Google, a company that continues to invest in and push for clean energy technology, has recently announced its newest, and potentially biggest, capital venture: funding a no-cost installation solar panel program for homeowners.  While already investing in other mammoth clean energy projects across the US, such as a $100 million investment in the world’s biggest wind farm, the company is now creating a $280 million fund to finance SolarCity‘s residential solar projects. Google essentially aims to erase any initial economic burden thereby moving more rapidly towards installation.  Given many homeowners today struggle with the up-front costs of putting up solar panels on their roofs, even with state-funded rebate programs and incentives, such a program comes at an opportune time.

Of course, Google also expects to make plenty of return… [view entry]

Dresden, a city of 220,000 in the eastern part of Germany, was the target of Allied firebombing in World War II that largely destroyed the city.  The wonderful skyline of towers built by the Saxon kings was restored and the downtown area is vibrant.   While the eastern part of Germany has suffered from emigration to other regions, Dresden has been growing modestly.

The City is bisected by the Elbe River and has a number of tributaries that flow into it.  In 2002, Dresden saw a major flood that inundated the city center, including the central railway station.  Over 1 billion Euros in damage was inflicted by the floods and some lives were lost.  The flooding was the result of the Elbe River overtopping its banks, rising groundwater, and the Weisseritz River defying… [view entry]

Rieselfeld Center

Two areas of Freiburg have been developed as eco-villages — Rieselfeld and Vauban.  The eco-villages showcase integrated planning based on principles of sustainability.

Rieselfeld, the larger of the two, was built on land that was formerly used for sewage disposal.  It lies toward the western outskirts of Freiburg.  There are about 4,500 apartments in buildings of 3 to 5 stories housing around about 10,000 people.  Most of the buildings are built to a “low energy” standard for heating requirements, which we are told is about 65 kwh/square meter (in Europe they use kilowatt-hours as a basic energy metric in the way we use BTUs).

Solar panels and green roofs appear throughout the development.  The ecumenical Maria Magdelena Church has a solar PV system on its… [view entry]

Governor Chris Christie

You may not know this, but “Cap and Trade” isn’t just a buzz-phrase for something many environmentalists would like to see the U.S. adopt for regulation of greenhouse gases–it’s been a reality for 10 northeastern states since 2009. With the announcement of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s plan to withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) this year, the hot-button issue of Cap and Trade has again come to the surface of environmental news sphere.  Cap and Trade, the market-based mechanism that many call for to help steer our energy production from fossil fuels to renewables, has been employed under a cooperative agreement called RGGI (“reggie”).  RGGI is a joint venture by the New England states along with New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, to… [view entry]

On June 5th, roughly 600 activists and marchers began a five day 50 mile hike from Marmet, West Virginia to Blair Mountain in protest of mountain top removal (MTR), a destructive and highly contested form of strip mining. Blair Mountain, one of the last, originally standing mountains in that region of Appalachia to avoid MTR, is also an historical site with battle fields and artifacts dating back to the Civil War and before.  It’s also, like many of the pristine mountains in that region, loaded with coal reserves.  Unfortunately, for the residents of states such as West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia, MTR is an all too common reality.  Current data show that as of 2010, an area the size of Delaware has been mined using MTR techniques and there is,… [view entry]

The Altstadt

Cars are prominent in Freiburg, but there is a different relationship between people, bicycles, transit and cars compared to home.  Cars defer to pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit as they negotiate the city streets.  Bicyclists and pedestrians move around each other fluidly.  There is also a higher level of convenience in using non-automobile travel modes.

Freiburg has made the Altstadt – the old core of the city – a car-free zone.  Only residents who live within the zone and service vehicles can drive in.  Pedestrians, cyclists, and the tram are freer to move.   Fraziska Breyer of the City government told us that when the car-free zone was proposed, businesses were very concerned that shoppers would shun the center.  But the decision has instead made the… [view entry]

Kaiser Joseph Strasse, in Freiburg Center

I’m on a personal study tour of Germany and Holland to see what German and Dutch cities are doing about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change.  The tour is organized by ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, an organization that the City of Cambridge has been a member of since 1999.  Our tour leader, Jade Jackson, is leading our group of 4 Canadians and 2 Americans through Freiburg and Dresden Germany, and then on to Bonn to attend the ICLEI Climate Resilient Communities conference.  We will end up in Rotterdam in The Netherlands.  I thought I would try to share what I see and learn along the way.  I hope you find it useful and interesting.

In Cambridge, we often… [view entry]

Cross-posted from the Sustainable Business Leader Program blog.

On May 23rd the Sustainable Business Leader Program, Cambridge Local First, and the Cambridge Energy Alliance hosted a new kind of business sustainability workshop:  a business-to-business conversation featuring the Cambridge Brewing Company, a handful of business-centered sustainability services, and a score of small business representatives curious about their own green options.

By having many of the players in the room at the same time, small Cambridge businesses were able to comfortably learn how they could make their businesses more environmentally friendly while saving valuable natural resources and money.

The workshop featured a presentation by Phil “Brewdaddy” Bannatyne, owner of Cambridge Brewing Company, who highlighted the steps that his business took to “go green,” including much… [view entry]

Tara Holmes

This past Friday, I attended a workshop lead by Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr entitled “An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing: Fostering Sustainable Behavior.”  As someone who’s personally very intrigued by the oftentimes overlooked (and dare I say critical) link between our everyday psychology and environmental sustainability, I was eager to attend. What I learned was both enlightening and somewhat anticipated.

In brief, humans, at least the populations Dr. McKenzie-Mohr has studied, tend to default to the easiest common denominator of behavior when it comes to environmentalism.  Of course, this isn’t to say there aren’t outlier personalities who go above and beyond the “green” call, but overall, unless regulated to do so, or cajoled by neighbors or friends, most people will resort to the path of… [view entry]

Bringing people together from a wide range of fields to make new strides in environmental change

While the environmental movement is nothing new, dating back almost a century, the approach of activists, organizations and policy makers is continuously evolving. The Garrison Institute is taking measures to contribute to this evolution by creating the Climate, Mind, and Behavior Program. The CMB program looks to combine a number fields to solve environmental issues.

The Garrison Institute holds a CMB Symposium where leading scientists and thinkers from the fields of environmental advocacy, neuro-economics, behavioral and evolutionary economics, psychology, social networking, policy-making, investing and social media together to focus on new approaches to reducing emissions on a large scale. The event has been held in March annually since 2010.… [view entry]