By John DeFore

The most visible hiccup in oilman T. Boone Pickens’s well publicized green energy agenda is his decision to delay that enormous wind farm of his.

A new essay, though, suggests there’s more wrong with the tycoon’s plans than his having to rely on the credit markets to realize them. Writing for the Earth Policy Institute, Jonathan G. Dorn argues that modifying American autos to run on compressed natural gas (CNG) would be a waste of time and effort. [Read more →]

By John DeFore

The big, smooth leaves of a magnolia tree may not be the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the words “Christmas tree,” but a group of San Francisco tree-lovers are hoping some SF residents can modify celebratory habits for the sake of the environment.

The city government’s SF Environment department has teamed with Friends of the Urban Forest to sell area residents living “Christmas trees” that will sit in a pot during the holidays and be ready for replanting afterward. The groups realize that most urban dwellers don’t have yards to plant in, so the group says, “After the holidays, we’ll pick up the trees from you and plant them on our city’s streets.” [Read more →]

By John DeFore

While this past weekend’s Los Angeles Auto Show had autophiles lusting after tomorrow’s hot wheels, a very different California event just celebrated a company working to make yesterday’s cars a lot greener.

The winner in the Transportation division of this month’s California Clean Tech Open was a San Francisco company called ElectraDrive whose products are aimed at drivers for whom electric vehicles can’t arrive quickly enough. The company’s “ElectraMount” is made to “rapidly and inexpensively adapt almost any passenger vehicle to electric drive.” [Read more →]

By John DeFore

While you’re sitting around the table on Thursday, be sure that in addition to giving thanks for whatever combination of fowl and starches sits on the plate you also pay due respect to the water in your glass. As a new documentary insists, it’s not something to take for granted.

FLOW (the title’s an acronym for “for love of water”) is a frightening film full of outrages and dispiriting facts about the state of water here and abroad. Stocked with scary tidbits for Americans who take water safety for granted — Can it be that 40% of the brief but nasty illnesses we attribute to “something we ate” are actually caused by water? Can you believe that drugs like Prozac linger in the water supply so long they’re found in the flesh of fish? — it also travels to areas where the scene is more dire: Bolivia, where the World Bank’s insistence on water privatization led to horrible things; India, where dying of water-borne pathogens is commonplace. [Read more →]

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Socks, they’re a universal holiday gift. Anyone can use ‘em, and most anyone would appreciate an extra pair, which is why the Sierra Club settled on having a sock drive to help the homeless this season.

Buy a pair of Sierra Club brand socks (made by Devmir Inc., based in North Carolina) in a blend of organic cotton, bamboo and recycled synthetic fibers, and the conservation group will donate a pair to The National Coalition for the Homeless. Sierra Club also will get 10 percent of the proceeds in this mutual effort to raise money for Sierra Club and donate one million pairs of socks to people in need. [Read more →]

By John DeFore

The world is scrutinizing every shred of news from the Obama camp these days, trying to guess who’ll have an office in the West Wing. But a group of gardeners based in Maine are more focused on what’s going to happen just outside the White House — on the lawn, in fact.

Eat the View is the name of a petition encouraging the Obamas to plant an organic garden on the White House lawn, using the produce both for the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and to feed the hungry at area food pantries. [Read more →]