By John DeFore

The latest edition of an annual report by the International Energy Agency was released this week, and while the news may not be unexpected, it’s unsettling nonetheless.

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By John DeFore

James Bond has often fought men who sought to bend the Earth to their whims. But this time around, the evil scheme is a tad more realistic than a planet-sized death ray.

In the new Quantum of Solace, which opens tomorrow, the super spy’s personal vendetta (he’s hunting the folks who killed his girlfriend in the last movie) leads him into the world of a big-time operator named Dominic Greene, whose name lends itself to a glitzy organization, Greene Planet, that is ostensibly trying to help the environment and the world’s poor.

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By John DeFore

As more and more individuals and groups set out to re-introduce gardens to urban areas — often citing WWII’s “Victory Gardens” as proof that a large percentage of our food can come from our back yards and vacant lots — the Detroit-headquartered Urban Farming wants to push edible plants into new spaces — like walls.

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By Barbara Kessler

The cork is off the champagne on the presidential election - and many environmentalists who’ve felt stifled by the Bush Administration’s indifference, hostility or lukewarm interest in ecological issues, including global warming, are giddy with new possibilities.

Frances Beinecke, head of the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council, sounded buoyant in an address on the NRDC website: “Barack Obama’s election is a huge win for everyone exhausted from playing defense. Count us among them. It rekindles our hope that environmental protection may be restored to its rightful place as a treasured American value.”

Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters, was no less ebullient. “America embraced change today. And the planet will be better for it,” he announced.

Karpinski noted that, along with Obama, the nation also elected some environmental-minded senators, such as cousins Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.), from a family with a long conservation history.

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By John DeFore

Pretenders bandleader Chrissie Hynde has been visible for years as a vegetarian and PETA supporter, but her latest album nods to the well-being of the plant world as well.

The first copies of the band’s new album Break up the Concrete come wrapped in a half-sleeve made of handmade paper with tiny seeds molded into it. Listeners can soak the paper in water and plant it in hopes of growing some flowers.

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From the Environmental Protection Agency

The 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards were presented in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference, held October 26-29 in Denver, Colorado.

Green Power Pioneer Award

Over the past 30 years, Dr. Jan Hamrin has created a legacy of environmental and economic success. As founder of the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions, Jan created the nationally known Green-e brand and certification programs for renewable energy, which provide consumer protection in evolving markets. The Green-e logo has become a premium mark of distinction among both buyers and sellers of renewable energy products because it builds upon a stringent set of standards to ensure that consumers who choose to pay a premium price for renewable energy are, in fact, getting a premium product.

Jan managed solar programs for the California Energy Commission in the late 1970s and later founded and led the Independent Energy Producers Association, pulling together renewable power and clean energy interests to affect policy and establish markets for non-utility power in the 1980s and 1990s.

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By Barbara Kessler

And the greenest state could soon be… No, not California. Not Washington, or Oregon, or Colorado.

It’s Hawaii!

Or at least it could be. Maybe. The islanders have plantation-sized plans for moving off fossil fuels and into clean energy. Their goal: Meet 70 percent of Hawaii’s energy needs with clean energy sources like solar and wind power by 2030. That’s a bigger reach than any other state have taken, or feels able to take.

Across the country, 24 states have set firm goals for adding renewable power to their energy portfolio. Another four states have non-binding goals for their Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), as they’re called.
Most of these look to increase the amount of renewable energy to 10 to 30 percent of the total used by the state by 2015 or 2020.

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By Harriet Blake

Rick Hunter, a St. Louis homebuilder, says he’s always been interested in green construction, but in the past decade has become a true believer that green is the future of building. For him and his three-year-old company, Sage Homebuilders, a green collar job is the whole package.

“We’re small and growing quickly,” says Hunter, a co-founder of the 12-employee company. “It’s fun to see how many people want to be part of this movement. People are getting excited about green collar jobs. They’re meaningful. They make people happier in their jobs and make people feel better about what they’re doing. And you can earn a living.”

In St. Louis, Hunter says, green collar jobs are “absolutely the trend, particularly in green construction.” Sage Homebuilders uses green products in new construction and renovation projects, focusing on upgraded energy systems (like the solar panels pictured on this “Near Zero” energy-saving home).

As the country struggles with an economic downturn and job uncertainty, talk of green collar jobs is becoming a larger part of the national dialogue. Late last month, a national rally Green Jobs Now: A Day to Build the New Economy prompted events in 48 states. The rally, sponsored by Green for All, 1Sky and Al Gore’s WE campaign, focused on the dual cause of social justice and a green economy with events ranging from block parties to solution fairs.

