Image credit: Larry vs Harry As a student, I spent a year living in Copenhagen. And I was amazed by how many people used cargo bikes as their primary source of transportation . From carting kids to school, to hauling groceries, to giving drunk friends a ride from the bar—heavy-duty load-carrying bikes were just another form of transportation for the people of this beautiful city. Could it be that the rest of the world is finally catching on to the potential of cargo bikes too?… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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You’ve probably heard plenty about the nation’s incipient smart grid — that futuristic-sounding thing that would transform our current one-way grid into yes, a smarter, two-way system that would better allow utilities to match supply to demand. Clean tech and energy efficiency advocates have been calling for its implementation for years. But how much energy and carbon emissions could it save? GOOD has a nifty infographic that answers exactly that. Check it out…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Image: Sportsnewscaster The National Football League has announced that it will be offsetting pretty much all of Super Bowl XLV’s energy expenditures this year — an amount that evidently adds up to a staggering 15,000 megawatts. They’ll be offsetting the energy use with renewable energy certificates provided by Just Energy , and it will cover a long list of events related to, leading up to, and the main event itself. Which, of course, is a th… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Photo credit: VinothChandar / Creative Commons If you could change only one law in America, what would it be? I know my answer: Campaign finance law . I would make every election publicly funded. I would make private or corporate campaign contributions illegal. The costs would be marginal to the taxpayer and I believe the benefits would be profound…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Photo: Western Digital How Energy Efficient Are They Really? The cool people at Ars Technica have a piece about ‘green’ hard drive. They look at the energy usage of regular models vs ‘green’ models to see how much energy would be saved by going that route…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
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There are lots of conservative Americans who write in to say that they care about the environment and are worried about dependence on foreign oil, even if they wish we would stop pushing the climate change agenda. I would think they and just about anyone in the country would be worried about the agenda of the The Heritage Foundation, sent to House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa at his request. The whole shopping list is worth reading, but being TreeHugger, lets just look at the issues affecting the environment:… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Photos: Flickr , CC, and Wikipedia , Public domain. Yes We Can… Do Better for Cyclists Now that Rahm Emanuel is back on the ticket in Chicago, let’s look at what the potential next Mayor has revealed so far about his plan for cycling in the windy city. Chicago blogger
Continue reading …The Law Of Labels: For Every LEED and FSC, There Is An Industry Sponsored Greenwashed Alternative
February 1, 2011 No Comment
1. SFI vs FSC Who can forget the smug guy standing on the lawn in front of his monster home in his pyjamas, the new environmentalist who chooses newspapers printed on SFI paper, looks for a home constructed with wood from SFI certified forests, and even demands that his bathrobe be shipped in packaging made with paper from SFI forests. So why was the Sustainable Forestry Initiative spending so much money in the New Yorker and other magazines and papers? … Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Photo credit: / Creative Commons In Australia, a number of introduced plant species have adapted to become more like natives, a new study reveals. A full 70 percent of the 23 species of invasive plants studied showed significant changes in height as well as leaf size and shape. The surprising thing, researchers said, was not that the plants had changed, but that they had made such
Continue reading …Record Amounts of Fish Consumed in 2008 – 80% of World’s Fisheries Fully Exploited or Overfished
February 1, 2011 No CommentNew data in from the UN FAO on the state of the world’s fisheries . The verdict: Global consumption of fish reached an all time high in 2008 (the stats in these sort of reports are always a few years behind…) and about one-third of all the world’s fisheries are overfished, depleted or in need of recovery. Oceana sums it up well : “The… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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