Green Options

North Carolina church goes green and holds to their traditions of cherishing the Earth. How’d they do it?

OK, so I haven’t posted a weekly green news roundup in a while, but I’m getting back to making it a regular feature as of today. So what are the green scoops across the U.S. this week? There’s plenty:

• Over in Dallas, for instance, officials and urban designers are gathering today for an all-day “charrette” (or brainstorming session) to figure out what it would take to create a fully sustainable city block. They hope to follow up their meeting with an international competition to design just such a thing. (You can read more here (PDF)).

A new hybrid inorganic/organic material could usher in solar cells that absorb all solar wavelengths.

The new polymer could also enable much more efficient charge separation since electrons dislodged by light in the material remain free much longer than in conventional solar cells used in solar powered battery chargers.

The inorganic/organic hybrid polymer material can be made into polymer blends that can “absorb essentially across the entire solar spectrum–they go from about 300 nanometers down to about 10,000 nanometers,” said professor [...]

Editor’s Note: This is a guest contribution from Adam Shake.

Bill Gates has his hands in the green again, but this time, it’s algae.  His Investment Firm, Cascades Investments LLC, along with the Rockefeller family’s venture capital firm Venrock, the WellcomeTrust, and Arch Venture Partners have invested a total of 100 million dollars in Sapphire Energy.

Sapphire Energy, a San Diego based company that launched in May of 2007, says that it’s goal “is to be the world’s leading producer of renewable petrochemical products.” The companies website goes on to say “Critically important, there is no ‘food vs. fuel’ tradeoff. The process is not dependent on crops or valuable farmland. It is highly water efficient, delivering 10 to 100 times more energy per acre than cropland biofuels.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Sapphire is working towards a 10,000-barrel-a-day algae-based oil facility, and can now concentrate on production and engineering problems. Meanwhile, Gates’s involvement may signal a broader interest in alternative biofuels.”

Pacific Gas and Electric in California announced last week it will buy 800 megawatts of solar-generated electricity from two companies, enough to light 239,000 homes. Within three years, PG&E will buy its solar energy from OptiSolar and SunPower, which plan to build the world’s two largest solar farms in California as

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Interesting article I’ve found on the Guardian

Fly less

Taking a flight will dwarf all other elements of your holiday in terms of carbon emissions. Use sites such as carbonresponsible.com to calculate the footprint of a particular journey and see how long it would take you to make the equivalent carbon saving by cutting down on car journeys or using low-energy lightbulbs. Sites such as seat61.com and sailanddrive.com help you plan breaks by rail and ferry as alternatives to [...]

Green tourism is a more popular form of tourism. general travel is going more green. But more expert say that the global warming is also caused by travel.

Citing green hotels, coconut oil fuel for airlines and even recyclable golf tees, executives in one of the world’s largest industries say they are urgently trying to shrink tourism’s oversized environmental footprint.

But with global travel projected to keep soaring, and those very leaders still

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British Columbia will be the first in North America to institute a comprehensive carbon tax on nearly all fossil fuels. It’s a groundbreaking move that could prove the feasibility of taxing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Beginning July 1st, 2008, businesses and residents of British Columbia will be taxed $10 per metric ton of carbon emitted by fuels such as gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane, and home heating fuel. The tax will increase yearly by $5 per ton to $30 per ton in 2012, at which point the government will reevaluate the tax rate.

Citizens across the UK will have the chance to expand their knowledge of all things green with a London expedition due to run in May.

Entitled LONDON AWARE 08, the exhibition gives people a chance to meet and talk with the exhibitors.

And as the website tells us:

LONDON AWARE 08 will be a meeting point for everyone - businesses, charities and experts, as well as people who are taking their first steps into a greener world.

Environmental News: Al Gore last night urged a climate conference to be ambitious in its attempts to check global warming and to ignore US objections because President Bush would soon be out of office.

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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