How many times have you heard your governor or your congressmen talk about how your state is a leader in the green economy?  I imagine a majority of governors and congressmen have made this or similar claims in the past few years.  The only problem is most of them are lying.

Green economists are fond of pointing out that there is really no such thing as waste or garbage.  In nature there is no waste as everything produced by one biological process is put to use by another.  Human garbage dumps are merely piles of wasted resources that we haven’t figured out what to do with [...]

Back in December I wrote about the Dark Future of Sushi, and the outlook hasn’t gotten any better since then.  Later that month, the Copenhagen Climate conference failed to produce a binding resolution to slow coral-bleaching, ocean acidifying, climate change.  More recently the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) failed to follow [...]

Three interesting renewable news items this week: 1)  China Outspends US on Renewable Energy in 2009 2)  New Device Improves Existing Wind Turbine Efficiency by 5-10% 3)  GM E. Coli Produce Ready-To-Use Oil From Cellulose

I just finished Bill McKibben’s, Deep Economy – The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.  For me, this is one of those rare books that is both easy and interesting to read, but will change how you view the world and likely how you live your life.  Using examples from Vermont, Central America, Cuba, [...]

I recently wrote an article on the enormous potential for wind energy generation in the United States. In short, it mentioned that due to advances in technology, the estimate of wind energy potential was recently increased by a factor of 3 and that potential is now way more energy than the entire country currently consumes. [...]

I recently wrote an article on the US Government’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.  In it, I mentioned that jet fuel accounted for a huge portion of the entire government’s total carbon footprint (and also its addiction to foreign oil).  Well, it turns out the Pentagon has been hard at work on finding a [...]

I recently finished reading “The Blue Zones”, by Dan Buettner, which provides fascinating details of the diets and lifestyles of people living in various regions of the world known for extreme longevity.  People living in these different “Blue Zones” often have lots in common.  Some things mentioned in the book, like the importance of regular [...]

While shopping for groceries today I was struck by two things: 1)  How great it is that big chain stores are learning about, and meeting the demand for, “green” products. 2)  How they still don’t quite get it. Here’s why:

The AP reported today that President Obama ordered the US Government to cut greenhouse gas emission by 28% by 2020.  The United States government is the largest energy consumer in the US market, so this could be a big deal.  So how is this goal likely to be reached?

I just read an interesting article in Wired Magazine on nuclear power plants fueled by thorium.  Thorium is a close cousin to uranium and can produce a sustained fission reaction and therefore energy.  A thorium power plant would create significantly less volume of waste that is also much less radioactive than the waste from a [...]

Our current production of corn, wheat, and other grains is a mess.  Farming these crops is very petroleum and energy intensive and leads to incredible levels of fertilizer, sediment, pesticides, and other pollutants entering our environment.  Things have gotten so out of hand that many farmers aren’t legally allowed to replant seeds gathered from their [...]