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I sat down with Stuart Varney & Company on FOX Business this morning to talk about the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards proposed by the Obama administration.

My take: I think better fuel economy is a good thing.

Here is the video:

Watch the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxbusiness.com">video.foxbusiness.com</a>

I'm a free-market guy and don't like government mandates, but we've had these standards since 1975 and it has spurred innovation in the auto industry.

People are feeling the pain at the pump and higher MPG means more money in their pockets.

Some automakers are not happy with the proposal, but others like Mark Reuss of GM North America find the new standards tough, but achievable.

And I'm encouraged by John DiCicco of University of Michigan's Energy Institute who believes that current technologies can yield 74 mpg by 2035 if staged appropriately.

Who wouldn't want to get 74 miles per gallon?!

At the end of the day, I'd prefer the auto industry innovate without government prodding, but I think the CAFE standards may just prime the pump.

Stuart also threw me a couple of curve balls about a coal mining operation that was ceasing operation and Major League Baseball's Designated Hitter rule.  (I'm not a fan of the DH, despite my Red Sox having been the beneficiary of the rule in 2004 and 2007.)

Here is a link to the video in case the player doesn't work in your browser: http://bit.ly/nJHeru

UPDATE: Late yesterday, I learned that the White House and Automakers had reached an agreement about a slightly revised number:  Automakers and Obama Agree.

30 Tips To Make Your Bathroom More Eco Friendly

Today, please welcome our guest blogger, Marina Chernyak. Enjoy her tips and hopefully, you will utilize them!

We use more chemicals and waste more water in our bathrooms than in any other place in our homes! It’s time to wake up and do something to make your bathrooms more eco friendly, in the interests of our planet. Here are 30 tips that you can implement at your home to ensure your bathroom is more eco friendly.

Dispose Medications And Cosmetics

1.Throwing old medicines into your garbage is not a good idea as animals and young kids may eat them by mistake. Don’t flush medicines either, as these will find their way into ecosystems and eventually into drinking water. Always hand over used medications at pharmacy recyclers and ask them to dispose of it properly.

2.Your old nail polish remover, nail paints, aerosols such as hairspray and leftover hair colorings are potentially toxic materials, which are hazardous and flammable. Don’t dispose those using conventional means. Package them and give them to your local municipality’s hazardous objects disposal unit. You can recycle empty aerosol cans but get rid of the lids.

3.All bathroom cabinets have a few of these. You cannot dump them in your regular garbage or recycling cans. Place used needles and syringes in a labeled sealed container and drop them off at the hazardous waste depot.

Reuse Old Bathroom Products

4.Use old toothbrushes to clean your jewelry, the spaces between your bathroom tiles and hard to reach cupboard corners. Buy liquid soap refills and fill up your old soap dispensers instead of buying soap in plastic dispensers.

5.Use leftover shampoo to clean bathroom tiles and your tub.

6.Use your heavy-duty hair brush as a scrub brush; you can use it to clean recycling and garbage bins and muddy shoes.

Buy Reusable Items

7.Single use plastic razors and blades add a great deal of non-biodegradable waste to the environment. Buy reusable razors to prevent this. Over 2 billion disposable razors make their way to landfills every year, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

8.Don’t use disposable cleaning cloths that are usually made of paper. Unless disposed of properly, these can clog drains and sewers. Use cotton washcloths instead and reuse them as much as you can.

Recycle Bathroom Products

9.Recycle empty shampoo, conditioner and body wash bottles, as well as empty toothpaste tubes.

10.If you have small plastic bottles, pour leftover shampoo or hand wash liquid soap in them. Keep them in your purse or bag to use on the go.

11.Use old shower curtains as a paint and waterproof cover for your table when your kids do their arts and crafts.

12.Old shower curtains can be used to create garden tents for your children to play.

13.Use old shower curtains to keep the sun and the wind off your delicate shade plants.

14.Use facial tissue boxes and toilet paper rolls to make arts and crafts. Donate these items to local schools for their craft projects.

15.If you have extra spray or pump bottles, clean and fill them up with a fourth of vinegar and a teaspoon of baking soda. You have a ready to use, homemade glass and window cleaner.

Do Eco Friendly Bathroom Shopping

Once you’ve cleaned up your bathroom and recycled everything you can, it’s time to think about what you can do to ensure you don’t buy similar stuff again. Here are a few smart shopping tips for an eco friendly bathroom.

16.Buy aerosols such as hair sprays and deodorants that come packaged in recyclable containers. You can find these at health and organic stores, as well as in brand name pharmacies.

17.Buy razors and toothbrushes that are made out of 100% recycled material. Some environment-conscious companies even send you a postage paid envelope for returning the product when you’re ready to recycle it.

18.Order all natural, environmentally friendly bathroom products from Grassroots, a company that packages its products in recycled plastic containers.

