environment

Coal is burned most days in my neighborhood in central Beijing. Even the newer electric heaters installed this year didn't stop my neighbors from cooking and keeping warm with smoke-spewing briquettes. Coal is a fact of life. But some businesspeople are marketing boilers that make the best of coal by burning it in a cleaner way, reports Feng Yongfeng of the Guangming Daily in a story republished at China Dialogue.

One such technology was developed by the Beijing Xiongcai Group, whose chairman, Wang Yongjiang, explains:

"Normally coal is burned from underneath," he explains, "but our boilers … Read more

Adobe Systems on Monday is set to finally release Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software, which is on the leading edge of a movement to make Web applications act more like traditional desktop applications.

At the company's Engage event in San Francisco on rich Internet application design, executives will announce the availability of AIR 1.0, a free download for Windows and Macintosh.

Also on Monday, Adobe will release Flex 3.0, its application development tool that is now free and open-source. Another development tool, called BlazeDS, for linking Flex applications to back-end business applications, will also be released into open source as planned. … Read more

Has conspicuous consumption got you down? You could do as some green pack rats do, and keep the landfill very close to home.

Ari Derfel, shown right, quietly collected his garbage for a year. Except for food that he composted for fertilizer, Derfel refused to take anything he threw away outside of his Berkeley, Calif., home.

Click over to this CNET News.com image gallery to see the great lengths he and some other eco-bloggers are going to in order to reduce the waste they generate.

One of the best things I've read recently is an oped in The Washington Post entitled "Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do It" by Michael Maniates, a professor of political science and environmental science at Allegheny College.

Prof. Maniates gets right to the heart of one of the things that bothers me about what I hear from some of the more ardent proponents of the cleantech movement: the unexpressed sense that saving the world can be easily accomplished with a few minor changes in behavior, and that technological advancements will be coming to save the day at … Read more

This entry was updated on January 28 to reflect the film's award status.

PARK CITY, Utah--On one end of the documentary spectrum, you have films that are akin to extended works of journalism. They are in-depth, objective examinations of issues, personalities or phenomena that often leave you thinking that truth really is stranger than fiction.

On the other end are advocacy films, which seem increasingly popular here at the Sundance Film Festival, particularly when it comes to politically charged issues such as the war in Iraq and the environment.

The latter type of documentary can be just as informative … Read more

A Swedish university received a grant to study one of the biggest threats to the environment--cow belching. The study will measure the amount of methane gas that is released through a cow's mouth and determine how much gas is produced by different kinds of feed. The release of methane gas into the Earth's atmosphere is considered one of the main causes of global warming. A group in Canada is also conducting a similar study.

Read the full story on Wired: "Sweden to Study Belching Cows".

Citizens, industrial polluters, and scholars do not usually see eye to eye--but that may change with a new Web site that monitors corporate environmental performance in the United States.

Read about it at HBS Working Knowledge:"Mapping polluters, encouraging protectors"

DearChina.org is a new site where people can cry out to the great Chinese "other" and ask it to be more sustainable. Its sentiment is admirable. "Not about criticism," according to the introductory blurb, "It's about recognizing the fact that China will play a major role in determining the possibility for a sustainable world."

The submissions, all 19 of which as I write are in English, are translated into Chinese and displayed side-to-side. Many are heart-felt and imbued with some sort of desperate positivity:

F. Xavier Helgesen had big dreams to build Web sites after graduating from Notre Dame in 2001 with an MIS degree, but then the dot-com industry crashed.

Instead he co-founded a company in 2002 that sells books otherwise destined for the landfill, sends some of the proceeds to literacy groups, and uses carbon-neutral shipping.

Better World Books collects books from university bookstores and libraries and resells them, donating 7.5 percent of the price of the book to nonprofit literacy groups--Books for Africa, Room to Read, World Fund, and National Center for Family Literacy. Some of the books are shipped … Read more