence on a method […]

  • ‘Getting Green Done’ speaks hard truths about sustainable business

    Corporate sustainability guru Auden Schendler lays out the problem with corporate sustainability gurus in his recent Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution. In doing so, he pretty much dares the nation’s copy editors to title their reviews with the decade’s most played-out headline: “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” […]

  • Corporate sustainability guru visits Seattle

    Corporate sustainability guru Auden Schendler lays out the problem with corporate sustainability gurus in his recent book "Getting Green Done."

  • Closing the door on building new coal-fired power plants in America

    This post was originally published at earthpolicy.org. —– Community opposition, legal challenges, and financial uncertainty over future carbon costs are prompting companies to rethink their plans for coal. Since the beginning of 2007, 95 proposed coal-fired power plants have been canceled or postponed in the United States — 59 in 2007, 24 in 2008, and […]