If you read our blog regularly, you might have noticed that I’m always ranting about how solar needs to be popularized before it will really sweep the nation. Well, it’s not there yet, but the last couple of weeks have given me a bit of hope. For one thing, last week’s Democratic National Convention in [...]

After several months of scrutinizing solar in China, let us shift our focus for now to another energy-guzzling, rising economic power with some ambitious energy goals of its own: India. While India’s emissions record is commendable in comparison with China’s (8 percent of global CO2 emissions in 2007, compared to China’s staggering 24 percent), by [...]

Lately, the air quality in Beijing has been astonishingly pleasant. For the past three weeks, when the skies haven’t been a sunny cerulean, they’ve been a rainy shade of gray, more cool than the usual muggy. Even when I was in the neighboring countryside two weekends ago, the difference between the rural and urban air [...]

Having just returned from the countryside, I already miss its bitingly cold, naturally clean water, its lush vegetation, its air free from the brown dust that characterizes Beijing. To be fair, Beijing hasn’t been so terrible lately—the past several days have been a striking blue—although every time a car passes by me on the street [...]

Living in Beijing right now has made me rather ambivalent toward China’s environmental policies. It doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the PRC isn’t the poster country for eco-consciousness. Almost everybody drinks their water either boiled or from a bottle, and a blue sky day in Shanghai or Beijing is a rare day [...]

China may not have as advanced a solar program as Germany (although, as Eric’s noted, Germany’s solar subsidies recently underwent a drastic slash) or Spain do, but a few pockets of land both to the north and to the south have become shining beacons of light for the rest of the country.
Take Jiangsu province, for [...]

OK, kids. Time to scribble down a list of all those books you’ve been meaning to read, grab a towel and head for the beach. Who needs U.S. Weekly, trashy romance novels or (God forbid) fiction, when you’ve got a slew of great titles on coal, corporate social responsibility, climate change and investing in the [...]

We’ve always known that our institutions of higher learning are home to some of our brightest citizens. Galvanize them with the prestige of an award and the thrill of competition, and it’s likely that the results won’t disappoint. Perhaps this is precisely what the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency reasoned when they [...]

Hey guys,
Just wanted to share this pic of this PV installation just down the road from my apartment. It’s a project of the City of Geneva, cleverly designed to blend into open/public space. (Actually, just adjacent to it is a skate park–I’m always dodging teenagers on skateboards whenever I pass by here…).

(Sorry the output [...]

For a long time, solar has been finding itself on non-traditional surfaces in fresh, yet practical, ways. The presence of solar shingles and solar billboards attests to this. Now take, for example, a solar balloon project called Sunhope.
 
 This initiative, which is being developed by architect Joseph Cory and aerospace engineer Dr. Pini Gurfil, of [...]