• IBM hops aboard high-speed rail | Green Tech – CNET News

  IBM on Wednesday plans to announce details of three rail projects outside the U.S. that bring that vision of efficient and convenient rail travel closer to reality. Overall, the projects in China, Taiwan, and the Netherlands show how rail travel can reduce urban congestion and cut down on pollution from transportation, said IBM.

  tags: ibm, high speed rail, trains, rail, greenmonktv

• Study: Range of pharmaceuticals in fish across US

  Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants serving five major U.S. cities had residues of pharmaceuticals in them, including medicines used to treat high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression

  tags: fish, pharmaceuticals

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• ReGeneration – LED there be light

  Ultra-efficient bulbs could make even compact-fluorescent lights obsolete.

  tags: led lighting, led, incandescent, greenmonktv

• National Grid launches carbon remuneration scheme – 23 Mar 2009 – BusinessGreen.com

  National Grid has today become arguably the highest profile firm to date to tie environmental performance to staff remuneration packages in a move that will see executives financially rewarded based on the emission reductions their departments deliver.

  The company announced today that it would implement carbon budgets across its entire operations from next month and incorporate compliance with those budgets into the performance management criteria it uses to gauge executives’ salaries and bonuses.

  tags: carbon emissions, remuneration, emissions reductions, greenmonktv

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• Device Provides Household Energy Savings of 12%

  100% Off will provide household energy savings of 12% by automatically overriding stand-by mode and switching appliances off

  tags: 100% off, stand-by, greenmonktv

• US economic stimulus money fuels ‘smart’ power grid surge

  Electric grids are getting smarter in an IBM lab in Texas as the promise of billions of US economic stimulus dollars fuels a drive to make power delivery more efficient and greener.

  tags: smart, grid, ibm, drew clark

• IBM Press room – 2009-03-22 Ricoh and Taisei Join Eco-Patent Commons – United States

  Ricoh and Taisei have joined the Eco-Patent Commons, a first-of-a-kind business effort coordinated by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) to help the environment by pledging environmentally beneficial patents to the public domain.

  tags: ricoh, taisei, eco patent commons, wbcsd, greenmonktv

• Robotic Fish To Monitor Water Pollution – CBS News

  A school of mechanical, battery-powered robots in the shape of fish will be released into a Spanish port to help monitor pollution there, scientists said Friday.

  The 5-foot-long robots work by mimicking the swishing movements of a fish’s tail, according to University of Essex robotics expert Huosheng Hu, whose team is manufacturing the machines.

  tags: robotic fish, water, pollution, water pollution, greenmonktv

• Schools of robofish to sniff out pollution in the Thames | Mail Online

  Schools of robotic fish could be sent into the Thames to produce a 3D pollution map of the river.

  Researchers at the University of Essex in Colchester are working on the robofish as part of a £2.5million EU-funded project to find new ways of monitoring water waste.

  Each fish will be about 50cm long, 15cm high and 12cm wide. They will be packed with pollution sensors that can electronically ‘sniff’ harmful chemicals in the water.

  tags: water, pollution, robotic fish, greenmonktv

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• Austin signs up for $250 million solar project

  Webberville-area project would be among world’s largest but also comes with cost questions

  tags: austin, solar, pv, photovoltaic, green choice, greenmonktv

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• How Much Energy Goes Into Making a Bottle of Water?

