Fast Company says "Massive investments in clean energy promise to keep farmers, urban planners, and green-tech entrepreneurs in business for the next decade" and lists their pick of the new green jobs that will be created - Ten Best Green Jobs for the Next Decade.
"It's time to bail out the people and the planet," says Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. We agree, and this guide to to sustainability-focused career paths will help retrofit and solar-charge your work life.
Farmer
America has only two million farmers, and their average age is 55. Since sustainable agriculture requires small-scale, local, organic methods rather than petroleum-based machines and fertilizers, there is a huge need for more farmers -- up to tens of millions of them, according to food guru Michael Pollan. Modern farmers are small businesspeople who must be as skilled in heirloom genetics as marketing. ...
Smart grid technology is years, possibly decades away from being accepted nationally. Right now, it is being tested in several places so that the best business model can be uncovered and small foul ups can be caught early and fixed.
As the United States grapples for ways to break its dependence on foreign energy sources, one tiny town in Missouri seems to have it figured out.
Rock Port, in the northwest tip of the state, has been on the decline for decades, and its population dwindles each year. But a walk up to the old cemetery shows something that has put the wind, literally, back in the town's sails: four massive turbines.
When the tobacco industry was feeling the heat from scientists who showed that smoking caused cancer, it took decisive action.
It engaged in a decades-long public relations campaign to undermine the medical research and discredit the scientists. The aim was not to prove tobacco harmless but to cast doubt on the science.
The U.S. government will spend tens of millions of dollars to assess and clean up uranium contamination across the vast Navajo Reservation, but the effort is unlikely to erase decades of frustration over what has been characterized as a slow and sporadic federal response.
The new five-year plan is the first coordinated push to measure and fix the environmental damage that resulted from a Cold War hard-rock mining boom in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
Solar energy will cost the same as power produced by coal, natural gas and nuclear plants in about a decade, a report released today suggests. By then, the price parity could propel solar adoption so that it accounts for 10 percent of U.S. electricity generation by 2025.
Concentrating solar power, which has been around for decades, is one of the most promising techniques being tried today to make solar electricity more cost effective.
In 2000 a Saudi oil geologist named Sadad I. Al Husseini made a startling discovery. Husseini, then head of exploration and production for the state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, had long been skeptical of the oil industry's upbeat forecasts for future production. Since the mid-1990s he had been studying data from the 250 or so major oil fields that produce most of the world's oil. He looked at how much crude remained in each one and how rapidly it was being depleted, then added all the new fields that oil companies hoped to bring on line in coming decades. When he tallied the numbers, Husseini says he realized that many oil experts "were either misreading the global reserves and oil-production data or obfuscating it."
KINGSTON, Ontario, Jun 25 (IPS) - North America's abject failure to meet the challenge of climate change has been "un-American", environmentalist and scientist David Suzuki told delegates Tuesday at the World Wind Energy Conference, the first ever in the region.
"We're facing an ecological crisis, a crisis far, far worse than Pearl Harbour," Suzuki said.
Twenty years ago this week, one of the United States' leading scientists warned Congress of the imminent danger of climate change and said that waiting decades to take action was too risky. Now James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has published new research indicating that greenhouse gas concentrations have pushed the climate near a dangerous tipping point that will unleash far-reaching changes in the atmosphere and oceans that could take millennia to reverse.
Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of electric power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts.
Shin Abe doesn't find it odd that the picturesque little Japanese town of Kuzumaki, where he has lived all his life, generates some of its electricity with cow dung. Nor is the 15-year-old middle school student blown away by the vista of a dozen wind turbines spinning atop the forested peak of nearby Mt. Kamisodegawa. And it's old news to Abe that his school gets 25% of its power from an array of 420 solar panels located near the campus. "That's the way it's been," he shrugs. "It's natural."
To Abe, it is. But the blase teen has grown up in an alternative universe - one that might be envisioned by Al Gore. That's because Kuzumaki (population 8,000) has over the past decade transformed itself into a living laboratory for the development of sustainable and diversified energy sources. "When I was growing up, all we had [to generate power] was oil," says Kazunori Fukasawaguchi, a Kuzumaki native who now serves in local government. "I never imagined this kind of change." (Read TIME's Top 10 Green Ideas of 2008.)
As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to tackle the vast problems ahead for America, he has consistently made two bold proposals.
First, he intends to make an immense investment in infrastructure - roads, bridges, railways - to jump-start jobs. Second, he plans to boost clean green technologies to make up for the squandered opportunities of the Lost Decade.
These are both powerful, worthy ideas. But they would be far more powerful if they were directly connected. The incoming administration has a historic opportunity to accomplish five major goals at once through a massive investment in stopping the waste of energy and dollars pouring out of American homes.
Japan has announced plans to build its first new geothermal power stations in nearly two decades in a bid to tap the nation's domestic energy sources.
A string of geothermal power plants are to be developed by a number of firms keen to capitalise on the active volcanic landscape that spans the country, while the government is also currently compiling guidelines supporting the development of such energy sources.
Home to 108 active volcanoes - ten per cent of the world's active volcanoes - Japan is in a prime position to tap into underground geothermal energy sources.
As a nation with few natural resources, Japan has long been dependent on importing substantial quantities of crude oil and natural gas. The country's renewed focus on geothermal energy marks a desired shift away from its dependency on imported energy sources which has made it susceptible to increasingly volatile prices.
Imagine cars with no tailpipes and no direct carbon emissions into our atmosphere - powered by an electrical energy system getting cleaner by the year through Renewable Portfolio Standards in effect in California and across the nation.
More than a decade ago, I was one of the original owners of the EV1, an electric vehicle produced by General Motors (GM). When GM discontinued the series and reclaimed all of the EV1s, it was a major setback for the American car industry. Instead of leading the charge to create a new generation of vehicles - America fell behind.
(NaturalNews) For decades, battery storage technology has been a heavy weight on the back of scientific innovation. From cell phones to electric vehicles, our technological capabilities always seem to be several steps ahead of our ability to power them. Several promising new technologies are currently under development to help power the 21st century, but one small start-up looks especially well positioned to transform the way we think about energy storage.
WASHINGTON (AP) - An Energy Department report concludes that wind turbines can produce a fifth of the nation's annual electricity needs within about two decades. That is about the same share of electricity produced today by nuclear power.
Wind energy today accounts for only about 1 percent of the nation's electricity. The government report to be released Monday said by 2030 wind energy could account for 300,000 megawatts of power, or about 20 percent of the total electricity generated.
The number of wind turbines is set to quadruple over the next decade under government plans to force through wind farm planning applications.
Ministers have put wind power at the heart of a Renewable Energy Strategy, which is due to be released on Wednesday. It will outline how Britain is to meet its target of a 34 per cent cut in CO2 emissions by 2020.
Group items tagged 
