Daily Archives: December 22, 2008

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As Mike wrote a while back, even the Prius can’t save Toyota. On Monday the world’s biggest car-maker announced that, in contrast to 2007‘s 2.3 trillion yen operating profit, for the past year the company made an operating loss of 150 billion yen.

Furthermore Toyota confirmed they are freezing the scheduled opening of their new Mississippi factory, which was expected to produce new Prius models for the US market. However, the Australian Federal Government believe their deal w

I don’t know if you saw the John Tierney’s piece in the New York Times on Barack Obama’s pick of John Holdren to be presidential science advisor, but its a doozy.

Structured around quotes from climate change deniers (or as Joe Romm calls them denier-equivalents) it tries to paint Holdren as a flawed ch

TreeHugger readers don’t appear to share my fascination with mass customization, the idea that you can order exactly what YOU want, made to your specifications, instead of having to take what Mr. Big Box offers. One recent extreme example was [me]&gogi cereal, which most commenters considered un-TreeHugger. They might say the same about M-Shape’s custom table that you can build on your Nokia cell phone. Why would one want to do such a thing?

photo: Hamed Saber

When people talk about types of renewable energy they normally say something like “wind power, solar power, geothermal” and list wave power almost as an afterthought. Though it certainly isn’t as developed as these other renewable energy sources, significant potential exists.

Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the reason wave power plays second fiddle to other sources is because with most ways of generating power from the ocean the technical aspects take place out of sight, below the water, maybe that’s part of it.

In any case, check out this slideshow showcasing: <a href=”http://www.treeh

‘Tis the season for VC predictions, and the NVCA says that VCs still think the world of cleantech, so what kind of cleantech VC blogger would I be if I didn’t have a few predictions of my own…
But let’s break with VC tradition and make some predictions with teeth.  And then let’s break with tradition [

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Not So Secret Anymore
EEStor has been playing the reverse psychology trick on most of us; the less they tell us about their supposedly revolutionary EESU (electrical energy storage unit) based on ultracapacitors, the more we want to know about it. But recently, part of the veil has been lifted when the company was granted a fairly detailed patent. Read on for more

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Much of North America is socked in solid and getting out to shop is even less attractive than it was when all you had to worry about was paying for for the gifts. TreeHugger recently showed a range of downloadable presents in our design gift guide, but here are a few last-minute Christmas-themed ideas, starting with the most complicated: a downloadable nutcracker man from Paper Replika.

Jaymi’s recent post on the green-ness of a Roomba versus an upright vacuum did not mention the option of a broom; perhaps it is ingrained in us to look for the high-tech solution. Back in 1959, the Sarnoff Labs of RCA predicted a Roomba-like “Mechanical Maid” and a few other wonderful labour-saving devices, all sucking watts to make our lives easier.

photo: Ricky

Apparently we’ve reached some sort of tipping point on the issue of corn ethanol as our children are now writing letters to the editor on the subject

Though the nitpickers amongst us will undoubtedly find fault with 13 year old Madeleine Stewart’s letter in the Concord Monitor on why “Ethanol is stupid” it certainly hits near the center of the target, if missing the bulls-eye itself.

Perhaps deconstruction of the writing of a barely-teenager is a bit much, but since the only commen

Screen capture from Apple’s Green Ad

There’s a hot debate out in the enviro-sphere on whether or not Apple is as green as it says it is, or green at all. Well, Dell tends to side with the nay sayers.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, or are utterly uninterested in computers, you haven’t missed Apple’s latest ads touting the greenness of its products. Dell, however, says that’s a bunch of huff and puff.