Meegan Jones has been the sustainability coordinator for such famous U.K. festivals as Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds.  She’s put together her experiences in a new book, Sustainable Event Management: A Practical Guide, which talks about the ways to understand and manage the environmental impact of any event.

Using her U.K. experiences and examples from around the world, including the Burning Man, Coachella and Bonnaroo festivals in the United States, Jones discusses energy, zero emissions options, carbon and waste management and other aspects of handling the small to mid-sized cities that spring up during festival season and quickly dissolve in days.

CleanTechies:  Do sustainable events cost more than non-sustainable ones?  Tell us what the differences are between the two. (more…)

IBEW Local 569

Micah Mitrosky is an Environmental Organizer with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 569 in San Diego.  She is focused on the renewables sector and talked with CleanTechies about unionization plans for the green industry.

CleanTechies: What is the mission of IBEW Local 569?

Micah Mitrosky: Our mission is to make sure that as our economy shifts to a low-carbon, sustainable economy, that we’re creating middle-class jobs with health care benefits, skilled career opportunities. A lot of what you think of as the fossil fuel sector are middle-class, union jobs. We want to make sure that, as we’re bringing in these new greener technologies and new green ways of doing things, that we’re replacing those with better middle-class career opportunities.

CleanTechies: What’s your biggest challenge in doing that? (more…)

How far will you travel to get the latest news on clean-tech trends and rub shoulders with industry leaders? CleanTechies is sponsoring these upcoming events on three continents. Check out the CleanTechies Events and Conferences Calendar for more. Among the highlights in the coming months:

• UC Berkeley, BERC, Energy Symposium 2010, March 3-4, Berkeley, CA

This student-run conference features presenters from more than 25 companies. Panels cover smart infrastructure, next generation technologies and more. Former Edison CEO John Bryson and Philip Moeller, commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will keynote. Meet the researchers, students, policy makers and experts from start-ups participating in the Innovation Expo on the first day of this event.

• Energy 2010 Hannover Messe, April 19-23, Hanover, Germany This trade fair is built to document the complete energy mix of the future. Ask for the special CleanTechies package when registering, which provides: (more…)

We can’t successfully tackle climate change without changes to the corporate regime which has been in place in America since the Reagan presidency. That’s the underlying message of Charles Derber in his latest book, Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy. It’s a message he delivers with directness in a book much more readable than I expected from an academic sociologist.

He accepts the position of scientists like James Hansen and others who point to the ominous dangers of tipping points in climate and conclude that we are already above a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which they consider no more than 350 parts per million. It’s not a happy acceptance. “No sane person would wish it to be the scientific truth,” he writes.

Derber recounts the terrible difficulty he had, after realising with despair the seriousness of climate change, in dealing emotionally with the prospect of mass, collective death — “more difficult than dealing with my own personal death.”

The only good news he discerns is that the scientific truth may be spreading and leading to a tipping point in the world’s social and political awareness. (more…)

The National Resources Defense Council Action Fund released a video clip last week designed to echo Obama’s call to move America towards a “clean energy economy” in his State of the Union address.

The video is part of the “This is Your Moment” campaign, which features a host of celebrities, such as Jason Bateman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Felicity Huffman, Justin Long, Edward Norton, and Forest Whitaker, urging Congress to pass the first-ever climate and clean energy bill, currently pending in the Senate.

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Whether you’re looking to share your expertise or just curious about the cleantech space, the CleanTechies Events and Conferences Calendar may feature a must-see event in your part of the world.

Among the highlights in the coming weeks:

• U.S.-Japan Clean Tech Symposium, Feb. 18, San Francisco, CA

What’s big in Japan’s cleantech sector? This four-hour session explores the state of the overseas market as well as ties between U.S. and Japanese companies. It’s organized bythe U.S. State Department and Japan’s trade ministry officials.

• Texas-Israel Cleanovation Conference, Feb. 22, Austin, TX

The launch of this conference promises to bring together some 200 attendees including from utility and clean energy companies, investors and technologists. Dr. Eli Opper, Chief Scientist of Israel, is among the keynote presenters. (more…)

At a factory in Wuxi, China, workers lift solar panels onto conveyor belts, while others in white lab coats move between machines as they check on a process for etching and engraving silicon wafers to form solar cells.

This scene in itself isn’t remarkable. But there is a new sort of excitement about the work. China’s production of solar panels has grown quickly in the past two years; it is it now the world’s leading exporter. When Matt Lewis, a representative of the California-based nonprofit ClimateWorks, visited the factory in October, he said it reminded him of his native Silicon Valley: The workers, even ordinary line workers, had a sense that they were part of building the future, the hot new industry.

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The green economy is thriving despite the economic downturn, according to the State of Green Business 2010 report released Wednesday by Greener World Media.

“Green professionals weren’t among the first to be thrown overboard,” said Joel Makower, report author and Executive Editor of GreenBiz.com, in a statement. “Their budgets were slashed, their headcounts frozen, all while their mandates sometimes increased. But they managed to survive, even thrive, during tough times.”
What top trends are now driving green business? To start, the report says more companies and consumers are embracing “radical transparency.”
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Dan Antonson is the founder of the Revived Group, a web designer whose forte is trust and credibility studies. We asked a few questions that new technology companies can implement to improve their web presence.

CleanTechies: New technology companies are known for something called “vaporware,” i.e., outlandish promises for devices and software that may or may not work. How do you inspire confidence in a new product that’s largely unproven on the web?

Dan Antonson: Stanford’s Persuasion Technology Lab did something about what people find credible online. And really what it comes down to is the graphic design, the way they position their company and the way they report their information.

People really don’t read a lot of things. All the research that’s out there shows that people really don’t spend a lot of time looking at the data. It just comes down to the graphic design. (more…)

President Obama called on Congress to pass climate and energy legislation that would include the construction of a new generation of nuclear power plants, more offshore oil drilling along the U.S. coast, and increased funding for developing renewable energy and improving energy efficiency.

But the president made no mention in his State of the Union speech of controversial legislation to impose a price and a cap on carbon emissions. By backing away from cap-and-trade legislation that already has been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, Obama signaled his willingness to work with Republicans to pass a scaled-back version of climate and energy legislation this year.

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