  Researchers have calculated that the energy required to produce bottled water is up to 2,000 times more than the energy required to produce tap water.

  tags: water, bottled water, energy, greenmonktv

• Obama expected to kill key Bush EPA program

  The Obama administration intends to close an EPA program heavily promoted by the Bush Administration that rewards voluntary pollution controls by hundreds of corporations with reduced environmental inspections and less stringent regulation, according to EPA sources and internal emails.

  tags: obama, epa, performance track, greenmonktv

• Heathrow’s third runway: planning for aviation boom times is no way to deal with economic bust | Environment | guardian.co.uk

  Even without the overwhelming environmental case against airport expansion, the economic case is crumbling too

  tags: Heathrow, airport, greenmonktv

• IBM Press room – 2009-03-16 IBM and Marine Institute Ireland Netting Results in Galway’s “SmartBay” Project – United States

  IBM and the Marine Institute Ireland have completed the SmartBay pilot information system to monitor wave conditions, marine life and pollution levels in and around Galway Bay. This real-time advanced analytics pilot is turning mountains of data into intelligence, paving the way for smarter environmental management and development of the bay.

  tags: water, galway bay, smartbay, ibm, greenmonktv

• ReGeneration – Real Insight: The world’s most affordable hybrid…from Honda

  The cost of entry to Hybrid-land (next to Fuelcellandia) just got a whole lot cheaper. Beginning March 24, the 2010 Honda Insight will be on sale, with the entry-level LX model selling for $19,800. That makes it the lowest-priced hybrid on U.S. roads.

  tags: hybrid, honda, honda insight

• IBM Press room – 2009-03-16 IBM Makes Water Clean With Smarter, More Energy-Efficient Purification – United States

  Scientists at IBM Research, together with collaborators from Central Glass, KACST and the University of Texas, Austin have created a new membrane that filters out salts as well as potentially harmful toxins in water such as arsenic while using less energy than other forms of water purification.

  tags: ibm, ibm research, water, UT, kacst, greenmonktv

• Monbiot.com » A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

  Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.

  tags: climate change, global warming, monbiot, greenmonktv

• Obama: It’s Not About the “F***ing” Light Bulbs! : TreeHugger

  Obama is sick and tired of having to save the planet by switching to energy-efficient bulbs. During the primaries, Newsweek overheard a very unscripted Obama talking about the debates:

  I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.

  tags: obama, light bulbs

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• The smart electricity grid comes home | Socket to me | The Economist

  Or so your correspondent believed until he attended Demo 09 in Palm Desert, California, earlier this week. The event, where selected startups are each given six minutes under the spotlight to pitch their product to an audience of investors and industry veterans, is one of the leading launch pads for emerging technologies.

  Three presentations at Demo 09 lifted his spirits. One, in particular, made him feel the smart grid might even enter the home before the decade was out.

  tags: smart grid, smart home, zigbee, tendril

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• Marc Gunther » GM’s woes: Bad news for clean energy

  Coskata, a much-touted biofuels company, is stalled.

  So, for the moment, is Compact Power, a U.S. maker of lithium-ion batteries.

  Why? Partly because of the global economic meltdown. Partly because both depend on General Motors.

  tags: coskata, compact power, crisis, gm, finance, greenmonktv

• IT Climate Leadership Challenge | Greenpeace International

  We’re getting IT companies to make greener electronics. Now let’s move them to help us fight climate change!

  tags: climateleaders, greenpeacebuzz, greenmonktv, climate leaders, greenpeace

• IBM Press room – 2009-03-04 Made in IBM Labs: IBM Creates Software for Holding Face-to-Face Meetings in Virtual Worlds – United States

  IBM is making it easier for widely dispersed businesspeople to interact and collaborate without the time and expense of in-person meetings.

  tags: ibm, virtual worlds, sametime 3d, lotus sametime, greenmonktv

• The Cost of Energy » Blog Archive » Cars, always the cars

  The slow-motion train wreck that is the US car market is looking less slow every day

  tags: cars, gm, volt, phev, ev, greenmonktv

• Marc Gunther » Google: “You’ve got to take a stand.”

  America doesn’t have a national energy plan, but Google does.

  The question is, why?

