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Facebook’s coal problem
You’ve hard about the cloud, right? This blog comes to you from the cloud. The cloud is where the bank keeps your money. YouTube, Gmail, Twitter and iTunes live in the cloud. So does a record of all my runs in 2011. The cloud, in essence, is...
Environmental Defense: living up to its name
Fred Krupp What a different just a few years can make. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time not long ago when Congress appeared to be on the verge of a bipartisan agreement to regulate global warming pollution. Republicans John McCain,...
GM’s sustainability chief: charged up about the Volt
Outside the door to General Motors’ Washington office is a photo of the Chevy Volt framed by the U.S. Capitol. GM loves to market the Volt, the 2011 Motor Trend Car of the Year (“A car of the future you can drive today.”) It’s an engineering...
When people ride bikes, great things happen.
Rising gasoline prices don’t much worry Rob Gusky. Gusky, a 48-year-old process engineer at a Kimberly-Clark facility in Neenah, Wisconsin, travels to work year-round by bicycle, making the 17-mile round trip even in winter. (Friday’s low in Neenah...
The future of electricity? More of the same…
In the slow-moving, capital-intensive, heavily-regulated electric utility industry, the times they aren’t a-changin.’ Natural gas is the cheap fossil fuel of choice. Coal will be burned for as long as there is coal. The federal government will...
Abu Dhabi: oil today, green tomorrow?
Abu Dhabi: not quite "green" Whatever you think about the rulers of Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab Emirates and host of this week’s World Future Energy Summit, you have to give them credit for thinking long-term....
WRI: Beyond the beltway, some bright spots
“It was a tough year for the environment, and a tough year for environmentalists, especially in the U.S.” So said Jonathan Lash, the CEO of the World Resources Institute, one of Washington’s most respected environmental groups, as he began his...
Five myths about electric cars
Mary Ann Wright Today’s guest post comes from three co-authors. Mary Ann Wright is vice president of technology and innovation for Johnson Controls Power Solutions, the largest maker of automotive batteries, including traditional lead acid...
The smart grid’s killer app? Electric cars
Let me clue you in to a little journalistic secret: few topics on the business/sustainability beat as inherently uninteresting (ok, boring) than the smart grid. Have you ever struck up a conversation with anyone, outside of work, about the smart...
Waste Management earns its name
Big companies aren’t good at breakthrough innovation. Disruptive innovation usually comes from start-ups or entrepreneurs. (See Big Business’s big innovation problem.) Big companies are even worse at innovation when it threaten to cannibalize...
The green jobs debate (cont’d)
Nat Keohane In a blogpost the other day (Cancun can’t: Ten reasons why the climate talks will fail), I devoted a paragraph (see below) to what could have been a longer critique of the way environmental groups tried to sell legislation to limit...
Cancun can’t: Ten reasons why the climate talks will fail
For the next couple of weeks, thousands of government officials, NGOs, environmental activists and reporters will gather in Cancun, Mexico for international climate negotiations, officially known as the Sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-16)...
