Name Name
titledescript
Sustainable designers Kenneth Cobonpue and Albrecht Birkner have joined forces to shape what's being touted as the world's first biodegradable car. The Phoenix is a superlight roadster built from rapidly renewable bamboo and rattan, along with steel and nylon. Borrowing design principles from Mother Nature herself, the exterior structure is built like a leaf and the interior is a single woven......read more
A GOP-led effort to block Obama administration climate change rules passed a crucial first step Thursday, when a House subcommittee voted to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The bill, tabled by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman (and climate change turncoat) Fred Upton, would prohibit consideration of CO2 and other......read more
For most of us, the vision of a solar-powered future conjures a mental image of rooftops covered in photovoltaic panels. But PV tech is actually only a few decades old, and humans have been harnessing the sun's power for millenia. Concentrated solar power (CSP), or "solar thermal," is an ancient, low-tech version of solar energy capture, in which the sun's heat energy is used to boil water and......read more
Cape Wind, the proposed 130-turbine wind farm to be built in Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod, received its final federal permit late last week, clearing the way for construction to commence this year. The EPA approval completes a regulatory process that has lasted over a decade. Cape Wind will be the first offshore wind farm in the United States, and renewable energy......read more
Our friends at Loomstate featured this revolutionary bit of green building on their Act Natural blog. The trailblazing piece of architecture is the family home of Push Design's Anthony Brenner, whose daughter has extreme chemical sensitivities that limited what construction materials could be used. Located in Asheville, NC, the walls of the home are filled with hempcrete, a hemp-based,......read more
The California Legislature has passed the nation's first energy storage bill, an important step in spurring the development of renewable energy projects. Energy storage is considered vital for renewable energy development because of the intermittant nature of wind and solar power. It allows utility companies to store renewable energy then utilize it later when demand is high. For example,......read more
The California Energy Commission has approved the Beacon Solar Energy project in the Mojave Desert, making it the first solar thermal farm regulators have permitted in twenty years. The $1 billion, 250-megawatt facility will be built and managed by NextEra Energy Resources. The Beacon project covers over 2,000 acres of private land in Kern County, California, where long rows of curved mirrors......read more
Six thousand matching bikes are about to become a part of the London streetscape, and the designers and operators hope that they're there for good. The bikes will be located at 400 docking stations around the city, and will be free for the first 30 minutes, or one pound a day and 45 pounds a year. The Mayor of London is hoping the bike sharing program in addition to two new cycle......read more
Give us some of those good vibrations. How everyday behaviors can produce clean energy. Livable cities all have one thing in common; they're designed for people, not cars. It's hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico. What does that mean for the worst oil spill in U.S. history? Now that's sustainable architecture. Straw, string or human hair, urban birds build nests with......read more
From Neatorama: On April 20, 2010, a mayday call from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico reporting an explosion aboard signaled the beginning of one of the largest man-made environmental disasters in the United States. Today, the environmental, economic, and political repercussions of the oil spill are just being felt – but what happened the day the rig went ablaze,......read more
