L.A. Green Bean

photo by Madhav Pai When Katie Couric allowed T. Boone Pickens to speak on CBS last week—I won’t call it an interview as Couric didn’t real probe any of Pickens’ statements to any great degree—he admitted that The Pickens Plan isn’t about greening the United State’s energy supply per se, it’s about energy independence. Fair enough, if the end result is a radical increase in renewable energy I can, to a cer...

Enamore creates lingerie for the sustainable seductress/seductor. Green Air Radio interviews the CEO of Converted Organics, a compost factory. EcoLibris reviews Mandy Haggith's book, Paper Trails: From Trees to Trash - The True Cost of Paper. Chemically Green interviews the makers of Kudzu Ethanol. Daily Fuel Economy Tip shares their thoughts on why a switch to electric cars would be easy. Most Hugga...

(Image from Mixed Soup) Yesterday, we noted that Japan's government has named six "Eco Model Cities" as environmentally friendly model cities and will provide them with financial support. One of them was Kitakyushu. What is striking about the projects are the diversity of ideas how to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Kitakyushu is an industrial city in south western Japan that used to be known as a very polluted place to live. That started to change in the late...

Driving The Highway Budget Myth: The "Last Bastion Of Socialism In America" For over 5 decades, US transportation projects have been budgeted based on a pair of myths: that public transit funding is an increasing drain on Federal and state highway budgets; and, a corollary, that fuel taxes cover the costs of highways and bridges. These mistaken beliefs feed hostility toward bicyclists and pedestrians who transgress on 'something we drivers pay for.' (Never mind that bicyclists and pedestrians often drive cars and trucks.) Via::

Streetsblog There are no hard data yet, but lots more people are out on bikes this summer, and lots more novice cyclists are ending up in hospital. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Cycling advocates say this could be the Summer of Splat on local roads. Take the area's dearth of bike paths, add aggressive Atlanta motorists, then toss in bikers who haven't been on the roads for decades. Presto — the buns are busting all over town. "We're seeing more peopl...

In the ongoing food versus fuel discussion, using waste products from agriculture or municipal waste is often cited as being the solution as to how to produce liquid biofuels without impacting available agricultural land and increasing food prices. Producing liquid biofuels from wood waste is promising from the standpoint of availability, but is more difficult to turn into usable fuel than other products. However, a new breakthrough from China, reported on in New Scientist, offers a potential solution to this problem.

We often talk about the benefits of local, fresh food, but here is another we have not thought about before: the footprint of refrigeration. So many processed foods move from reefer trailer to refrigerated case in the store to the freezer in your house, what does that use in energy? Over at the Ethicurian, Marc crunched the numbers and found that the entire food industry uses 1.02.1016 BTUs of energy per year, the equivalent of 1,760,000 barrels of oil. Refrigeration uses up 14.9% of that (the hatched part of the graph above) or 262,000 barrels of oil, or 464,546, MWhr....

Welcome to SustainStyle, a weekly digest from the writers at 1plus1, a blog dedicated to eco-friendly fashion. SustainStyle runs every Wednesday. Organic by John Patrick is named one of the 10 finalist for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. Katharine Hamnett offers new designs on her online shop, including a tank vest we "LOVE". An Interview with Chloe Sevigny tells us why she is always head of her ...

Dutch designer Joost van Bleiswijk designs everything from candelabras to wall units out of stainless steel, all laser cut and interlocking. "A combination of fireplace, altar and cabinet. This piece is as a conclusion of cabinet designs over centuries." It is also extraordinarily heavy and over the top, but there is method in this madness. He describes his method of working in Dezeen: "From archetypical drawings I create the objects as flat components by computer. The method of sliding different elements into one and other, and how t...

photo: Getty Images While it’s not quite celebrity-style coverage, in the sense of reporting what the Texan former oil-man had for lunch, TreeHugger certainly gives T. Boone Pickens his due time. And as he’s in the middle of spending $58 million promoting his vision of how the U.S. can achieve energy independence through increasing wind power and natural gas, he definitely stays on the radar. Yesterday Pi...

credit: Getty Images/NASA Wildfires in Alaska and Canada Had Net Cooling Effect Proving that climate science can be anything but intuitive, researchers report that large wildfires could have a net cooling effect. Led by Robert Stone, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the team studied the wildfires that ravaged Alaskan and Canadian wilderness in 2004. The work is credited with creating a better understanding of the impact of particles and smoke in the atmosphere, which has been one factor of uncertaint...

"We have to drill offshore. we have to do this. Oil executives say in a couple years we could be seeing results from it. So why not do it? We need to do it." TreeHugger on Offshore Drilling Climate Change? What Climate Change? : TreeHugger Conserving Beats Drilling , and Is F...

If I had a nickel for every prospective parent I know who changed their lifestyle for the better when they knew they were expecting I’d be a wealthy man indeed. But they just may be a bit late to the party. No pun intended. And that’s because a controversial idea, called epigenetics, indicates those late nights in smoke filled rooms, that stress filled entry level job, or that apartment you rented next to that major, pollution-spewing roadway when you were young and broke may just be exacting their toll on the DNA of your child today. ...

In 1921 Edmund Rumpler wowed the Berlin Auto Show with the Teardrop. The engine components were enclosed in a tub underneath, and from the top it had a teardrop shape. The public thought it was ugly, it was hard to steer, there was no trunk space and it evidently was "outrageously expensive." Thinking it looked futuristic, Fritz Lang bought then at deep discount and blew them all up in his movie Metropolis. In 1979, Volkswagen took one of the two remaining cars and put it in its wind tunnel. They found that it had a drag coefficent (CD value) of only 0.28, bette...

Online Community for Hypermiling With hypermiling getting ever-more popular as gas prices increase, it seems strange that TreeHugger has yet to feature a post purely about CleanMPG. Billed as an online community for learning to “raise fuel economy and lower emissions in whatever you drive”, CleanMPG features timely posts on the latest in green...

In Canada, tapping the tar sands has been called the most environmentally destructive project on the planet. In the United States, some equally not-so-eco-friendly technologies have been developed to extract oil from shale in Colorado. If the Interior Department has its way, exploiting U.S. oil shale is going to become less financially burdensome for oil companies. Don’t worry, the environmental impact will probably remain high. ...

It may well be that towing a trailer behind a station wagon is not the most fuel efficient way to travel, but squeezing all the air out of it and making it fold up as small as possible certainly is going to help. While pop-up trailers have been around forever, Dutch designer Niels Caris has designed a very clever pop-out unit that expands to many times its folded size, in a manner not dissimilar to one we have shown from 1936. While the trailer and motor home businesses are in the tank because of gas prices, many clever solutions for dealing with small spaces start with boats ...

Green roofs are all the rage now, but back in 1995 it was pretty unusual when Emilio Ambasz and Associates extended Fukuoka's Tenjin Central Park with a terraced building covered in gardens. Builder Takenaka calls "a step-shaped rooftop garden in order also to create the image of a mountain as the view from the park." ...

photo by Ricky via flickr You may have read about how Texas governor Rick Perry filed a request with the Environmental Protection Agency to waive the Renewable Fuel Standard requirement for ethanol, so as to ease pressure on rising corn prices. The EPA has just announced that it needs more time to decide whether to grant the waiver. While the EPA originally said it would make a decision by this coming Thursday, it now says it will need until early August to review the more than 15,000 public comments on the request. ...

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been lambasting the nation for wasting food--apparently the British throw out 4.1 million tons of good food each year--spending an average of £420 (US$832) per household. This has struck a note with newspapers as disparate as the Times ("How to cook without wasting food") to the Daily Express (a popular tabloid) musing on the effects of the credit crunch and the soaring price of food. Here is a succinct reflection from the