White isn’t the only color for brides these days.
More and more weddings are pulling off a green theme along with their color scheme and paying attention to the environment as well as pulling off a smash wedding. It’s not so difficult to do.
Check out some of these tips and tricks to help make your wedding not only an affair to remember but also an ally to the environment. (more…)
A dear friend wrote me just now, apparently a bit depressed about all the green-washing, all the public ignorance and apathy surrounding sustainability, and all the complexities in determining which projects truly are more eco-friendly than others.
She mentioned my piece on Michael T. Klare’s article “How to Fry a Planet,” noting: “He makes a good point, and if I apply that to my current thinking…the petroleum industry is king and everyone else is connected to it, and so if the petroleum industry isn’t moving, nobody else will be, at least not in any meaningful way.” (more…)
Here’s a question for you: When you listen to the debates in English Parliament, and hear how people with opposing viewpoints heckle and interrupt one another, doesn’t your skin crawl? Mine does. These people have such incredible manners on most occasions, but not in public speaking. How is that possible?
When I saw this piece in which British Prime Minister David Cameron scolded Europe for “missing out on the fracking boom,” I could imagine the loud HARRUMPHs he must have received from the environmentalists. (more…)
An old friend from high school has invited me to be a guest on his radio show which takes a conservative perspective on the topics of the day. I’ll be on for an hour to talk to him and entertain callers’ questions about my views on renewable energy, electric transportation, and sustainability more generally. When he called to schedule the interview, he promised that the talk wouldn’t be combative, i.e., he won’t call me a communist, a bleeding heart, etc.
I had to choke back my laughter when we announced these conditions: “You don’t know the hundreds of other similar situations in which I’ve found myself over the years. Most of the talk radio shows that have had me on have callers from hell (more…)
I’ll soon be updating our list of renewable energy investment opportunities, as I’ve come across a few more that I think are excellent. One is a municipal solid waste (MSW) to electricity via pyrolysis project in a small, stable, but developing country where the project will bring electrical power to many towns and villages for the first time. As I’ve discussed often before, such efforts have enormous philanthropic value, but they can also be extremely lucrative. (more…)
I sympathize with those tasked with putting a precise dollar figure on the externalities of fossil fuels. Sure we know there are costs to society in terms of lung damage and long-term environmental damage, but what are they?
The story of the petcoke piles in modern-day Detroit is a case in point. (more…)
In a piece I wrote yesterday on clean energy power density, I mentioned that renewable resources do, in fact, come with a number of limitations, owing mainly to the fact that the infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light we receive at ground level from the sun at its zenith is fixed (1004 Watts/square meter). The “beauty” of fossil fuels is that they circumvent that limitation; (more…)
Of all the great minds whose essays I read on the world energy scene and its surrounding geopolitical implications (global hostility, climate change, world economics, etc.) Michael T. Klare just may be my favorite. Dr. Klare:
… is The Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His newest book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, has just recently been published. His other books include: Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum. (more…)
I’m proud to serve as a member of the Advisory Board for the Clean Business Investment Summit (CBIS), held annually at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the late summer. This year’s event on September 12th will be the fourth such meeting of which I’ve been a part, and I have to say, to date, each one has been bigger and better than the one before it.
CBIS brings together good ideas in clean tech with investors – an enterprise to which we’re no strangers here at 2GreenEnergy. Thus far, over $110 million in angel and venture capital has been raised as a direct result of introductions made at CBIS – not too bad, in my humble estimation. (more…)
Here’s an article about renewable energy power density, i.e., the amount of power available in a certain area, measured perhaps in Watts per square meter. The article makes the point that, as the world’s population continues to move to the cities, we’ll have increasing difficulty generating the energy we need locally – especially if we do it with renewable resources, where we’re limited by the amount of radiation we’re receiving from the sun, or by the amount of energy in the wind that is blowing by us. If you’re having trouble imagining this, think of the absurdity of heating, cooling, lighting, and providing power for the equipment in the 2,158,000 square feet of office space in the Empire State Building by putting solar panels on the roof.
This, of course, is the reason that all the other technologies associated with the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity need to come along at the same time, in particular, high voltage transmission to bring enormous amounts of electrical energy over large distances with a minimum of line loss. If we still have a civilization here in 50 years, I predict that most of the energy consumed in the U.S. will come from PV, CSP, and wind scattered around the deserts and the plains, and that most of the energy for Europe will come from the Sahara.
