Amazon Commits to 100% Renewable Energy · Environmental Management & Sustainable Development News. Amazon Web Services says it will source 100 percent renewable energy for its global infrastructure.
The company doesn’t give a timeframe for achieving this goal. Untitled. IBM, GM, Coke Form Environmental Innovation Council. January 18, 2012 IBM and the World Environment Center have announced the formation of the Innovations in Environmental Sustainability Council, whose charter members will include Boeing, Coca-Cola and General Motors.
The council of global companies will explore how innovation in business process and technology can enable strategic solutions to major sustainability challenges involving materials, energy, water, infrastructure and logistics. Charter members, which also include CH2M Hill, Dow Chemical, F. Hoffman-La Roche, Johnson & Johnson and Disney, commit to incorporate sustainability more deeply into their strategy and practice. Members will share their experiences to encourage adoption of best practices, both in increasing efficiency and in identifying and developing opportunities for growth.
As an example, he cited Dow’s 2015 sustainability goals, which press the company to accelerate innovation while reducing its global footprint. Green jobs are real: U.S. solar employs more people than steel. Cross-posted from Climate Progress.
People want to know: Are green jobs real? The answer is resoundingly “yes.” With roughly 93,500 direct and indirect jobs, the American solar industry now employs about 20,000 more workers than the U.S. steel production sector. The American steel industry has historically been a symbol of the country’s industrial might and economic prosperity. But today, the solar industry has the potential to overtake that image as we build a new, clean-energy economy. Last week, Germany’s economic development agency announced similarly big news: There are now more than 100,000 workers employed in the German solar photovoltaic (PV) industry alone.
And as a reader over at Clean Technica observed: “The U.S. has about 312 million people while Germany has 82 million, about 25 percent as many people … That makes the German solar industry more than four times as large an employer than U.S. steel based on country size.” Haiti Searches for a Solar Future. Before the earthquake struck on the evening of January 12, 2010, Alex Georges and his partner had been running a successful solar panel design and manufacturing company in Haiti, the only locally owned and operated one in the country.
Business was faring well. Sales were growing steadily, as were the number of company employees. But today, Georges worries that foreign aid has distorted Haiti's small but growing renewable energy market.
The World Cup and Negative Externalitie. Milieu. GOING, GOING, GONE? New Satellite Images Reveal a Shrinking Amaz. Washington, D.C.- Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon may be on the rise, according to high-resolution images released by an agency of the Brazilian government.
The images suggest an end to a widely hailed three-year decline in the rate of deforestation and have spurred a public controversy among high-level Brazilian officials, writes Tim Hirsch, author of "The Incredible Shrinking Amazon Rainforest" in the May/June 2008 issue of World Watch magazine. Deforestation accounts for approximately one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions and is responsible for significant species loss worldwide.
Recent anti-deforestation measures under the administration of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have led to a marked drop in the rate of forest loss over the past three years. The announcement by INPE garnered conflicting reactions from government officials. LCD Chemical Found to Have 17,000 Times the Climate Impact of CO. By Bobby Grace Dubbed the "missing greenhouse gas," nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) was found by a recent study to have a global climate impact 17,000 times greater than carbon dioxide.
The chemical is found in the LCD panels of cell phones, televisions, and computer monitors, as well as in semiconductors and synthetic diamonds. The chemical is not one of the greenhouse gases monitored by the Kyoto Protocol, due to the fact that LCDs were not produced in significant quantities when it was drafted. What kind of impact is this suppose to have, you ask? The chemical is found to stay in the atmosphere for 550 years and there is no force of nature known to remove it. LCD monitors have long been presented as environmentally friendly, particularly next to lead-laden, energy inefficient CRT models. Environment worries to lift electric car sales: report. LONDON Fri Jun 18, 2010 7:54pm BST LONDON (Reuters) - Global sales of electric vehicles are set to rise this year due to worries about security of oil supply, the environment and fuel costs, UK consultancy J.D.
Power said on Friday. Global sales of electric cars are expected to reach 940,000 units this year compared with 732,000 units last year, with the number jumping to 3 million in 2015, J.D. Power analysts said in a report. The uptake of battery powered cars is seen as key to fighting climate change by cutting carbon emissions, as well as a way to wean economies off imported or difficult to reach oil, as highlighted by BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill.