Home / treehugger.com rss archive / September-09-2007


Celebrity Eco-Hypocritique
Back to back articles covering celebrity eco-hypocrites appeared recently in the L.A. Times and Daily Mail. Both articles made a fuss about various green celebrity transgressions, the majority of which involve air travel (both private and commercial). Sienna Miller flies a lot for her work on climate change awareness, Leo DiCapprio ...

A Picture is Worth...Is Your Toilet Running?
AP Photo/David ZalubowskiSeen last week at the Colorado/Colorado State college football game, as part of Denver Water's promotions around the city to promote water conservation. Don't let your toilet run away from you.::Yahoo! via ::Gristmill...

Power Pigs Will Pay
Commercial buildings are responsible for about 20 percent of the United States's greenhouse gas emissions; encouraging landlords and tenants to cut power is a great way to fight global warming. Problem is, many states have regulations which allow only one meter per building, and charges are generally divvied up by square footage. So even if Tenant A takes measures to cut electricity consumption (installing CFLs for example) but happens to have the biggest suite in the building, it'll get stuck with the biggest utility bill. And though Tenant B might lease offices half the size of Tenant A's, they wi...

Devantini ES, Tesla Roadster Watch Out
The official website for this impressive car is in Swedish, so we don't have a lot of information. What we do know is that it's an electric sports car, modelled on the Shelby Cobra. It's called the Devantini ES, and it started life as a college project. One of the many YouTube videos which have been cropping up, showing test drives, has this description, "The project started as a graduation project at the Innovation Engineering programme, Halmstad University, made by Emil Birgersson and Henrik Leonhardt." ...

Event of the Day: Farm Aid 2007
Photo credit: Paul Natkin/Photo Reserve Inc. 2006Are you going to Farm Aid? We're about to hop on a train and then a bus to Randall's Island, New York City to nosh on local, organic farm-fresh fare and listen to Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, The Counting Crows, and more rock out "to keep family farmers on their land." We'll have the report when we get back, but don't wait up!...

Digitally Mapping San Francisco's Trees
Tree planting in San Francisco just got a lot more fun (and more high tech): Friends of the Urban Forest, a non-profit group that offers technical and financial assistance to neighborhoods and individuals who plant trees, has partnered with the City & County of San Francisco and Autodesk to develop the Urban Forest Map. The virtual project, which uses the MapGuide Open Source technology, can digitally identify the location of each planted tree and manages a city-wide tree database. People are encouraged to ge...

Quote of the Day: Carlo Petrini on Taking It Slow
The quest for slowness, which begins as a simple rebellion against the impoverishment of taste in our lives, makes it possible to rediscover taste. By living slowly , you understand other things, too; by slowing down in comparison to the world, you soon come into contact with what the world regards as its "dumps" of knowledge, which have been deemed slow and therefore marginalized. By exploring the "margins" of slowness, you encounter those pockets of supposedly "minor" culture that are alive in the memories of old people, typical of civilizations that have not yet become frantictraditions that guide the vital wor...

Take Action, Start a Petition
The Care2 Petition Site makes it a snap to start your own petition. First, identify the target of your protest, your call-to-action message, and your goal number of signatures. Then, fill in your personal information and think up a snazzy blurb for the promo spot that will be displayed on the Petition Site homepage, in the petition library, and at other pieces of real estate on Care2.com. Hit publish, use the free promotional tools to spread the word, and wait for the signatures to come pouring in.Recent success stories include the Forest Ethics petition, which garnered 23,686 signatures and managed to ...

Flybo Arrives on U.S. Shores
Have a hankering for a nice, compact electric car but don't have the patience to wait out the Smart Car? Well, if you live in or close to Saginaw, Michigan, you're in luck: the Great Lakes Auto Sales dealership will start selling the Flybo-EV within the next few weeks. The mini EV, powered by a 48-V motor, will come with a base sticker price of $10,000 and can run for up to 70 miles before needing some extra juice - which can be supplied by any conventional household electrical outlet. It's not the zippiest car on the road (its top speed is a puny 25 mph) and...

Bike Move: Friends Move Entire Household With Pedal Power
We are huge fans of carrying cargo on bicycles. To this end weve featured bike trailers, weve written about Dutch cargo bikes, and weve even covered the intriguing concept of the Sports Utility Bicycle. However weve never, until now, come across folks crazy enough to at...

Soda Lovers: Relieve Trapped Wind... With Carbon Offsets??!!
Carbon offsets have recently become big news, and have even been the subject of angry protests. Nevertheless, it seems like a good job that TreeHugger produced our guide on How to Green Your Carbon Offsets, as it would appear that a majority of the public are still deeply confused as to what an offset even is - some even think it is a method for reducing discomfort after drinking too much soda. According to a ...

Two Years Ago in TreeHugger: Deja Vu All Over Again
Sometimes looking at the archives is a bit scary, when you find out how little things have really changed. Other than Mike proposing a very low-tech method of keeping people from letting all the cold air out of the fridge, the rest of our entries two years ago could be ripped from today's headlines: another supergrass will save us, the Governor of Montana is in favour of coal to liquid technology, we like

No Comment Dept: Office Hazards
see Warren on ">laser printers and John on microwave popcorn....

Clean Coal: If It Can't Make It There, It Can't Make It Anywhere
They can't get enough carbon dioxide in Saskatchewan; they actually import it from the States to inject into oil wells to stimulate production. Thus it was the perfect place to build a coal fired power plant that would separate out the CO2, where there was a market for the stuff. It was going to use a process called Oxyfuel, where the coal is burned in "synthetic air" where the nitrogen is removed, so the products of combustion are almost pure CO2 and water. "SaskPower's Clean Coal Project will introduce technology capable of capturing at least 90 per cent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The additional use of SO2, NOX, mercury...

Say You Want A Revolution?
There is no more fervent believer than the recent convert to green-dom. Here's are some highlights from acolyte Thomas Friedman, as spoken/recorded at the July 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival. "Did you ever study a revolution in history? You ever seen a revolution where nobody got hurt? That's the green revolution, nobody gets hurt - we're all winners...Exxons' green. They give $100 million to Stanford...Dick Cheyney's green. He's for liquefied coal.""...today the old legacy industries, they control this story; they contro...