Green Options

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Earlier this week I wrote a particularly winging post, complaining about lack of UK government action on tackling climate change and arguing that many governments merely see green issues as an excuse to raise tax revenues.

Today I would like to look at a situation where the reverse is true, visiting the Germany eco-town of Freiburg .

At first glance, those Germans may appear to have limited green credentials. Fearful of potential impact on their high performance car industry, Germany has lobbied aggressively in recent months to delay new EU legislation aimed at improving vehicle fuel economy. Germany is also home to six of Europe’s ten most polluting power stations and has been keeping quiet about plans to build 24 additional coal powered plants.

However, in terms of concrete and practical actions aimed at making a real difference to the environment, this nation of passionate recyclers, high speed railway builders, and renewable energy nuts appear to be way out in front.

Just when you think you’ve heard it all, along comes a new study that finds yet one more way in which we humans can screw up the environment: get divorced.

Actually, as weird as it might sound at first, the discovery — published in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – makes perfect sense once you consider the typical result of divorce: two people and, possibly, [...]

Consumer Consequences, an interactive online game/environmental footprint calculator launched by American Public Media this week, strives for more detail than other footprint calculators have offered — which proves to be both a positive and a negative.

A positive because, by asking detailed questions about, say, your eating and drinking habits as well as all the more typical queries — What’s your monthly electric bill? What’s your car’s

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Recently, here on GO, we talked about green building in fairly general terms, but more specifically, what are some green building strategies?