Blogs & Ecology

photo: Katie Blanch

There have been a couple of developments recently from companies trying to turn feedstocks normally used to produce ethanol or biodiesel into gasoline instead. The obvious advantage of such a development is that the current fuel distribution system as well as the millions of automobiles, motorcycles and trucks already on the roads could be used as is. Towards that end, Bakersfield, California-based Byogy is the latest company to tout its biomass-to-gasoline process.

Biomass Turned Into Gasoline Cheaply

photo by Nic McPhee

Expanding the amount of the wind power deployed in the United States via proposals such as The Pickens Plan may face a number of hurdles, but one which is being lowered is educating the future engineers wishing to work in wind. The US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory has announced the first of six universities to receive funding to develop Wind Applications Centers and Montana State University in Bozeman is it.

photo by Laura via flickr

It’s been about two months since T. Boone Pickens unveiled The Pickens Plan to wean the United States off foreign oil imports and transition our energy infrastructure towards more wind power for electricity and more natural gas for transportation. The back and forth debate on the feasibility of Pickens’ proposal has died down a bit since then, but still more questions remain than answers.

According to researchers at Duke University Medical Center there’s a significant chance that a drug commonly prescribed to halt pre-term labor and stave off premature birth might leave the brains of children susceptible to other chemicals widely present in the environment. And with 20% of all pregnancies in the U.S. encountering pre-term labor and 1 million of those being treated with terbutaline or related drugs to halt pre-term contractions and premature birth, there’s a real chance the child who may affected could be your own....

photo: Calpine

There’s been a good deal of geothermal energy news in the past few weeks—less than solar and wind perhaps, but that’s more a function of publicity and popularity rather than the potential of the resource—and the latest US Geothermal Power Production and Development Update from the Geothermal Energy Association shows just how much geothermal power has grown so far this year.

New Developments Will Nearly Double Current Capacity

photo: Mike Evans

When the subject of earthquakes is brought up here on TreeHugger, most of the time it takes the form of the intersection of green building and earthquake resistant housing or in the case of the recent quake in China, the environmental damage caused afterwards. This one’s about earthquakes yet to come.

Hypermiling Picked Up By Mainstream Media
High gas prices are not without certain advantages – from fewer traffic deaths to increased mass transit ridership, paying more at the pump can certainly concentrate the mind to seek alternatives. We’ve already noted that

Ideal Bite has announced its call for nominees for the first-ever Best in Green (B.I.G.) Awards. The program will recognize companies, products and services that are true leaders and innovators in the green space. Winners of the 2008 B.I.G Awards will be announced at Ideal Bite's B.I.G. Awards Party in November 2008 in New York City.

B.I.G. Award Categories:
The B.I.G. Awards consist of seven categories including: Home, Health & Beauty, Style, Food, Fun, Everyday/Living and Next in Green. Nominees will be selected from the thousands of products, companies and services that make up...

(Image credit marantzer)

Six Ways that Mushrooms Can Help Save the World
Yesterday I posted about MushroomExpert.com, and in the process of researching that post I came across the above video of Paul Stamets speaking at TED which, for some reason, we have yet to feature on TreeHugger (though we have written about ...

photo by Lisa Norwood

If you’re one of the legions of animal lovers who’ve spent a holiday evening admiring the lights at the Bronx Zoo but deploring the carbon emissions they inevitably create there’s good news for you. The Wildlife Conservation Society has decided to move the annual event to daylight hours to create an extravaganza that won’t leave a giant footprint behind when you’re gone....

photo by Yan Chow

Comprehensive Online Guide to Mushrooms and Fungi

When By Kids For Kids (BKFK) and The Weather Channel launched the Going Green Challenge to inspire kids to come up with neat inventions to help make an eco-difference there’s little doubt that the field was an open one. With a myriad of issues in need of resolution, the grand prize winner, Elizabeth Rintels, 12, of Keswick, Virginia, came up with a “Water Watcher” invention that helps monitor water usage in an ingenious way....