19.Order environmental friendly, organic cleaning liquids, toothpastes, sprays and other items from planet-aware companies such as Amway and Nature clean.

20.An alternative is to make your own household cleaners, or buy homemade cleaners from homemakers.com and similar outlets.

21.Buy tissues and toilet paper made out of 100% post-consumer recycled material.

Save Water

Restricting the use of water in your bathroom is perhaps the most eco-friendly thing you can do.

22.Install a gray-water recycling system to ensure that water from your shower, tub and sink water are recycled for use in your garden, lawn and garage.

23.If you don’t have a recycling system, it’s best to conserve water using any method possible. Take baths instead of showers and use the bathwater to water your plants and shrubs, and to clean your car.

24.Use a single mug of water to brush your teeth instead of keeping the faucet running.

25.Wipe your face down with wet cloths instead of splashing lots of water on it.

26.Reduce the number of times you flush your toilet.

27.Fill your tub to the recommended level so there’s no excess seepage after you’ve stepped in.

28.You can get two kids to bathe together in a single tub, to save one person’s bathwater.

29.Scrub your bathroom tiles with a mixture of vinegar and baking soda instead of water and soap.

30.Install a waterless toilet in your bathroom.

Marina is SAHM living an eco-friendly life from last 3 years and run cocktail and foyer table store.

… as the green future unfolds.

The online division of Everlasting Hardwoods, recently launched their product line of IPE decking wood. As supporters of sustainable forestry practices as set

By 2050, the earth will support roughly 9.3 billion people; but creative visionaries around the world are doing their part to secure future access to water, energy, food and living space.

In 1981, Canadian potter Burt Cohen hand-formed a ceramic water filter with local, low-cost materials. Today, the open source model is being used to purify water in over 13 countries, and is expanding its presence worldwide. And, in an effort to eliminate dilution as a water cleaning method, Oregon engineer Mark Owen combined nanotechnology and sunlight to create a low-impact filter that kills contaminants at the source.

Whole Foods is highlighting this and other sustainable innovations in an online series called "9.3," which profiles the radical ideas of creative conservationists. Check out the video:



First Solar was also featured in a recent episode on solar power innovations:



Great to see someone focusing attention on solutions and innovations.


(Disclosure: I hold a long position in First Solar, FSLR.)

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of uSell for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine. Chances are, you have a stash spot in your house, of cell phones, MP3 players, and well, just electronics in general. Your not alone, I do, too. We’ve meant to get rid of them, but well, [...]

I was working at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas when the first shuttle lifted off.

Now, 30 years later, the shuttle has come to its end of life in the NASA Space Program. It does not seem like its been 3 decades , 135 flights and of course, many deliveries to the International Space Station.

The spaceship and the two other surviving shuttles will become museum pieces, like the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules and the Wright brothers’ flying machine before them. NASA astronauts, a dwindling breed, will have to hitch rides to the space station aboard Russian Soyuz capsules for at least three to five years.

Shuttles launched the Hubble Space Telescope and fixed its blurry vision; built the space station, the world’s largest orbiting structure; and opened the final frontier to women, minorities, schoolteachers, even a prince. The first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, became the oldest person ever in space, thanks to the shuttle. He was 77 at the time; he turned 90 this week.

Atlantis will go on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex in 2013. Space shuttle Discovery is headed for a Smithsonian Institution hangar in Virginia. And Endeavour is bound for the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

NASA has new marching orders for space exploration and I look forward to seeing their progress. In the meantime, BRAVO for the work accomplished thus far!

…. as the green future unfolds.

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Here are my new totals

Recycled - 0
Garbage - 0
Hazardous Waste - 0
Donate - 5
Sell - 136
Giveaway - 11
Return - 0
Compost - 0
? - 0
Total number of items - 152

Grand total so far =  1960 items (OMG SO CLOSE!!)


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Image from Stinque.com

Last week's report by the Brookings Institution and Battelle Technologies on the clean economy was greeted with much fanfare.  I even wrote about how it ranked the Greater Philadelphia region (where I live) number 5 in the nation.

One of the key success factors the Brookings-Battelle study points to is the creation of industry hubs or clusters, such as the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster for Energy Efficient Buildings. 

I was pleased to see the reference having been a fan and supporter of the GPIC effort.  (As founder of the business network, Cleantech Alliance Mid-Atlantic, I wrote a letter of support to the DOE for Philadelphia's initial application.)

But then I came across a Washington Post opinion piece by Vivek Wadhwa titled "Industry Clusters: The Modern-Day Snake Oil."   My skeptic bone, which is located just to the right of the funny bone, in case you are wondering, started to tingle.

