Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
By John DeFore
Not long ago, a City of Austin crew spent the day installing new “No Parking” signs along the streets of my neighborhood. Two big Ford F450 trucks sat outside my home-office window for hours while the men dug holes and planted posts — and their engines ran the entire time.
Not wanting to [...]
Tags: Alternative Fuels · Cities/States · Model Projects · Other Transport
British Petroleum (BP) has announced plans to bring cellulosic ethanol to market in the U.S., through a partnership with bio-fuel developer Verenium, a company that makes biofuels from rice straw, sugarcane stalks, switchgrass and wood chips. The partnership could help speed the availability of lower cost, more environmentally friendly biofuels, according to an announcement by [...]
[Read more →]Tags: Alternative Fuels · Briefs
By Tom Kessler
Almost 90 percent of the car shoppers who visit Kelley Blue Book’s Web site say they are concerned about the future of our environment, company research shows. Among survey respondents, 80 percent agreed that individuals should make lifestyle changes to help reduce CO2 emissions. And 75 percent of KBB shoppers reported that they [...]
Tags: Alternative Fuels · Briefs · Cars · Recycle & Reuse
By Barbara Kessler
The upside of high gas prices is becoming evident as Americans flock to dealers of small and hybrid cars, revealing that we can, if whacked in the wallet, lower our greenhouse gas emissions.
There’s another silver lining not so readily apparent, but quite compelling. According to researchers at the University of Alabama in [...]
Tags: Alternative Fuels · Briefs · Green Enthusiasts/Researchers
By Barbara Kessler
Who would have thought we’d be hoping that gas prices had settled in at $4 a gallon? Instead, U.S. government tracking shows that they are creeping past that benchmark, ranging from an average high of $4.59 in California to a low of $3.95 in Texas this middle week of June. It’s making [...]
Tags: Alternative Fuels · Business · Energy · Fossil Fuels
By John DeFore
The era of mass-produced hydrogen fuel cell vehicles has finally arrived — although the “mass” part of that statement is debatable.
Tags: Alternative Fuels · Briefs · Business · Cars · Energy · Greener Businesses · Transportation
By John DeFore
As anyone can tell you who has touched the hood or tailpipe of a car after a long drive, much of the energy produced by a tank of gas goes not to forward motion but to producing heat. A typical car’s engine is said to waste around two thirds of its energy [...]
Tags: Alternative Fuels · Briefs · Cars · Green Enthusiasts/Researchers
By John DeFore
Biofuel research company Origin Oil has filed a patent on a device that promises to facilitate the industrialized production of algae, knocking down some of the barriers to petroleum-free fuel.
The new Helix BioReactor, which a company announcement this week describes as a “breakthrough technology,” is an effort to
Tags: Alternative Fuels · Briefs · Greener Businesses
By Barbara Kessler
Seemed like a trifling issue not long ago, but it’s time – probably about $2 per gallon past time — to look at our driving habits. Obviously, we should drive less. And given the current price of a gallon gasoline ($3.75 to $4) our wallets and the environment are surely in accord [...]
[Read more →]Tags: Alternative Fuels · Briefs · Cars
By John DeFore
Nissan Motor Company took the occasion of its financial-results stock exchange reporting (nearly $7 billion in profits from $90+ billion revenues in fiscal 2007) Tuesday in Tokyo to make an announcement of interest to those of us who don’t own stock. In 2010, the company plans to release an all-electric car in [...]
Tags: Alternative Fuels · Briefs · Cars
By John DeFore
With the chorus of ethanol critics becoming impossible to ignore, biofuel advocates are under pressure to pursue options that don’t threaten the world’s food supplies. Researchers at the University of Texas announced late last month that they’ve developed a promising contender:
[Read more →]Tags: Alternative Fuels · Briefs · Green Enthusiasts/Researchers
By Bill Sullivan
Charles Harris is here, there and everywhere. While the rest of the Winston Solar Car Team dotes over “Sun Hunter”, the eighth such vehicle in the organization’s nearly 20-year history, the captain surveys the scene, making sure everyone is playing his or her proper role.
“Everyone here is motivated. You don’t have to [...]
Tags: Alternative Fuels · Cars · Model Projects · Schools/Colleges/Churches
By John DeFore
For a movie that explicitly addresses the perils of overconsumption, Pixar’s WALL*E is being used to promote an awful lot of consumer products.
One tie-in in particular is rankling Greenpeace. It seems that the lovable robot’s image has popped up on boxes of Kleenex, a product the activist group has criticized with a “Kleercut” campaign that asserts, “it takes 90 years to grow a box of Kleenex” because the product’s manufacturer Kimberly-Clark “all but refuses to use recycled paper in its products.” (Among other things, they’re trying to get parents and teachers to reject the company’s tissues in classrooms.) [Read more →]
By John DeFore
Mitsubishi Electric announced Wednesday that it will quadruple its capability to produce solar cells, jumping from the 150 megawatts it currently produces each year to an annual 600MW capacity by 2012 — a more ambitious goal than its previously stated one to get to 500 MW by 2013. Current production levels are already triple what they were four years ago. [Read more →]
Residents of the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area will again get a chance to trade in their pollution-emitting old clunker for a newer, less polluting car with the help of state money.
The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) reports that it has about $12 million for the second year of the AirCheckTexas Drive a Clean Machine campaign, which began taking applications in mid-August. [Read more →]
