History has a nasty habit of repeating itself and this photograph looks like it could be from 1950’s London. Unfortunately it is from Beijing circa 2007. Natural light is now 10 to 25 percent dimmer …

Image Credit: Rensselaer/Shawn Lin
Producing energy from the sun makes perfect sense until you factor in the economics of solar technology efficiency and the environmental impact of manufacturing panels and adding new power lines. One of …

images credit: REUTERS/Kimberly White
Google Inc, the internet search and advertising leader, is increasingly looking at the energy sector as a potential business opportunity, the New York Times reported.
Google is hoping to soon unveil tools …

Photo: Argentinean officials announce the new regulation (credit: National Environmental Office).

Thanks to a set of regulations and norms established by the Argentinean Environmental Secretariat, companies that carry on hazardous activities will have to get insurance against environmental damage in the country.

According to the office, the law that establishes this was actually approved a while ago, but companies didn’t comply with it because -ironically- there weren’t regulations to define which activities were considered dangerous and there wasn’t any insurance po…

Photo provided by Bioneers

Think of Janine Benyus, and your brain will likely bounce right to biomimicry.

Benyus is someone we’ve talked about often before, but just to refresh you, she is the president of the Biomimicry Institute and spoke at last weekend’s Bioneers conference.

During her speech, she outlined some of nature’s best 100 solutions for our problems, as well as compa…

Most people complain of hating high school. But that might be because they didn’t get to do cool stuff like make an electric car - or it is because they didn’t go to High Tech High.

HTH started in 2000 as a single charter school, but it has grown by leaps and bounds since then, and the student body focuses on specific projects that teach them what they need to learn. The school has had a 100% graduation rate, which is practically unheard of, and the students leave as published authors, since each class con…

Spooked by High Energy Costs?
Google has long been eco-conscious. From tips on how to save energy in data centers, to investments in plug-in cars and batteries and a fleet of PHEVs.

Its most recent initiative is an energy savings calculator with a Halloween theme. Read on for more details….

The point of going to an office to work is to communicate with others. But for too many years we have been building our offices so that the only way to get around is by elevator. At some offices an alarm goes off if you try to use the stairs, and every separate office ends up being in a world of its own. That doesn’t encourage a whole lot of inter-office communication.

In Minneapolis, SmithGroup designed some jazzy offices for law firm Bowman and Brooke, and critical to the design was a jazzy stair. Penny Broda writes in GreenSource:

“Most of the airy feeling comes from the o…

photo: Jenny

Another nail has been hammered into the corn ethanol coffin. According to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the water requirements to produce corn ethanol are significantly higher than producing non-irrigated biofuels, hydrogen generated from renewable energy, or petroleum or diesel fuel.

The researchers compared the amount of water withdrawn (used and returned to the source) and the water consumed (water not returned to the source) per mile traveled in a typical car when powered by gasoline, diesel, corn ethanol, soy-derived biofuels, hydrogen and electricity and obtained the…

Home office of Mr. Universe in Serenity

In these difficult times a lot of people are working from home, whether they want to or not. A lot of others would like to, but employers have not been crazy about it, even though it can cut overhead as well as your company’s carbon footprint. As Megan suggests at Planet Green, “Let your boss know that green telecommuting is a growing trend, that eco-smart bosses and workers everywhere are giving this carbon-footprint-shrinking solution a go, and that you’d like to hop on the emission-reduction wagon.” (read m…