Environment

Oil officials see limit looming on production. It's not an oil peak; it's an oil plateau. The Wall Street Journal reports on impending restrictions on oil extraction. Now both oil industry skeptics and execs are seeing limits. Recently, Don Paul, CTO of Chevron (not the presidential candidate), told us that the world has consumed 1.1 trillion barrels of oil and will go to 1.5 trillion by 2012. The world only had 3 trillion barrels to begin with.

A deeply green city confronts its energy needs and nuclear worries. The New York Times reports on the struggle … Read more

Nuclear power plants have a lot of excess heat, so why not use that heat to make fresh water?

That's the idea of S.S. Verma, with the Department of Physics at the Sont Longowal Institute in Punjab, India. If located offshore near large population centers, the plants could provide cheap electricity as well as fresh water to megacities like Mumbai.

Some companies are already looking at developing desalination platforms that can be attached to nuclear plants, he said, according to the Indo-Asian News Service (via Earthtimes). (Verma's complete paper can be found here.)

The general and very … Read more

First Solar, which makes cadmium-telluride solar cells, is having one of those years that corporate managers and investors dream about.

Revenues more than tripled in the third quarter to $159 million from a year ago while profits rose to $46 million, or about ten times what they were the year before. Plant expansion is occurring rapidly and the company's stock has gone from $20 to over $200 in a year. The stock price seems vastly inflated when you look at traditional price-earnings ratios, but it's not the first time people have bet big on a growth stock. It'… Read more

After two years of studying the economic impact of climate change, asset management firm AllianceBernstein has come to a seemingly paradoxical conclusion: one of the dirtiest fuels around--coal--has a bright future.

Its findings, released Friday, are one of several reports issued by investment firms over the past two years which explore how industries can benefit or be harmed by climate change.

Apart from growing consumer demand for clean energy and green products, one of the most significant economic drivers is regulation over greenhouse gases.

Like many people following regulatory activity, AllianceBernstein analysts figure mandatory limits on emissions will happen--it's … Read more

Environmental marketing firm TerraChoice found that many retail products overstate their environmental attributes, a practice which risks causing skepticism among consumers.

The company sent people to big-box retail stores to find products labeled as green. In the process, it found that almost all of them committed at least one of what it calls "sins of greenwashing."

Most common was the "Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off," where manufacturers claim a product has a green feature, such as recycled paper content, but don't pay attention to potentially more important issues, such as global warming or water use. … Read more

Scientists are starting to consider planet-scale engineering projects to slow the pace of climate change--anything from causing massive plankton growth in the ocean to putting a giant mirror in space above Greenland to stop ice from melting.

These ideas to alter the earth's environment at large scale, called "geoengineering," are increasingly being articulated and seriously evaluated even though they are likely to be controversial.

Earlier this month, climate scientists held a conference in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss the importance of geoengineering projects. The overall consensus was that geoengineering deserves further study, according to one of the organizers … Read more

A U.S. government science panel published a report Wednesday that quantifies North America's net contribution of carbon to the atmosphere, one of the first baseline studies comparing the continent's emissions and its carbon absorption through vegetation. The results show that the continent's fossil fuel emissions are outpacing the land's natural ability to absorb carbon dioxide by three to one.

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program, a government panel, conducted the study with the help of researchers around North America and a slew of agencies including NASA, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, and the … Read more

Vancouver's CellFor, which breeds clones of pine trees for forestry operations, has received $24.5 million in a fourth round of financing, according to VentureWire.

The company, founded after the merger of two other companies in 1999, has come up with techniques for breeding disease-resistant, uniform pine tree seedlings. The 18-inch high seedlings cost 35 cents each, more than the five cents that ordinary seedlings fetch. Still, CellFor says it can sell 100 million seedlings annually and hit profitability in two years.

Forestry is the last sector of agriculture that doesn't heavily emphasize breeding techniques to increase yield, … Read more

Green chemistry is a green movement you may not have heard of, but one certainly worth paying attention to.

Over the past month, I got to hear some of the leading lights in the field, notably professors John Warner and Paul Anastas, speak about what green chemistry is and its effects. Click here for the full report.

Chemicals touch so many industries that the ideas behind green chemistry, such as reducing waste and making non-hazardous materials, can be applied very widely--electronics, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, bioplastics, water purification, green buildings, consumer health and care products.

In just one example, Anatsas, professor of … Read more