Wadhwa points to a recent study conducted by Rune Dahl Fitjar, of Norway’s Centre for Innovation Research at the International Research Institute of Stavanger, and Andres Rodriguez-Pose of the London School of Economics and Political Science, which found that regional and national clusters are, in fact, "irrelevant for innovation."

Rather, Wadhwa relates, "the key drivers of innovation in Norway are the communication channels that local entrepreneurs maintain to the outside world and their open-mindedness toward foreign cultures, change and new ideas.  Companies that are 'regionally minded' -- that maintain ties only with players within the same cluster -- are four times less likely to innovate than the globally connected."
 
What do the researchers say is the determining factor for success?  People.

Not just any people: "knowledgeable people who have the motivation and ability to start ventures," writes Wadhwa.  Knowledgeable, risk-taking people who are connected by extensive information-sharing networks.

"The same dynamics at play in Norway give Silicon Valley its advantage," according to Wadhwa.  "It is a giant, globally connected network in which sharing information and risk-taking are the norm."

Rather than patting ourselves on our backs for developing clusters of innovation, we need to focus on people.  And we need to continuously ask the following questions:

• Do we have the right people and are we connecting them in ways that will help them start companies?  
• Are we connecting them with the right mentors and networks and access to financing?   
• Are we getting government out of the way of their success?  
• Are we making the pathways to commercialization clear and efficient enough to encourage repaid growth?

If not, we may be creating nothing more than a government-sponsored enduring clusterf*ck that will lead to nothing more than an academic exercise and more fodder for reports.

During the spring and summer melt, the sea ice atop the Arctic Ocean (shown here in this photo from July 12, 2011) begins to melt; the liquid water collects in depressions on the surface, pressing down on them and making them deeper until they become melt ponds. These freshwater ponds stay separated from the salty sea below and around it until cracks in the ice let the two mix.

Scientists who are part of NASA’s ICESCAPE mission (Impacts of Climate on Ecosystems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment) are studying these melt ponds and the surrounding water and ice to see how changes in the Arctic impact the ocean’s chemical and biological makeup.

That is a really cool landscape, don”t you agree?

… as the green future unfolds.

Greetings everyone! My name is Louis and as some of you know from Stefanie’s previous post, there are some exciting changes in the works at FocusOrganic.

Stefanie is moving on to new endeavors but we managed to convince her to write from time to time. She has now handed over the reins to me and I’m excited to start curating and publishing ideas on sustainable living. As a guy committed to making sustainable living the de facto standard, taking over FocusOrganic was a natural fit. My ... [visit site to read more]

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© Focus Organic for 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Valcucine receives Honors In December 2010, I posted Congratulations to Valcucine , for an award they received.  Then, they did it again, in February 2011, when they received, the “GREEN GOOD DESIGN AWARD,” for their Invitrum 100% system. Image via Wikipedia Valcucine, is the first, fully recyclable glass base unit, with recycled aluminum parts and [...]

An international team of scientists has come up with a method to make wool carpets from all-natural materials that can be re-processed after a life cycle.

Most carpets are biodegradable but they are glued together using latex. When carpets are thrown away, they end up in an oven to burn for extra energy in other industries or they go to the local dump.

There is a new project that is being funded by the Dutch Government called Erutan or “nature” spelled backwards. Their slogan is “It’s a natural solution – sheep eat grass, from the sheep, we get wool, and from the wool we make a carpet with natural ingredients.” The researchers decided to replace all synthetic substances and chemicals with organic materials, enzymes and polymers. The adhesive is based on natural compounds such as lignin or tannic acid.

It is a joint venture of three Dutch companies – James, Best Wool Carpets, and Bond Textile Research, working in cooperation with three technology developers – Research Institute TNO in the Netherlands, Technical University of Graz in Austria (TUG) and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain (UPC).

They have managed to create an all natural carpet that looks and feels like any carpet that is on the current market. There is no latex involved so when the carpet reaches it end of life, it can be re-cycled to a type of fertilizer for agricultural uses.
The team are hoping their carpets will revolutionize the industry.

But the scientists did not want to stop at changing basic ingredients – they decided to make all other processes associated with manufacturing eco-friendly as well.

For instance, the researchers from Technical University of Graz in Austria came up with a way to wash dirty, greasy raw wool from New Zealand sheep without any detergents, salt or any other chemicals.

They clean it with enzymes. With enzymes in washing powders everything has gotten faster, you use less water, it’s much better for the environment and those enzymes come from nature.

As for color, they are using natural ingredients versus the synthetic dyes that are currently used.

As for availability, it is not clear. Will keep you posted.

…. as the green future unfolds.

A report released yesterday, “Sizing the Clean Economy,” which is based on the Brookings-Battelle Clean Economy Database, ranks the Philadelphia metro area 5th among the 100 largest metro areas for overall size of its share of the clean economy in the US.

