Green City
San Francisco has made great progress towards becoming a “Green City”. Voluntary programs like “Green Business” that encourage businesses to take proactive actions that are good for their bottomline and the environment, is just another example of the city’s innovative approaches towards greening. Mayor Gavin Newsom talks with Dana Goodyear on what it means to [...]
Simple designs that could save millions of lives
Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. MIT engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal. About Amy Smith: Mechanical engineer Amy Smith’s approach to problem-solving in developing nations is refreshingly common-sense: Invent cheap, low-tech [...]
Life at 30,000 feet
When Richard Branson was at school, his headmaster predicted he would wind up either a millionaire or in jail. Since then, he’s done both. He talks about the ups and the downs of his career, from his multibillionaire success to his multiple near-death experiences, from Virgin’s line of spacecraft to the failure of the Virgin [...]
Winning the Oil Endgame
Energy guru Amory Lovins lays out his plan for weaning the US off oil and revitalizing the economy in the process. It’s the subject of his book Winning the Oil Endgame, and he makes it sound fairly simple: On one hand, the deadly risks of continued dependency, and on the other, some win-win solutions. About [...]
Why can’t we “grow” new energy?
Juan Enriquez offers a glimpse of some ground-breaking research to explore the potential of bioenergy. Our current energy sources — coal, oil, gas — are ultimately derived from ancient plants — they’re “concentrated sunlight.” He asks, Can we learn from that process and accelerate it? Can we get to the point where we grow our [...]
