By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Here’s a movie you never thought they’d make.
Coming to the big, or maybe small, screen near you, a film…about…laundry!
With a short opening feature on watching paint dry.
OK, so that’s mean and I’m kidding, but not about the movie. Drying for Freedom is really in the works, but it’s not just about [...]
If you worked a four-day work week, you’d be gearing up to knock off about now, as I write this on a Thursday.
Of course you wouldn’t know I was writing this, because you’d be so darn productive during your four-day work week that you’d never crack a peek at anything on the Internet beyond your work-related reading.
Even if you weren’t loyally plowing away at your desk, you’d still be statistically more likely to read this at home, because you’d be home more. (And if you used your new-found at-home time away from home, well, that’s none of our business now is it?)
Let’s just say that a four-day workweek — whether it was composed of four 8-hour days or four 10-hour days — would provide more leisure time, potentially a very good thing for stressed out Americans with their comparatively higher rates heart disease and health issues. This, in itself, would be enough justification to consider a shorter workweek.
Geothermal and solar energy projects will be getting a financial boost from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.
President Obama announced that more than $467 million will be devoted to speeding the development of these technologies, which will support green jobs and provide low-carbon energy for decades.
“We have a choice. We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy,” said President Obama in an Energy Department news release. “We can hand over the jobs of the future to our competitors, or we can confront what they have already recognized as the great opportunity of our time: the nation that leads the world in creating new sources of clean energy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy. That’s the nation I want America to be.”
Moving to create clean energy jobs, fight climate change and set America on a path to energy independence, Reps. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Todd Platts (R-Pa.) on Wednesday introduced the American Renewable Energy Act, which would require America to generate one-quarter of its energy from “clean energy sources” by 2025.
“With our economy in crisis, renewable energy can create hundreds of thousands of new green jobs, revitalize declining manufacturing sectors and decrease global warming pollution,” said Rep. Markey, chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, in a news release.
In its waning days, the outgoing Bush administration is promoting oil-shale development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming by passing midnight-hour regulations that would open public lands to oil-shale exploration, leasing and development. In November, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management put these regulations into effect to develop an oil shale program that the bureau says could add 800 billion barrels of oil from land in the Western United States.
In response, earlier this week, 11 environmental groups notified the administration and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of their intent to file federal lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act. The BLM has 60 days to respond. The environmental groups, which include the Sierra Club, the Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity, among others, want the administration to consider the effects that commercial oil-shale development will have on endangered species.
Pundits from former Vice President Al Gore to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, agree – the technology to develop clean energy and curb global warming is available. What’s needed are lawmakers with the mettle to put it into action.
“We’re committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership,” said Al Gore, launching the We Campaign earlier this year.