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By John DeFore

While automakers and garage-based inventors work on replacing the car as we know it, a scientist at Temple University claims to have found a way of squeezing more out of the ones we already own with a process tongue-twistingly dubbed electrorheology.

A team led by professor Rongjia Tao implemented the principle for a small device that creates a strong electric field to make auto fuel less viscous; that allows much smaller fuel droplets to be injected into the engine for combustion. As the authors explain in the introduction to their paper: “Because combustion starts at the interface between fuel and air and most harmful emissions are coming from incomplete burning, reducing the size of fuel droplets would increase the total surface area to start burning, leading to a cleaner and more efficient engine.”

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By John DeFore

Once upon a time, the only humans who lived in trees were such fictional folks as Tarzan and the hero of Italo Calvino’s charming romance The Baron in the Trees. That was before the “tree-sitting” phenomenon, in which activists climb into trees threatened by development and refuse to come down.

The population of real-life tree dwellers shrank this month as the last two participants in a 20-year-old protest agreed to leave their perch in Northern California redwoods.

As the story was reported locally, the protest ended after bankruptcy put the Pacific Lumber Company under new ownership. Humboldt Redwood Co., which took the company over, committed to a sustainable-harvest policy that the Associated Press says “promised to spare any redwood that sprouted before 1800 with a diameter of at least 4 feet. It also pledged to avoid clear-cutting, a practice that the timber giant aggressively practiced under its previous owner, Maxxam Inc.”

Humboldt president and chief forester Michael Jani trekked out to the occupied trees himself to make the promise explicit, and the activists are taking him at his word. Last week, the final tree-sitters in Humboldt County gave up their temporary homes, including a 300-foot tree at least 1,500 years old where 22-year-old Billy Stoetzer had lived (in a hammock shelter) for almost a year.

Organizers tell reporters that they’ll keep an eye on the area to ensure that promises are kept. Since Humboldt Redwood is owned in large part by the owners of The Gap, they’d have plenty of opportunities for high-profile protest if things were to change.

For more information about old growth redwood forests, see this National Park Service webpage.

(Photo: National Park Service.)

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By John DeFore

Americans who’ve seen Pedro Almodóvar’s celebrated film Volver may not be surprised to hear that, on some days, Spain gets a third of its energy from wind power: A number of that film’s scenes feature star Penélope Cruz driving through vast fields of white turbines driven by an East wind that plays a crucial part in the story.

Now a researcher at Spain’s Public University of Navarre has patented two new approaches to a problem plaguing wind generators: voltage dips.

As a news release here puts it, the kind of temporary power disruptions that can cause your living room lights to flicker can do a lot more to the mechanisms in a wind turbine. “In fact,” it says, “an interruption of half a second in a productive process can cause the whole process to block and it may have to be reinitiated.” For wind generators, “the electronic part of the unit can burn out or otherwise be destroyed, unless a protection system is installed.”

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By Kelly Rondeau

It’s back to the books for kids across America and going green in the classroom has never been so easy. With the help of a popular program called the Go Green Initiative, teachers have quick and simple access online to all the tools and resources needed to green a classroom, an entire school, or even a school-district.

Serving as the charter and flagship school for the Go Green Initiative, Walnut Grove Elementary School, in Pleasanton, Calif., first found out about the program in 2002 when Jill Buck, a mother of three, and PTA president, got creative and began asking “What else could we do to go green?”

“The school was doing some gardening, composting and recycling, but I wanted to do more, so I sat down at my kitchen table and started writing up the initiative,” said Ms. Buck (pictured left). “That was in 2002, and since then the program has just grown and grown: we’re now operating in all 50 states in the US, we’re in 13 countries, and on 4 continents; our website gets over 2 million hits a month; it’s an amazing program. Schools are finding us on the Internet and simply by word of mouth.”

Walnut Grove’s principal, Bill Radulovich, comments, “It all started here on my campus, as Jill (Buck) was my PTA president. As the charter school for this program, she first starting designing ideas to partner with waste management to help us with recycling waste, and that grew into networking and working with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funds that are distributed to different programs.

“Where once we had cardboard boxes to hold are recycling items, we now have huge 55-gallon gobblers, these huge barrels with slots that are really cool. She helped us gain more methods in the form of recycling and reusing and how to be more efficient overall.”

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