Mark Schapiro
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 European or other firms may "invest" in renewable energy programs, known in the market as clean-development mechanisms, or CDMs, in China or elsewhere in order to offset their own volume of greenhouse gas emissions. The World Bank estimates that the market in CDMs was close to $30 billion in 2006, and that sixty percent of those investments went to China." Those investments were in renewable energy like wind and solar power, energy-efficiency technologies, and updating old factories to eliminate emissions like hydrofluorocarbons, which contribute to erosion of the ozone layer. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Developing renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels. The most promising are wind, CSP and solar power.
So grab a bicycle. Turn in your old gas banger for a hybrid vehicle or, better yet, a plug-in electric when they become available. And stop driving five miles to the video store to return a DVD that weighs 4 ounces. Go solar! |
Stacy Malkan
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 Major institutions, government agencies and entire industries can create markets for non-toxic products and drive down costs for bio-based plastics, green chemistry, renewable energy and other solutions for the future. The billion-dollar cosmetics industry, of course, could be a major force for positive
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Green...
Schools: GreenSchools.net Hospitals: NoHarm.org Buildings: HealthyBuilding.Net Business: GreenGuide.com Science: SEHN.org Computers: ComputerTakeBack.com News: EnvironmentalHealthNews.org
Teens rally for safe cosmetics around Union Square in San Francisco. |
Mark Lynas
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 High oil prices also make renewable energy more competitive, spurring further investments in solar and wind.
But fossil fuels are not only oil. Coal, still used to generate most of the world's electricity, is a larger contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than oil - and there's enough coal in the world to last another couple of centuries at least, busting any reasonable emissions budget many times over. Coal can also be turned into synthetic fuels - a technique pioneered by the Nazis and later continued by the apartheid regime in South Africa. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The sections in this book on processed foods, health care and renewable energy are worth the entire price all by themselves. In reading these sections, you'll be introduced to a whole new way of thinking about topics like deciding what to eat for breakfast, interacting with health care practitioners, or considering your true ecological footprint on planet Earth. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 One of the best things about using electricity to power your automobile is that this currency of energy can be generated from any source, including renewable energy sources like solar, wind, wave and hydro. If everyone owned a car like this one, Americans could very likely reduce our country's addiction to foreign oil and assist in reducing the problem of global warming. Soon to be on the road, it would seem that these are among the most environmentally friendly vehicles available. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 My passions focus on areas that include disease prevention through nutrition, green living, renewable energy, consumer safety, animal welfare and more. For the past four years, my efforts have focused primarily on education, grassroots activism and content creation. Today, I'm expanding the scope of these efforts with the launch of two new for-profit entities that aim to deliver practical yet innovative products that help people live healthier, more sustainable lives in harmony with our planet.
The two companies are:
EcoLEDs (www.EcoLEDS. |
| Now, with the financial support of our own eco-friendly business unit, we can turn up the volume on the messages we've been promoting over the last three years: Preventing disease with nutrition, banning pharmaceutical advertisements, reforming the FDA, switching to clean, renewable energy sources, ending the cruelty of animal "meat" factories, promoting solar technology and much more.
With the benefit of these commercial entities, we maintain complete freedom to keep reporting the truth on these topics, with no strings attached. |
David Steinman
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 Target is reducing energy consumption by making their stores as energy efficient as possible, and by using renewable energy sources whenever it is feasible. Three of their Los Angeles stores even produce 20 percent of their own energy using rooftop solar panels (something good for LA with its still smoggy February days). Target also looks at sustainability and reuse when developing new properties, focusing on energy efficient sites, and assessing such issues as storm water run off. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Kunstler refutes the idea that there are any viable replacements for oil, but I believe we may yet find hope in the search for alternative, renewable energy sources.
Nuclear, solar, wind, cold fusion, gas hydrates and many other areas of alternative energy are discussed in the book, and each one is shown to be inadequate in replacing the loss of fossil fuels that seems inevitable. If Kunstler is correct, we are in for a rough ride that would no doubt include a rather sharp population correction. Without inexpensive fuel resources, the world simply cannot support our current population. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It enhances the diversity of stories on NewsTarget and allows a community of writers to contribute to an important public education effort about natural health, eco-conscious living, renewable energy, disease prevention and similar topics.
