By Gavin Newsom •
September 17, 2009
Air travel is a major contributor to climate change. Offsets are a small part of a larger solution.
Today at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) we are launching the Climate Passport program allowing travelers to offset the impact of their air travel through an airport kiosk. This will be the world’s first airport kiosk—giving people the opportunity to calculate the environmental impact of their flights and purchase carbon offsets to address that impact while at the airport.
By Derek Markham •
August 31, 2009
Take part in the “weight loss” challenge from Native Energy and you can lose 30 pounds while helping to build the greenest town in America.
“Our ‘weight-loss’ challenge is a simple, fun way to get people thinking about how
they can easily join in the fight against global warming.”
-Regina Farrell, Native Energy
By Susan Kraemer •
July 23, 2009
You’ve seen the headlines:
Cows Operate Power Company as Side Business
Onion Farmer takes $2.5 Million to Bank For Electricity Production
More Carbon Sequestration Needed: Farmers Paid to Not Plant
Every day there’s more news of the alternative energy that farms can make. From cow poop. From crop residues. From onion skins. From chicken feathers. From wind royalties. From solar power.
But you read cleantechnica.
Of course farmers will benefit from the climate bill. HR2434 is designed to make it cheaper to switch to low carbon energy than to keep using fossil fuels that destroy our future.
Farmers; however, are stuck with Fox News and Rush and the Heritage Foundation and CATO. They are told
Your energy cost will soar under socialist Al Gore climate bill!
So they worry. What Fox News and Rush won’t let them know is that…
By Susan Kraemer •
July 19, 2009
It’s hard being an environmental celebrity, especially when you are Royal too. People want to see you, but that can mean racking up a lot of carbon miles.
So Prince Charles had his Aston Martin converted to run on bio-ethanol made from aged English wine, and his Audi, Jaguar, and Range Rover all run on what the English call old cooking fat.
In the US we call this reused cooking oil because that’s much hipper and greener sounding, and marketing is everything.
So now Prince Charles is driven in the royal Jaguar that runs on homemade biodiesel and, for a little variety; in the Land Rover or the Audi, in a carbon conscious fashion.
But what about his airplane travel? Well…
By Zachary Shahan •
July 13, 2009
With overwhelming support from the general American people and a President who says that we really need to do something about climate change, the House of Representatives passed a landmark bill on climate change on June 20th. A victory! Or maybe not. The bill is a major step forward in gesture in many ways.
However, the House dropped or changed many instrumental parts of what is needed to reduce or limit global warming.
If you are like me, you’re going to hit as many music festivals this summer as your wallet can handle.
We’ll be joined by hundreds of thousands of people heading out to enjoy great band performances. Of course, that also means hundreds of thousands of people eating packaged food and drinking bottled water (and other substances) and all the waste that entails. And let’s not forget the tons of fossil fuels burned just getting there.
Fortunately, many festival programmers and organizers have been working behind the scenes for years to try to mitigate some of the environmental impact of these annual throngs of music-lovers. They all adhere to the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ principles at the heart of greening their festivals, but that is just the beginning. Most are upping the ante on green initiatives.
Here I highlight just five of this summer’s festivals and their creative and inspiring eco-initiatives:
1. Bumbershoot, Seattle
Bumbershoot is a leader in green festivals. To begin with, organizers have creatively applied the re-use principle by turning their old signage into new Bumbershoot bags. A small local business called Alchemy Goods turns old rubber and vinyl into bags. 
All this is after the festival signs have already been used multiple times. First they print most of their new signage locally on 100% recyclable material using 100% VOC and solvent-free inks. Then they re-use a large percentage of the previous year’s signs for the current year’s promotion.
By Alan Smith •
April 1, 2009
Excuse Me, Waiter? What Year is this Carbon?
By Alan Smith •
April 1, 2009
We’re coming at you live with special Red, Green, and Blue coverage from New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.
By Amy Jussel •
February 16, 2009
Sweet! Anyone receive any Climate Change Chocolate this past Valentine’s Day weekend? Well, chocolate bunny season is coming up so you might wanna bookmark this one…
I wrote about the TerraPass carbon offset chocolate offerings on Shaping Youth with a jaundiced eye toward greenwashing, since the main Bloomsberry factory is located in New Zealand, but good news! Bloomsberry chocolate manufacturer CEO Paul Pruett confirmed the TerraPass chocolate that’s sold in the U.S. is produced in the U.S.!
It’s evidently part of their business model to stay local with manufacturing, in addition to the chocolate’s recyclable wrapper and 15 tips for reducing your carbon footprint. Even better? Bloomsberry reports so far they’ve sold enough chocolate bars to offset the equivalent of:
814 passenger vehicles for 1 year
10,333 barrels oil
588 homes for 1 year
31 acres of forest preserved from deforestation
23.2 railcars worth of coal
By Scott Cooney •
February 10, 2009
You’re a small business owner and you’ve got your hands full with credit card readers, vender accounts, customer complaints, and advertising cold-callers…and do we even have to mention the recession? Still, you want to do your part to help reduce the impacts of climate change, and you’ve heard that one of the ways your company can reduce your carbon footprint is by offsetting your emissions with what they call carbon offsets.
There’s a lot of information out there about carbon offsets, but how can you know that purchasing carbon offsets is actually reducing overall carbon emissions globally? Where does the money go? You certainly don’t have the time to research all companies offering to offset your carbon footprint (In the SF bay area alone - 3Degrees, Terrapass, LiveNeutral, The Carbon Neutral Company, Greatest Planet…), but yet you want to do just that.
This post was originally published at Intent.com on Monday, December 15, 2008.
The winter holidays are almost upon us, and whether you’re celebrating Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or the holiday(s) of another tradition, you may still be stumped for gifts to give this year… especially gifts that fit your own (and the recipients’) values.
For the past few years, I’ve moved away from buying “stuff” as much as possible, and focused on giving the gift of giving (say that three times fast!). That is, I look for gifts that contribute to larger causes. After writing about ‘TisBest gift cards a couple of weeks ago, I started brainstorming on other good “gifts that keep on giving” for the “treehugger” on your list.
