Green Options

There’s good news for the future of green-collar employment, but it comes with a caveat: maximizing job growth in green industries will require the right public policy support. That means law-makers need to approve measures such as a renewable portfolio standard, incentives for renewable energy, public education programs and adequate funding for research and development.

If such measures are put in place, the U.S. could see as many as one out of every four [...]

While growing up whenever our family received a package we would store the cardboard boxes in the attic. Throughout the years those boxes were used and reused and reused- moving in and out of college and apartments, sending packages to others, carting things across town… I am pleased to state that a box handled by the Redmond family usually had a pretty long life span. It was interesting when years went by and we didn’t use many

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There are so many beneficial reasons to buy in bulk, so this simple green practice is easy and rewarding to implement. Living an hour away from the nearest grocery store, buying our food and personal products in bulk is a necessity of mountain life. The survivalist in me does not feel comfortable unless my pantry is stocked with staple goods bought in bulk. Not only does buying in bulk make life

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Do you know where your pension coming from? For some US teachers, it’s Chinese coal.

The Chinese coal industry is known for its lucrative returns: the China Shenhua Energy Co. gained 65% from July to September, and many investors claim they can’t afford not to be in China. In fact, 20% of Shenhua’s stock is held by U.S. investors — one of whom is the Teachers Retirement System of Texas.

But China’s coal

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Renewable energy is big, big, big: Josh just wrote about the world’s largest wind farm possibly going up in South Dakota (yahoo!), California could see the world’s largest solar power plant, and now Singapore is in the foray with landing the largest solar manufacturing facility the world’s ever seen.

A Norwegian company called Renewable Energy Corporation (REC) will build the complex, which will be completed in different stages to incorporate wafer,

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The demand for solar energy is expanding rapidly, but one of the industry’s obstacles to even faster growth has always been the difficulty of getting enough silicon to make photovoltaic cells for solar panels.

This week, though, IBM announced a new potential source for much-needed silicon: waste silicon wafers used to make semiconductor chips for computers,

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We’ve covered the topic of junk mail before in our daily tips (see Tip o’ the Day: War on Junk Mail), but a new website is offering consumers an easy way to get rid of unwanted catalogues. With the holiday season approaching, my mailbox has become inundated with catalogues for every product under the sun. Previously, I have sent individual letters to each company, as well as signed up for

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Findings from a new report examining insurance companies’ responses to climate change were released at the International Association of Insurance Supervisors last week. The study found that an increasing number of companies are implementing initiatives to reduce the risk of climate change’s impacts and reduce the emissions that cause the problem.

"From Risk to Opportunity 2007: Insurer Responses to Climate Change" was commissioned by Ceres, a U.S. group of investors and clean

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For the first time ever, a U.S. regulatory agency denied a coal plant permit solely on the basis of its carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a main contributor to global warming.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) denied permits to two large, 700-megawatt plants proposed by Sunflower Electric Power. The plants would have cost about $3.6 billion and spewed 11 million tons of CO2 into the air each year. That’s almost

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