January 10th, 2012

Imagine if our nation was offered a choice of how to spend half a trillion dollars of our wealth over the next two decades.
One option would be to send $350 billion overseas to the Middle East and other oil exporting countries, and the remainder on increasing oil industry revenues.
An alternative option would be to take that half a trillion dollars and invest $300 billion directly into the U.S. auto industry, put $200 billion back into consumers’ pockets, and create half a million new jobs while cutting emissions of dangerous carbon pollution.
Is this choice just a pipe dream? Is it too simplistic a way to look at things?
Hardly.

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September 9th, 2011

U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) CEO Rick Fedrizzi praised the job-creating infrastructure improvements proposed in the American Jobs Act, outlined by the president in a public address on Thursday.

“It is clear that we must rebuild and modernize our increasingly brittle built environment,” said Fedrizzi, the founding chair of the USGBC, in a statement. The USGBC promotes more efficient buildings and construction methods.

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December 1st, 2010

Climate change deniers have sprung up like volcanic mud pots in the U.S. Congress in the last few years, burbling about how climate change is either not happening or not caused by the carbon pollution that scientists around the world blame for arctic ice melts, glacier loss, rising seas, stronger storms, drought, wildfires and other dramatic climate changes.

The deniers gained strength after the last elections when many politicians perceived that much of the public agreed climate change was either not happening or not caused by human pollution. A post-election study by the Wonk Room in collaboration with a Daily Kos reporter found that virtually every state now has representatives lodged in Congress who says climate change is a myth. Many of them have vowed to stop U.S. action against climate change.

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March 22nd, 2010

(In this piece, reprinted from a collection of essays assembled by the World Economic Forum, a Switzerland-based non-profit commited to improving the state of the world, U.S. Secretary of Energy argues that making buildings energy efficient can rack up substantial energy savings. Chu also discusses why businesses and individuals have previously failed to pick up on this opportunity.)

By Steven Chu

Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy

For the next few decades, energy efficiency is one of the lowest cost options for reducing US carbon emissions. Many studies have concluded that energy efficiency can save both energy and money. For example, a recent McKinsey report calculated the potential savings assuming a 7% discount rate, no price on carbon and using only “net present value positive” investments. It found the potential to reduce consumer demand by about 23% by 2020 and reduce GHG emissions by 1.1 gigatons each year — at a net savings of US$ 680 billion.

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November 2nd, 2009

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, [...]

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September 17th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

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.

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May 28th, 2009

From Green Right Now Reports:

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.”

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February 6th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

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.

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January 8th, 2009

By Harriet Blake
Green Right Now

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.

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October 28th, 2008

By Harriet Blake

It all comes down to leadership.

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.

Now, a new report, Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook from Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC) reaffirms this concept:

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