Climate Technology

One economist says no

James Galbraith gets to the heart of the dilemma facing climate change economics: The market’s real failure is that it allows for no signal from the future to the present, […]

More Murray

Yesterday the Washington Post ran a profile of Robert Murray, head of Murray Energy, owner of the Utah mine that recently collapsed and all around evil motherfvcker. I actually thought […]

The CEO of Ford Motor Co. …

.. wants a roughly $6-per-gallon tax on gas. That’s the only way, he says, Americans will stop "demanding" gas-guzzling cars. No comment.

YearlyKos: Meyerson and Stern

Watching Harold Meyerson (editor in chief of The American Prospect) and Andy Stern (head of SIEU) chat about … stuff. Stern says of the 100 largest financial institutions in the […]

Soros, Goldman Sachs financing destruction of Brazilian forests

Well, that whole beating George Bush thing in 2004 didn't work out, so now billionaire financier / Democratic fundraiser / anti-Communist crusader George Soros is back to his first love: making money -- apparently even when it comes at the expense of the planet.

Sabrina Valle of the Washington Post is reporting that Soros is one of the biggest investors in growing sugarcane ethanol in the Brazilian cerrado, "a vast plateau where temperatures range from freezing to steaming hot and bushes and grasslands alternate with forests and the richest variety of flora of all the world's savannas."

That could soon come to an end. In the past four decades, more than half of the Cerrado has been transformed by the encroachment of cattle ranchers and soybean farmers. And now another demand is quickly eating into the landscape: sugarcane, the raw material for Brazilian ethanol.

"Deforestation in the Cerrado is actually happening at a higher rate than it has in the Amazon," said John Buchanan, senior director of business practices for Conservation International in Arlington.

"If the actual deforestation rates continue, all the remaining vegetation in the Cerrado could be lost by the year 2030. That would be a huge loss of biodiversity."

The roots of this transformation lie in the worldwide demand for ethanol, recently boosted by a U.S. Senate bill that would mandate the use of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, more than six times the capacity of the United States' 115 ethanol refineries. President Bush, who proposed a similar increase in his State of the Union address, visited Brazil and negotiated a deal in March to promote ethanol production in Latin America and the Caribbean.

For ten mil

Congrats to Treehugger, which was just purchased by the Discovery Channel for a cool $10 million.

Ranking oil companies from evil to even more evil

Get pumped: Sierra has updated its guide to choosing the least-evil gas stations. And they’ve condensed it to fit in a handy travel-sized package: a rearview-mirror air freshener, which could […]

Interesting stuff on the hottest new green tech

I’ve been waiting for a good excuse to link to Earth2Tech, an interesting new project from internet legend Om Malik’s GigaOm family of blogs. It’s focused on clean tech startups, […]

Hayden Hamilton, CEO of GreenPrint, answers questions

Hayden Hamilton. What work do you do? I’m the founder and CEO of GreenPrint. How does it relate to the environment? We recently launched GreenPrint software which analyzes each page […]

Sure looks that way

Back in May, I was seduced by GM's seeming sincerity in developing a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt. We must always remember, however, that GM is a master greenwasher.