  “You’ve got to go out and take a stand,” says Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO.

  tags: energy plan, google

• The Cost of Energy » Blog Archive » Carbon is Forever

  Why is it that even when we talk about the impacts of climate change we keep focusing on the 91 years from now until 2100? Is it simply the tyranny of round numbers? Is it our seemingly infinite myopia? Or have we just decided that we don’t give a flying fig what happens after 2100, because our own kids will almost certainly be dead by then?\n\nLuckily, not everyone is taking that position, and some are reminding us that Carbon is forever:

  tags: carbon, carbon emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, co2, forever, greenmonktv

• Willie Smits restores a rainforest | Video on TED.com

  By piecing together a complex ecological puzzle, biologist Willie Smits has found a way to re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, saving local orangutans — and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems.

  tags: rainforest, borneo, deforestation, orangutan

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• Oracle and Zogix team up to provide carbon insight – Carbon Offsets Daily

  Oracle will today become the latest business software vendor to bolster its credentials in the emerging carbon reporting market, when one of its partners launches a suite designed to help firms automatically track carbon emissions arising from employee travel.

  tags: carbon emissions, carbon reporting, carbon software, oracle, greenmonktv

• Take Eco-Efficiency to a Higher Level – Leading Green – HarvardBusiness.org

  A silver lining of the economic downturn is that efficiency has moved to the top of the business agenda. The recently enacted U.S. stimulus package includes more than $11 billion in funding for energy efficiency funding that will hopefully achieve the trifecta of saving energy, money, and jobs. And companies of all types are embracing efficiency to cut costs while improving environmental performance.

  tags: efficiency, harvard, greenmonktv

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• NASA, Cisco Partnership on Climate Change Monitoring Platform -> News@Cisco

  NASA and Cisco Inc. announced Tuesday a partnership to develop an online collaborative global monitoring platform called the “Planetary Skin” to capture, collect, analyze and report data on environmental conditions around the world.

  tags: nasa, cisco, greenmonktv, planetary skin

• Plight of the humble bee – Times Online

  Native British bees are dying out — and with them will go flora, fauna and one-third of our diet. We may have less than a decade to save them and avert catastrophe. So why is nothing being done?

  tags: greenmonktv, bees, bee, climate change, global warming, pollination

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• Desktops will move to the cloud, VMware exec says

  The desktop is one the areas ripe for moving into the cloud, and the driver will be lower operational costs for both large and small companies, a VMware executive said at the company’s VMworld conference in Cannes.

  tags: virtualization, desktop virtualization

• Storing Solar Power in Salt – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com

  What if it were possible to have solar power even when the clouds close in, or in the middle of the night? What if it were so reliable, it could fill the gap when the wind dies down and turbines stop spinning?

  It’s all possible, said Terry Murphy, president of SolarReserve. The company’s design uses the sun’s heat to boil water and spin a turbine — not unlike other “solar thermal” concepts that are now common. But where a typical system uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight and heat water; SolarReserve uses them to heat a salt, which melts into a liquid about twice as dense as water — and here’s the catch: stored in thermal silo, the melted salt is able to maintain vast amounts of heat, which can tapped later for use in power production.

  tags: baseload, solar thermal, molten salt, salt

• SAP Increases Focus on Sustainable Business

  Company Announces Expanded Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) Application; Aggressive Carbon Footprint Reduction Target; and New Sustainability Organization Led by Its First Chief Sustainability Officer

  tags: sap, cso, chief sustainability officer

• BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Microgrids as peer-to-peer energy

  Small networks of power generators in “microgrids” could transform the electricity network in the way that the net changed distributed communication.

  That is one of the conclusions of a Southampton University project scoping out the feasibility of microgrids for power generation and distribution.

  tags: peer to peer, microgrids, chp

• Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom | Video on TED.com

  Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.

  tags: TED, barry schwartz

• Jaguar drives to be green – Times Online

  Jaguar is working hard to improve its green credentials – including an ambitious plan, dubbed “Limo Green”, that will produce a prototype luxury saloon capable of more than 57 miles per gallon – about the same as the best family cars today.

  tags: jaguar, limo green, ev, phev

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