Climate Technology

New business and climate change video

Sea Studios Foundation has a new 12 minute video entitled Ahead of the Curve: Business Responds to Climate Change. It features some of the biggies (DuPont, Wal-Mart, PG&E) and the hot green business broker, Bill Reilly, who facilitated the TXU energy deal. It also has John Holdren, the Harvard climate change prof who is pushing AAAS in more aggressive directions on climate as board chair. It is a format that works well done by real professionals (Sea Studios does Strange Days on Planet Earth, the excellent series narrated by actor Ed Norton).

Why bother filing an EIS for a biodiversity-destroying project?

Ag giant Cargill was forced to close a soy export terminal in the Brazilian Amazon this weekend, marking a major victory for greens, who have argued for years that the plant was built illegally and became a significant cause of rainforest depletion.

The terminal spurred a major leap in soy production -- millions of acres of rainforest were turned over to soy bean fields -- which is used principally to supply European livestock farms. Ironically, it was closed not because of the destruction, but because they never submitted an EIS. Mmm, soy.

Fuel Me Twice

Bush, Big Auto agree that ethanol is the way of the future … again Detroit’s Big Three automakers cruised to the White House yesterday to plead their case for improving […]

Proposed coal company merger will draw green opposition

This is from a press release that just crossed the transom: The expected March 29, 2007 merger of Dynegy and LS Power will create a combined company with the most […]

What gets measured gets fixed, as they say

The following is a guest post from Deborah Shimberg. Deborah lives in northern Vermont, where she started and continues to run Verve, Inc., which makes all-natural Glee chewing gum. —– […]

Why are environmental activists so clueless at marketing climate change solutions?

Virgin Blue, the Australian extension of Richard Branson's airline empire, recently launched a program to allow passengers to purchase carbon offsets when they book a flight.

That's nice. But what struck me was this quote from Greenpeace's energy campaigner, Ben Pearson:

Virgin should not be criticized out of hand for this scheme, but it promotes the idea that dealing with climate change is easy and cheap rather than being about the difficult task of changing consumer behavior, government policy and investment.

Dirty money

And Rainforest Action Network has the soap.  Get scrubbing.

Goldman Sachs and other financial powerhouses get into the Texas wind biz

What is Goldman Sachs doing in rural Texas? Probably some of its bankers have wondered that themselves, when they find they’re three hours from the nearest latte. A Texas turbine. […]

Pep Raleigh

Google gives out bikes to 2,000 employees across the pond We have a vague recollection that there was life before Google, but it must have been a sad, empty sort […]

If organic food is so popular, why are so few farms transitioning their land?

On a recent trip to Austin, I visited the flagship Whole Foods — a vast space where people gather en masse to render financial sacrifice to that new god, organic […]