"Green jobs" - high-quality employment in renewable energy and other environmentally sustainable sectors - are uplifting communities while helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, jobs in fossil fuel industries, particularly coal, continue to decline.
Worldwatch reports regularly on the growing field of green jobs across the globe.
For the past several years, my colleagues and I have been working on the water and energy connection -- specifically, the California Energy Commission’s conclusion that water systems consume 19 percent of California’s total electricity use. Increasingly, this connection is shaping the thinking of water agencies.
China is now one step closer to putting in place a carbon tax. According to several reports, the Energy Research Institute (ERI) of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Finance (MOF) announced on Tuesday that they have completed their study on the feasibility and necessity of establishing a carbon tax in China.
Drive south down Louisiana Route 1 to the tip of the bayou and you enter the heart of shrimping country. Some of the world’s finest seafood comes from these delicate grass and reed marshes that stretch as far as the eye can see. These are the great fertile estuaries that provide the nutrients for the bountiful seafood of the gulf.
But man has made its mark here.
The Gulf of Mexico oil well whose rig exploded and sank last week is now leaking about 1000 barrels of oil a day.
The oil remains three days of unimpeded floating from the shore, and the Coast Guard claims that wildlife impact has been minimal, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service has spotted sperm whales in the vicinity of the spill.
The British scientists accused of conspiring to manipulate data to prove the importance of human activity in causing climate change have been cleared of wrongdoing for a second time.
Investigators, led by geologist and energy industry veteran Ronald Oxburgh and hired by East Anglia University - the university that housed the scientists' Climate Research Unit - published their report on Wednesday.
General Electric wants to put a long-lasting, energy-saving light bulb in every lamp on every bedside table.
They are calling their new product - designed to mimic the performance of a 40 Watt incandescent bulb - Energy Smart LED bulbs, and they hope to have them on the market before the end of 2010.
The Solar Impulse, an airplane with the wingspan of a jumbo jet but weighing almost 1000 lbs less than a Honda Civic, flew for 87 minutes on Wednesday.
The Swiss aircraft is a prototype for a plane that plans to take a fuel-less flight around the world in 2012, but it had never been more than a meter off the ground before today.
The most powerful man in Abu Dhabi has hired architects to design a zero-carbon city. He wants it to be free of cars, free of skyscrapers, and entirely powered by the sun.
Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan is the President of the United Arab Emirates and the emir (commander) of the city of Abu Dhabi. And, according to the BBC, he has already committed between USD 15 billion and USD 30 billion to the creation of Masdar, an urban community of 50,000 that will serve as a model for all future eco-cities.
We've all heard about lots of potential partial solutions to the climate change problem. Cap and trade legislation is one. Household-level energy conservation is another. A switch from fossil-fuel-fired electricity to renewable electricity is another.
But those are the well known potential solutions.
