Gil Friend’s Blog

The SF Chronicle reports on the California Green Innovation Index, being released today: California is leading the way in the fight against global warming as its investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into green technology companies and its citizens...

Just a day after being impressed to learn that California will require zero net energy homes by 2020, I'm even more impressed to learn that Austin will require it by 2015. (I'm at at the USGBC's GreenBuild conference, where's there's plenty to be impressed with.)...

Natural Logic's four part You can still register for today and/or for upcoming sessions. This is a great, high-density, practical orientation issues and practices for measuring and managing carbon footprints. As I noted a couple of weeks ago: I'll be hosting the...

Speaking of carbon: Have you been wondering about carbon offsets? You're not alone. There's a thoughtful series of essays at Zerofootprint, while the sharks at Sherman's Lagoon offer a briefer and much more flippant (flipperant?) treatment. In fact they've done a...

Speaking of carbon (2): Natural Logic has just announced "Coming to Grips with Carbon," a four-part webinar series (produced by Stacey Marvel) on ""How to Measure and Reduce Your Carbon Footprint." I'll be hosting the entire series, and will be joined by some of the...

OpenEco.org opened its "doors" yesterday. OpenEco.org is a new online community -- developed by Sun Microsystems in partnership with Natural Logic -- to help organizations calculate, compare, and reduce green house gas (GHG) emissions. Inspired and guided by Natural...

I'll be speaking at West Coast Green today about Regional Sustainability Dashboards. (At the 'stealth' new technologies session in the Futures Room on the 4th floor.) (I took part in two panels there yesterday, moderating California Mayors Talk About Green, with...

Architecture 2030 has a full page ad in the New Yorker this week asking "Think You’re Making a Difference? Think Again." They note that "There are 151 new conventional coal-fired power plants in various stages of development in the US today," and go on to compare...

The Guardian reports: The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off. Scientists monitoring events this summer say the acceleration could be catastrophic in terms of sea-level...