Climate Technology

Dole will make some tropical-fruit distribution carbon-neutral

U.S. residents have a heckuva hard time finding a local pineapple (Hawaiians respectfully excluded, of course). But now you can nosh your tropical fruit with less guilt; Dole Food has pledged to offset 100 percent of the CO2 emissions that come from growing bananas and pineapples in Costa Rica. Working with government agencies, the company plans to carbon-neutralize its entire supply chain, from growing the fruit to packing, transporting, and distributing it in North America and Europe. And those emissions are far from insignificant: Dole ships some 31 million boxes of bananas and 13 million boxes of pineapples annually from Costa Rica, which aims to be a carbon-neutral country by 2021.

source: Environmental Finance

In a nutshell

Business types discuss various subjects at industry confabs: best practices, new marketing strategies, changes in the regulatory environment, etc. They discuss how better to compete. When representatives of the coal-to-liquids industry get together, they talk about something else: One theme dominated discussion last week at an industry-sponsored conference on turning coal into gasoline and diesel […]

They’re still common, but they make no sense

A little while back I praised Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) for opposing new coal plants in his home state. Now he’s clarified his position: he opposes new coal plants anywhere in the world. Word. One grumpy note. Look at this: Michael Yackira, president and chief executive officer of Sierra Pacific Resources, said his […]

Wikipedia Scanner reveals orgs that edit Wikipedia articles

Ah, Wikipedia. Many of us at Grist frequently use this resource, but we do so knowing that just about anyone can edit a Wikipedia article at anytime. So, can we really trust the information contained within?

Fear not! As Wired reports, there is a new tool that sheds some light on who is editing what:

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Making money cutting carbon

DR: There hasn’t been any public pressure to change the electricity system. Most people don’t even know how electricity is made. It comes out of the wall like magic. TC: You are so right. In Ontario, they did a massive peer-reviewed study to identify the health and environmental effects of making power with coal, and […]

Charlie and the Optimism Factory

Florida’s governor names climate panel, talks up green economy Used to be the greenest thing in Florida was a golf course — or maybe an old lady’s dye job gone slightly awry. But something’s happening in that sunshiny state. This week, Gov. Charlie Crist (R) followed up on an early-summer commitment by picking 21 business, […]

Strange Riverbed Fellows?

IBM partners with New York institute to create river-research center Tech giant IBM is partnering with a state-financed science organization in New York to create a cutting-edge river research center. The project, launched with the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, will tap into the mad skillz of IBM engineers to provide 24-hour data collection […]

Huffington calls on press to do that thing I did

Arianna Huffington wonders why, with all the press coverage of the Utah mine collapse, so little has focused on the horrible safety record, anti-unionism, and political back-room dealings of the mine company’s faux-folksy CEO, Bob Murray. What she does not do, apparently, is read her own site. Just saying.

Fascinating talk from people at the company

Via Treehugger, Metropolis magazine has posted a transcript of a talk by Scott Charon and Susan Lyons from furniture company Herman Miller. The talk was given at Metropolis‘s conference Design Entrepreneurs: Rethinking Energy. As the eco-geeks among you likely know, Herman Miller is way out ahead of almost any other company on the planet in […]

Makes total sense!

On the one hand, Bush and the Republicans say we’re helpless to do anything about global warming until China and India act. On the other hand, the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp. are funneling billions in taxpayer dollars to huge corporations (think Halliburton and Bechtel) to help them construct carbon-intensive hard […]