Climate Technology

Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla chats about the promise of ethanol

Venture capitalist and ethanol booster Vinod Khosla. Billionaires are piling onto the biofuels bandwagon. Bill Gates is doing it. Richard Branson is doing it. The Google guys are doing it. Less well-known is the billionaire who kicked off the whole trend: Vinod Khosla, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and former partner with Kleiner Perkins, the […]

Richard Branson chats about embracing ethanol and slashing airplane emissions

Does a music mogul who signed the Rolling Stones and Janet Jackson have what it takes to make a pop star out of biofuels? Sir Richard. Earlier this fall, publicity-chasing British entrepreneur Richard Branson made a $3 billion bet that he could do just that — and help solve the climate crisis to boot — […]

An interview with Seattle biodiesel distributor Dan Freeman

Dan Freeman. As a kid, Dan Freeman experimented with using alcohol to run lawnmowers and minibikes. (Oh, to have been a fly on the wall for that parent-son conversation.) These days, he runs Dr. Dan’s Alternative Fuel Werks, a Seattle-based biodiesel retail and distribution company with customers ranging from school districts to organic farmers to […]

Friends in Flow Places

U.S. Interior lets oil-industry royalties slip away, investigation says An eight-month investigation by the U.S. Interior Department’s inspector general reveals that Big Oil may be skirting millions of dollars in annual gas and oil royalties while Interior officials grease the skids. Some of the juicier findings: officials said they’d reviewed 72 percent of revenues from […]

How cash and corporate pressure pushed ethanol to the fore

… got all liquored on that road house corn … — Tom Waits, “Gun Street Girl” Before it became widely used as a car fuel, ethanol was just grain liquor — and the federal government was not particularly kind to it. We pledge allegiance to ADM. Shortly after the American Revolution, the new government imposed […]

A Royal Al-ly

Gore lends heft to sustainable-business campaign launched by Prince Charles We were so excited when we saw that Prince was recruiting Al Gore for a green campaign. We loved thinking about the velveteen rocker and the ex-veep partying like it was 1999 again. But alas, it was gently pointed out to us that it’s Prince […]

Senators send letter to ExxonMobil

Today's Wall Street Journal printed a letter from Senators Snowe and Rockefeller to ExxonMobil (here) along with an editorial about the letter (here).

In the letter, Snowe and Rockefeller ask ExxonMobil to stop perpetuating the uncertainty agenda (which they refer to as the "obfuscation agenda"). The letter is similar in many respects to a letter sent to Exxon by the British Royal Society.

The editorial is a broadside against the Senators. How dare they write that letter! You can feel the anger in it -- I'm quite certain the first draft was written in all caps.

Here are a few thoughts:

Ron Steenblik, sustainability advocate and subsidies scholar, answers Grist’s questions

Ron Steenblik. What work do you do? I am the director of research for the Global Subsidies Initiative, an ambitious new project under the auspices of the International Institute for Sustainable Development. What does your organization do? The GSI was created to measure, analyze, and illuminate subsidies that are undermining sustainability, through targeted research and […]

Wal-Mart may sell organic, but it also thrives on ruined downtowns and long freight hauls.

I've always been a bit appalled by the polite applause with which some enviros greet Wal-Mart's "green" initiatives. Seems to me that the only way the company could really "go green" would be to stop selling cheap plastic crap shipped in from halfway around the world in vast suburban megastores. In other words, completely change it's business model -- not, say, adopt "green" building techniques for its appalling superstores, or haul mass-produced "organic" food from California, Mexico, and China to stores nationwide, thus burning lots of fossil fuel and potentially squeezing profits for farmers and sparking consolidation and industrialization in a movement that arose to challenge same.

Deep breath.

Sometime Grist contributor Bill McKibben nails it in the latest Mother Jones.

Money quote:

The U.S. organic cotton industry has a tough row to hoe

The view from the Panoche Cotton Gin outside Firebaugh, Calif., reveals a great deal about the state of the cotton industry in the U.S. A generation ago, fields of cotton surrounded the gin as far as the eye could see. Today, the gin — a warehouse-sized plant that can clean and bundle dozens of tons […]