In September, the UK’s University of Bath completed construction on a small building whose walls are insulated with the shredded woody inner core, or shiv, of the hemp plant (not to be confused with bast, the fibrous outer part under the bark).

The hemp plant, which can’t be grown in the United States because one variety, (more…)

On Friday, Sept. 23, the California Air Resources Board (ARB) – in the absence of a California Legislature vote on the issue – approved a greenhouse gas reduction target of 33 percent for 2020 for the Los Angeles and greater San Francisco Bay areas – a target originally set by AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act in 2006.

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Which companies are committed to reducing the causes of climate change? The Carbon Disclosure Project recently released its 2010 reports on companies in both the Global 500 and S &P 500. The reports chronicle companies’ efforts to be more transparent about their carbon emissions and their efforts to reduce them. (more…)

A burgeoning human population has doubled the rate at which it is pumping dry sources of groundwater in recent decades, according to a new study. Relying on a global database of groundwater use and demand, the researchers from Utrecht University calculated that the rate of withdrawal of groundwater stocks jumped from about 30 cubic miles annually (126 (more…)

Glycos Biotechnologies succeeds in creating metabolic process for synthesis of biofuels and biochemicals from fatty acids.

Biofuels are mostly based on feedstock from edible crops such as sugarcane, sugar beet, corn and sorghum. However, their use has sparked concerns over sustainability and prompted the industry to look for (more…)

Biofuels have the potential to come from any number of sources. On one end of the spectrum we have a variety of crops and plant based biofuels that extend all the way to algae based biofuels, while on the other end we get more interesting developments like whiskey biofuel. One of the latest trends in biofuel news is the development of bacteria that are capable (more…)

Macroalgae grown off the coast of Norway will provide the material for the production of “renewable, sustainable and low cost” ethanol.

Berkeley-based Bio Architecture Lab (BAL) and Statoil, an offshore oil and gas producer with a presence in 40 countries, have announced a partnership whereby Statoil will provide direct funding for R&D (more…)

If state lawmakers in Pennsylvania give the go-ahead on certain funding requirements, Pennsylvania State University will soon be making a shift away from burning coal—the dirtiest fossil fuel and biggest contributor to climate change. For more than eighty years, Penn State’s West Campus Steam Plant has burned coal to provide the school with energy. However the university now plans (more…)

Climate change, renewable energy, green this, eco that … We are constantly flooded with information about the need to shift towards a different, planet-friendly economy in order to preserve the atmospheric condition in which life as we know it can thrive.

And it’s true. (more…)

Each year, we come across a new set of discussions on the subject of Moore’s Law – the idea that the potency of technology doubles every two years. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors that could be put onto an integrated circuit doubled with that regularity — and that this exponential growth persisted for an astonishingly long period of (more…)