Climate Technology
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Smithfield, Pilgrim’s Pride, and other meat giants get credit-crunched
As I’ve written so many times before, a very few companies essentially control U.S. meat production. Their business model is crude, but for years has been effective: You place lots of animals in a tight space (or "contract" with farmers to do so), stuff them with corn and soy (made cheap chronic overproduction mandated by […]
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Clif Bar’s husband-and-wife CEO team talk about staying independent in a Big Organic world
Kit Crawford and Gary Erickson. Photo: Bart Nagel Walk into Clif Bar’s Berkeley headquarters, and you might think you’ve entered greenie-nonprofit world: multiple recycling stations, cruiser bikes kept for employees’ lunchtime use, and a fridge that serves as a pickup point for a local farm’s community-supported agriculture program. Vending machines peddle Amy’s Organic frozen meals […]
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The new corporate threat to our water supplies
This is a guest essay by authors and filmmakers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman. Their book Thirst exposed how the corporate drive to control water has become a catalyst for community resistance to globalization. This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. —– In the last few years, […]
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Galbraith argues against the bailout and in favor of public investement
I cited James Galbraith last night while arguing that the financial mess should not deter us from making substantial investments in our future. (By the by, you should read Galbraith’s new book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.) Today, Galbraith has a kick-ass op-ed in the Washington […]
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Wal-Mart will slice use of plastic bags
Wal-Mart aims to cut plastic-bag waste in its global operations by an average 33 percent over the next five years, the retail behemoth announced Thursday at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. And if you ever doubted that Wal-Mart is big, consider this: The move is expected to eliminate some 9 billion plastic […]
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Van Jones talks about the National Day of Action
Green-job advocates Green for All have just moved into a lovely new office space in Oakland, California. There’s plenty of natural light, beautiful bamboo floors, and lots of room to grow. Unfortunately, their charismatic founder, Van Jones, hasn’t had much chance to enjoy it. Jones is one of the faces at the forefront of the […]
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Chrysler to offer electric car by 2010, full lineup of EVs sometime after
Automaker Chrysler announced Tuesday that it too is jumping into the electric-car fray, aiming to roll out its own electric vehicle in the United States by 2010, followed soon after by a full line of electric and/or plug-in hybrid vehicles. If the company meets its intended deadline, 2010 will be a busy year for electric […]
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Western states announce proposal for cutting GHG emissions
Participants in the Western Climate Initiative on Tuesday announced specific plans for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The seven states and four provinces will initiate a cap-and-trade program, establishing a carbon market that applies to industries and utilities by 2012 and transportation, heating, and other fuels by 2015. The proposed […]
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The financial crisis, how we got here, and who knows what to do about it
David Roberts recently said about the current financial crisis: • Nobody clearly understands how we got in this situation. • Nobody clearly understands what situation we are in. • Nobody clearly understands what’s going to happen next. The first and second were, I think, serious errors. Dean Baker predicted this back in September of 2002 […]
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U.S. biz waiting for regulation before cutting emissions, report shows
Only about one-third of leading U.S. companies have set targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, compared to 74 percent of global corporations, says the sixth annual report from the Carbon Disclosure Project. CDP, an influential initiative backed by 385 institutional investors, received input from 64 percent of the Standard & Poor’s 500 U.S. companies (a jump […]
