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Buying Into the Green Movement

By Alex Williams Here’s one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi’s and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt. Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid. Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight – careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand – and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives. That vision of an eco-sensitive life as a series of choices about what to buy appeals to millions of consumers and arguably defines the current environmental movement as equal parts concern for the earth and for making a stylish statement. Some 35 million Americans regularly buy products that claim to be earth-friendly, according to one report, everything from organic beeswax lipstick from the west Zambian rain forest to Toyota Priuses. With baby steps, more and more shoppers browse among the 60,000 products available […]

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Suzlon, PPM Agree on 700-MW Wind Energy Contract

Suzlon Wind Energy Corporation, the US-based subsidiary of Suzlon Energy A/S of Denmark, just extended its contract with PPM Energy to add 300 MW of wind turbine capacity to become one of the largest single contracts in the history of the company and the U.S. wind energy industry. The original agreement calls for delivery of 300 MW of turbine capacity in 2008 and 100 MW of capacity in 2009, but now has been extended to include an additional 300 MW in 2009 for a total of 700 MW over two years. “We’re exceptionally pleased that PPM Energy has exercised their option to bring Suzlon and the industry a historic contract,” said Andris Cukurs, CEO of Suzlon Wind Energy Corporation of Chicago, Illinois. Suzlon’s S88-2.1 MW wind turbine is the featured machine of the agreement and will be delivered to various ready-to-build sites across the US starting in the summer of 2008. “Suzlon has welcomed PPM Energy’s technical and engineering input and provided direct communication lines with the leaders of the company,” said Terry Hudgens, CEO of PPM Energy. PPM Energy is part of the IBERDROLA group of companies, the world leader in wind power, with more than 6,500 MW of […]

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Moving Beyond Kyoto

New York Times We – the human species – have arrived at a moment of decision. It is unprecedented and even laughable for us to imagine that we could actually make a conscious choice as a species, but that is nevertheless the challenge that is before us. Our home – Earth – is in danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings. Without realizing the consequences of our actions, we have begun to put so much carbon dioxide into the thin shell of air surrounding our world that we have literally changed the heat balance between Earth and the Sun. If we don’t stop doing this pretty quickly, the average temperature will increase to levels humans have never known and put an end to the favorable climate balance on which our civilization depends. In the last 150 years, in an accelerating frenzy, we have been removing increasing quantities of carbon from the ground – mainly in the form of coal and oil – and burning it in ways that dump 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours into the Earth’s atmosphere. The concentrations […]

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