Green News

Photo by Pete Oxford From a die-hard ecologist's standpoint, the unequivocal answer is simple: No. Tourism invites hordes of people to trample over the delicate island ecosystems, the ever-growing industry attracts migrant workers to join an already unsustainable population which combined with the gaggle of visitors usurps the Galapagos' limited resources. Not to mention the extensive fossil fuel-frying air travel you'll most like...

:: Unclog your drains the eco-friendly way. The world's waterways will thank you. :: Cut out the calories and wasteful packaging from store bought snacks by making your own. How about tasty Tortilla Chips? :: Check out the anti-gift list for a good laugh--or fright!...

This week is Carnival of the Green #156 and it's being hosted by Healthy Child Healthy World, a blog that gives us simple steps in creating a safe, clean and green home for our family. So head on over to this week's Carnival to find a round up of green news and events from the past week, submitted by other bloggers and green sites. To learn more about Carnival of the Green, where it will be and how to host, please click here to link to...

The financial meltdown has proven how badly things need to change. In July the world was focused on faltering trade negotiations, managing high energy and food costs, climate change and ecosystem degradation. Today, the recent financial collapse has led to a large-scale evaporation of trust in markets. The irony is that leading companies have long been trying to convince the financial markets to value sustainable development, the companies that pursue it, and the long-term view. The WBCSD has long been calling for bold governance to manage climate change and for governments to recognize business as a solution provider for that and other sustainable development challenges, in te...

What to do when your corner of the world consumes 5 million liters of diesel fuel a day and you have a fish processing industry which can produce 120,000 kilograms of processed fish waste daily from just one factory? Turn that waste into biodiesel, obviously. That’s just what Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center and Vietnamese seafood producer Hiep Thanh Seafood JSC are doing under a three-year project:...

Andrew Maynard plug in housing When I asked Is Home Ownership a Good Thing? a few months ago, the consensus was very much yes. Now some thoughtful people are coming down on the other side. Richard Florida: Our reliance on single-family homeownership is a product of the past 50 years – and the experiment has outlived its usefulness. Not only is it now readily apparent that not everyone should own a home, and th...

photo: Mini USA You probably heard or read about last week’s announcement that applications for the Mini E field test had been opened and that 500 people in the Los Angeles and New York metro areas would be participating. Maybe you ever applied to have the honor of paying for a year-long lease on one of the two-seat Coopers and giving feedback to Mini in the hopes that sometime, hopefully sooner rather than later, you can actual purchase one. Well, it doesn’t look like that’ll be the case:...

Photo via Ubergizmo The iPhone isn’t the only cell phone that will allow you to adjust your home’s power consumption. Nokia has entered the smart home scene and is working on providing a new option for controlling your smart home via your mobile phone. Nokia’s Home Control Center is a Linux-based platform that will be compatable with Zigbee, Z-Wave and other smart home t...

Andy Revkin of the New York Times at Columbia University on why climate change is not “the story of our time”: My coverage has evolved. Climate change is not the story of our time. Climate change is a subset of the story of our time, whic...

photo: Steven Wong That may be an obvious statement for regular followers of renewable energy news, and of the green movement in general, but a new study published in Conservation Biology illustrates just how important intact tropical forests are in slowing climate change. And just how counter productive converting them to biofuel plantations really is. Here’s the gist of it:...

Photo via Anna Gram Here’s a stylish throwback to grade school science experiments: A clock that runs on lemons. The citrus clock is designed to be an elegant way to run a timepiece for a week with one lemon. But, it raises a few questions about the merit of such a design. ...

We wrote a year ago about Michelle Kaufmann's assault of the booming prefab modern gingerbread scene, noting that "as the mortgage crisis deepens, this may be the only modern prefab market left." We are disappointed to note that whereas last year her house was a modest, one storey number, she has gone all McMansion on us with her GingerLotus, which is definitely more than we can chew in a sitting. ...

photo: The Guardian If you live in the United States, you may have missed the announcement made last Thursday, that the world’s fastest all-electric superbike has been unveiled. Making its first appearance at the 2008 NEC Bike Show in the UK , the TTX01 isn’t commercially available yet, but it is street legal (in the UK at least), can do 0-60 in 3.5 seconds and reach a top speed of 125 mph. The price tag when a limited number are available for purchase by the end of 2009: £20,000 ($30,000). Want to know how far will you be able to go on a ...

My favorite talmudic anecdote is from the Rabbi who noted "my life has been blessed, because I never knew I needed anything until I had it." I know exactly how he felt; How have I coped without this One Click Butter Cutter? No wonder North American kitchens are so big, they have to accommodate all of this crap....

Andrew Lih China has a big counterfeiting problem, but it's not DVDs or clothing or cars. It's pollution statistics. We've mentioned it before, and wrote about it recently at The Vine, but as the UN worries about giant smog clouds over Asia and Beijing considers

Photo via labudde Choosing accessories for your laptop can sometimes be tough. You may want to choose the greenest option possible, and yet you don't want to sacrifice style. Sometimes you want to buy whatever is at the closest store because it's easy. But there are some excellent options out there that will make you want to hold off buying whatever is at the ready, and buy something that is most definitely green. Among these options is this great upcycled laptop bag made by

Until some carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade system pushes fossil fuel prices up to where they probably should be (if all the environmental factors are taken into consideration) any small thing that reduces the cost of generating electricity from renewable energy sources is great news. A claim that a new wind turbine design could reduce the cost of generating electricity from wind power by 50%, and possibly double or triple a turbine’s output in the process is even better news. This is how it could happen: ...

Photo via Robert Nelson Amazon is finally offering refurbished Kindles – apparently they’ve been around long enough that refurbished options are actually available. Kind of. They’re currently out, but keep your eye on the website for more. The good news is that while the price red...

photo: Native American Biofuels Considering that many of its higher profile vehicles really suck fuel like there’s no tomorrow, you may not think that the US military concerned itself much with reducing fuel usage, but based on a recent announcement that’s apparently not the case. According to Army Times, the Army will be deploying 800 Neighborhood Electric Vehicles next year for on-base transportation. That will be expanded to 4,00...

They are just so cute, those kids on the cement promotion site. The concrete manufacturers advertise themselves as green, and whenever we go to the trade shows, all the insulated form manufacturers are calling themselves "green"- there was a whole row of them at Greenbuild. My usual complaints are the amount of Carbon Dioxide generated in its manufacture or the damage done by aggregate extraction; now we have a new one: cement kilns are among the worst emitters of mercury on the continent. ...