If the headline doesn’t get you, the price tag might: $500 million. U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis was in Memphis last week to announce five grant competitions, totaling $500 million, to fund projects that will prepare workers for green Read more…
Author: Jeff Kart
A little two-man submarine in Lake Tahoe, California, is searching for jobs under the water. What’s down there? A nonprofit called the Undersea Voyager Project is getting ready to launch a five-year mission in 2011 to look for ideas on Read more…
BioSolar Inc., a publicly traded California company, says it’s come up with a way to build a better solar panel, with plastics made from plants. I sat down recently with company CEO David Lee, both of us at keyboards, to Read more…
A colleague of mine said to me recently, “No energy is clean energy.” Which got me thinking. Of course, Clean Coal comes to mind. And people love to say that “No coal is clean,” and “Clean Coal is an oxymoron.” Read more…
There’s a kernel of good to this story, if you care about climate change and high food prices. Sure, ethanol has been a great example of how America can begin to overcome its dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But using Read more…
Just when you thought the future was in carbon capture and sequestration (and that’s true), comes more information from the “new EPA” under Administrator Lisa Jackson and President Barack Obama. The agency, which has already begun the process of regulating Read more…
You know the song: “Rain, rain, go away/Come again some other day.” Heavy rain in places with older sewer systems (Michigan and elsewhere), often results in combined sewage overflows. But it doesn’t have to be that way. And the solution Read more…
The news out of New York was big. The New York Power Authority is working on rules for siting 120 megawatts of offshore wind turbines in Lakes Erie and Ontario. But a bigger wind and water story was hatched this Read more…
You’ve probably heard the reports about drugs in our water that aren’t removed by traditional wastewater treatment. Maybe you’ve heard about the harmful byproducts spawned when chlorine is used in the water treatment process. Here’s a new one: Super bacteria Read more…
This is kind of backward. States have banned phosphorus fertilizers for lawns, because the phosphorus runs off the landscape, into rivers and streams, and breeds algal blooms and muck. Ever visited a beach visited by muck? It’s not a vacation. Read more…
Summer’s comin. Sun, sand, beach and shiga toxin. Shiga toxin? Yep, it’s a gene that can make swimmers sick. And health departments don’t test for it in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania. They test for E. coli, an indicator bug Read more…
Can you make lemonade from algae? Figuratively, yes. A bunch of students from the University of Michigan and Michigan State University have a business plan to use algae to treat wastewater and make biofuels. It’s a double play, like taking Read more…