Green Options

Editor’s Note:  This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a  a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

Let Me Out! How to enjoy the school run by Ann Kenrick is a book about sustainable school travel.  Any parent, no matter the size of their child’s school, has witnessed the traffic jam and exhaust fumes associated with the start and end of the school day, but it wasn’t always so.  According to Kenrick, if you picked a random group of 40-year-old and asked them how they traveled to school, over “90% will say they walked” to school.  Let Me Out! How to enjoy the school run contemplates why school transportation trends have changed in such a short time and suggest methods to “reverse the trend.”

Candy giant MARS, parent company of M&M’S®, DOVE®, MILKY WAY®, SNICKERS®, 3 MUSKETEERS®, and TWIX®, turned on a huge new solar array (a “solar garden”) at its headquarters in New Jersey today. No matter what you think of candy food like this, it is good to see such a company going solar. Popular with millions, billions perhaps, and about as mainstream as you can imagine, this is a good step for solar’s more widespread use across the country.

This facility is PSEG Solar Source’s first large-scale solar project. It is one of the largest solar projects in the state of New Jersey, which is already 2nd only to California in its amount of installed solar capacity. The MARS headquarters adjacent to the solar garden is the workplace of about 1,200 employees and is where M&M’S® Brand Chocolate Candies are manufactured.

What would have been the Southern Hemisphere’s largest wind farm, a $2 billion NZD ($1.4 billion USD) and 630 MW wind farm in New Zealand, is not happening because New Zealand’s Environment Court says that it would ruin the surrounding landscape.

This project would have powered over a million homes and made a huge dent in New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. It is not happening now because of a group of NIMBY activists and the Environment Court’s ruling.

This is a huge blow, in itself, to renewable and wind energy proponents, but it also brings concerns for future wind energy projects.

Chances are, if you run a major polluting company, you’re not reading cleantechnica. But you never know. So here’s my advice, based on my experience writing about energy; gathered into one easy quick read for the non-eco reader, on how a polluting company can benefit from the new energy bill requirements to cut carbon emissions.

Today is 350.org’s International Day of Climate Action, during which people around the world are trying to call attention to our need to bring the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back down to 350 parts-per-million (ppm). A noble cause, to be sure — but can we actually do it?

An interview with and climate scientist and oceanographer Dr. Julian P. Sachs. quote from the interview: “The increase in atmospheric CO2 and methane since about 1850 are unprecedented in the last 800,000 years in terms of the amount and rate. High levels of these gases in the atmosphere in the geologic past (last 800 kyr there is excellent data from ice cores) have always been associated with warm temperatures, and vice versa. It is not a stretch to [...]

Although images of giant coal-fired smokestacks and automobile tailpipes characterize greenhouse gas scenarios, a new report proposes a different way of thinking about it – product policy.  Products and packaging contribute 44% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and reduction plans are more likely to succeed if extended producer responsibility (EPR) is made a cornerstone of commerce and environmental policy, the report says.

Norway committed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2020 this week. This is the most ambitious goal of any rich nation to date.

Norway’s prime minister Jens Stoltenberg (just re-elected) is meeting the requests of many developing nations and environmental NGOs with this commitment.

“The United States is in a sense climate illiterate still,” Hans Schellnhuber, the director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said earlier this week.

He wasn’t just comparing the US to the EU, however. Even developing nations seem to know more about the issue and the potential results of inaction.

In the midst of a week when climate change finally stole back some of the spotlight that had been hogged by health care reform for months, the Senate fought off a potentially devastating attempt to emasculate the EPA and its recently won power to regulate greenhouse gases.

Not all clean tech companies need to produce more environmentally friendly products in order to make a difference; some are leaders in the industry because quite simply, they change their procedures in order to ensure that their practices reduce their carbon footprint. In this week’s Newsweek “Green Rankings” were released, and many of those higher up on the list include leaders in technology that are trying to make sure that their environmental impact is just that much cleaner.