NewsTarget is now accepting applications from writers, authors and news reporters. Click here to apply to be a writer. Additional information about the program is available at: http://www.newstarget.com/021982. |
Mark Lynas
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| A reality check
Many books on global warming end with some rather platitudinous sentences about renewable energy, as if the authors believe - rather like Disney's Blue Fairy - that simply wishing for something and believing in it is enough to make it come true. My feeling is that if it were that easy to move away from fossil fuels, we would have done so already, or at least be heading rapidly in the right direction. Instead, as we saw above, the world is moving rapidly in the wrong direction, and seems set to continue doing so. |
David Steinman
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| All served organic milk, and half ran on renewable energy. All newly built sites use piping made with recycled material. The McDonald's in Sweden recycled 97 percent of its solid waste.40 One McDonald's in that country sells biodiesel made from the cooking oil used for their fries. So why don't we get organic ice cream and all-natural beef at McDonald's in the United States?
Because we're slobs, and we don't care. We just keep getting fat on the chemical beef and corn that we're being fed while our health declines rapidly after age fifty. |
| Foundation and we leveraged that amount into one billion dollars of renewable energy subsidies," Suzuki told me. "Of course, we're just at the beginning of the transformation."
The Suzuki Foundation has discussed SWAG with the Union of Concerned Scientists in the United States and Australian Conservation Fund to spread the message. The message is sweeping over the world. The issue is how fast we can go. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 America is fixated on short-term thinking and stop-gap measures, ignoring the greater concerns of education, renewable energy, individual health and individual liberty. And finally, America is a bankrupt nation by any honest accounting method, and it is only by the grace of debt holders of Asia that America can continue to sell debt at all.
No wise nation will follow America into this quagmire (and why should they, when they have their own quagmires to explore?).
The good news in all this, by the way, is that you don't have to follow the fate of your nation. |
David Steinman
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| The Business Roundtable has also launched its Climate Resolve program, which has put on national workshops to help companies implement carbon-neutral practices, including use of cogeneration and renewable energy sources at plants themselves and also how to start entering savings on greenhouse emissions into the balance sheet.35
Waste Management, the largest trash, toxic waste, and environmental service company in North America, has a new slogan, "Think Green," that it claims goes deeper than the color of its refuse collection trucks. |
Mark Schapiro
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| European policies translate into money: $13 million (€10 million) for a feasibility study of a clean coal, carbon-sequestration project, with technology provided by the EU; $35 million (€30 million) for aid to big industries, like cement and aluminum, for increasing energy efficiency; and $500 million (€430 million) provided by member states — Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden are the biggest contributors—to sixty-five different projects aimed at increasing energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources. |
David Steinman
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| Be sure to check out their latest returns and get expert advice:
New Alternatives Fund invests 25 percent of its funds in renewable energy such as wind power, fuel cells, ocean energy, solar, hydrogen, biomass, and geothermal. Visit them at www.newalternativesfund.com.
The Domini Equity fund is based on the Domini Social Index 400 (whose companies include McDonald's). So why did Domini pick McDonald's? |
| They do this by raising awareness so that people can make informed decisions about how to vote with their dollars and by organizing efforts to encourage changes in business practices, for example, people can send a letter encouraging ExxonMobil to start investing in renewable energy sources.^ Co-op America even uses similar strategies for positive reinforcement, as with their letter to congratulate magazine publishers using environmentally preferable papers.-*2 www.coopamerica.org ?
Greenbiz.com
Information is critical to greening business. |
Mark Schapiro
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| Now that system is being emulated on a grander scale, in the carbon-credit trading markets used by the signatories of Kyoto, to channel billions of dollars into renewable energy. The United States refuses to participate in these markets.