The database from which these data are derived is a collaborative effort of Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program and the Battelle Technology Partnership Program. 

The report ranks the size, growth, and geography of the “clean” economy in the US, which it defines as "economic activity—measured in terms of establishments and the jobs associated with them—that produces goods and services with an environmental benefi t or adds value to such products using skills or technologies that are uniquely applied to those products."

Philadelphia has, according to the study,  54,325 "clean" jobs.

Other points of interest to the region:

• Philadelphia's 54,325 clean economy jobs make up 2.0 percent of all jobs in the region.
• Between 2003 and 2010 Philadelphia added 6,573 clean jobs.
• On average each clean economy job in Philadelphia produces $15,693 in exports.
• Estimated median wage in Philadelphia's clean economy is $43,913; compared to $42,722 for all jobs in Philadelphia.

New York had the most clean jobs at 152,034, followed by Los Angeles (89,592); Chicago (79,388); and the DC metro area (70,828).  The Greater Boston area topped in at 41,825 jobs, landing the 8th spot.

According to the study, "the clean economy grew more slowly in aggregate than the national economy between 2003 and 2010, but newer 'cleantech' segments produced explosive job gains and the clean economy outperformed the nation during the recession."

The report points to the recently established energy innovation hubs, such as the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster for Energy Efficient Buildings (GPIC), as an important factor in continued growth for the sector. 

Among the other recommendations for scaling up the clean econmy, the report's authors suggest, "Ensure adequate finance by moving to address the serious shortage of affordable, risk-tolerant, and larger-scale capital that now impedes the scale-up of numerous clean economy industry segments."

They also recommend the creation of a water sciences innovation center and the establishment of a regional clean economy consortia.

"Metropolitan areas, large and small, are now and will increasingly be the nation’s critical centers of clean
economy talent, innovation, and finance and so its top hubs of commercialization, deployment, and trade," the report concludes. "Regions and metropolitan areas, in short, are not a part of the national clean economy; they are that economy."
 
You can find interactive maps here to dig deeper into the findings.

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Trade plus Aid Biogas Digester Project

This is another program that is helping South Africa. There has been a grant for 22 towns to get this biogas digester. As you will see, the towns that have gotten their new biogas digesters installed are very happy campers!

… as the green future unfolds.

I wanted to like Carl Safina's new book, A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout.  In fact, I did like it for the first 40 pages or so.

Safina is at his best in this book when reconstructing the events of the blowout itself and sharing the stories of those in the region whose lives felt the negative impacts.

He's skillful at building narrative tension, explaining what went wrong and why, describing decisions that were made or not made that led to the explosions, the subsequent destruction of the oil rig and death of eleven workers.

But Safina lets his journalistic guard down and his opinions, speculations, and grinds personal axes and he loses me.  There are one too many asides such as, "Really? Is that all you've got? Sorry; I have a lot of respect for professors, but I don't believe her," he writes in reaction to a professor who was demonstrating how to sniff food for traces of oil.

Also annoying is Safina's juvenile and relentless butchering of names (Admiral Thad Allen, of the Coast Guard, becomes the "Thadmiral").  Safina loses control of his story -- a story, well-told as certain passages are in this book, about which we should be left to make our own judgments.

And then, as almost an afterthought, Safina has a change of heart about the government's handling of the disaster, after sitting down with Dr. Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, and now-retired Admiral Allen, to hear their side of the story.  A better approach, in my view, would to have been to write the book with that perspective and knowledge, simply letting the story stand on its own.

I don't blame Safina for this; I blame his editors at Crown, who clearly didn't do their jobs in the rush to get this book out before most Americans thought the "Deepwater Horizon" was a new water ride at Six Flags rather than the disaster that captivated us for most of the summer of 2010.

The story of the incompetence, poor decisions, neglectfulness, hubris and bad judgment on the part of BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and others is one that needs to be told.  And when Safina sticks to that story, he tells it well.  We don't need the author to point out the absurdity of some of the things said by BP's then-CEO Tony Hayward; his statements and blunders do a fine job on their own.

Instead, Safina gives us knee-jerk environmental rhetoric and juvenile attacks on those involved.  So much so that I kept putting the book down in frustration, but picked it up again hoping Safina would tell me something I needed to know about the disaster.

He did.  My three-take-aways from the book: the disaster was preventable; we were neither prepared for this nor are we prepared for the next such disaster; and it didn't turn out to be as bad as the media led us to believe it was going to be.

I'm a fan of Carl Safina's Eye of the Albatross and Song for the Blue Ocean; both books are illuminating and enlightening.  Where A Sea in Flames sticks to the story of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Safina succeeds; too often, however, he fails to deliver the goods and lets his own story – of his shock, anger, and second thoughts -- get in his way.

The book is not a disaster, but its troubles -- like the blowout itself -- could have been prevented.