The Bush administration's refusal to sign the Kyoto accord is shifting business opportunities from U.S. to European innovators. Qi Ye of Tsinghua University told me he has been traveling often to London and Frankfurt to drum up investment opportunities in the carbon-offset markets there, apparently to great effect. |
| In the process, China has become a playing field for international influence driven partly by the desire to address the country's huge contribution to climate change, and partly for positioning in anticipation of the economic bonanza that is already beginning to come from the development of alternative, renewable energy technologies. On both counts, the United States is falling behind the European Union. Beijing already sees that many new rules governing China's economic future are being written in Brussels and not Washington. |
| The Chinese Politburo has committed to doubling its capacity for renewable energy to 16% of national consumption by 2020, an extraordinarily ambitious goal given the Politburo's simultaneous ambition to quadruple the country's gross domestic product by that same year. The different approaches between Europe and America, in helping China meet the greatest environmental challenge of our time, were highlighted at a three-day strategic economic dialogue between top U.S. and Chinese officials during the height of the Christmas season in 2006. |
| Those investments were in renewable energy like wind and solar power, energy-efficiency technologies, and updating old factories to eliminate emissions like hydrofluorocarbons, which contribute to erosion of the ozone layer. The market has become so lucrative for the Chinese that the country is expected to open its own carbon exchange in Beijing by the end of 2007. "China is facing a choice to either go one way on its environmental path or another," commented Yingling Liu, with the World Resources Institute's China Watch project. "The choices are now being made.... |
Alex Steffen
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 The technology roadmaps of today point toward electrification of our vehicles as the answer; hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles would use onboard fuel cells to generate electricity from hydrogen gas, a renewable energy source.
Hydrogen cars, and an entire economy based on hydrogen-generated energy, sound great in concept. In reality, hydrogen vehicles carry a long list of unknowns. Foremost are the cost and performance of the hydrogen fuel cells themselves. Currently, hydrogen fuel cells require complex manual assembly, and therefore production is slow and costly. |
James Howard Kunstler
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 Fossil fuels allowed the human race to operate highly complex systems at gigantic scales. renewable energy sources are not compatible with those systems and scales. Renewables will not be able to take the place of oil and gas in running those systems. The systems themselves will have to go. Even many "environmentalists" and "greens" of our day seem to think that all we have to do is switch inputs. |
Stacy Malkan
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| Levi's is introducing organic cotton jeans. Vanity Fair recently published a green issue."3
Where the dollars flow, the largest corporations are sure to follow — and the inevitable question: how green is green going to be once Wall Street gets hold of it? The question hung heavy in the air, alongside the essential-oil fumes in the aisles of the world's largest trade show for natural and organic products. The Expo still attracts a diverse mix of small and owner-operated companies built on sweat equity and principles of social responsibility. |
Alex Steffen
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| According to the companies, producing Bio-PDO consumes 30-40 percent less energy per pound than producing
Hydrogen may one day be produced by specially engineered algae, such as these at the National renewable energy Laboratory. petroleum-based PDO; if used as planned, its manufacturers say, it will save the equivalent of 10 million gallons (38 million liters) of gasoline per year. In 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency presented DuPont with its annual Presidential Green Chemistry Award in recognition of its work in developing the PDO process. |
| If we do that and keep working hard to develop clean power sources, we could very well have a planet that runs largely on renewable energy by the dawn of the next century. If we combine conservation and clean energy with some of the other tools in this book, the next generation may well live in a solar-powered world.
In the meantime, pushing the efficiency envelope in our own lives not only helps us save money but also changes the world around us. It primes the market for more efficient products. It builds the market for green-power utilities. |
| You don't directly receive that renewable energy, since it all goes into a kind of melting pot. But your utility will use your fees to build new wind farms, solar arrays, or other systems, which helps transition the electricity infrastructure away from the oil economy.
If there are no renewable sources or green-power programs in your area, you can stil do your part by purchasing renewable-energy certificates (RECs, also known as green tags). By doing so, you are funding the advancement of renewable power in other areas that have such programs.
How do I find green power? |
| At that production rate, by 2020 China could be producing more than double the solar power projected in its renewable energy plan. There's no reason to think that the manufacturing rate won't keep rising.
One reason China is likely to keep making more solar panels is to benefit from the growth of new markets. According to an August 2004 article on SciDevNet.com, Xi Wenhua, the Director of China's Institute of Natural Energy, stated that over the next five years, the country intends to train 10,000 technicians from the developing world on the deployment and use of solar-power technologies. |
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