·:[ Environmental News Bits ]:·
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Read the full story at News.com.

You could call it grass-roots green.

The second season of Energy Smackdown, a TV show that challenges homeowners in the Boston area to “green” their lives, kicked off Sunday.

Households, including my own, have signed up to take up several challenges to lower their carbon footprint and compete against families in other nearby cities–in this case between Medford, Cambridge, and Arlington, Mass.

Read the full story at News.com.

Algae may one day be the preferred feedstock for biofuels. But in the meantime, it can have a job cleaning up waste water.

Seattle-area start-up Bionavitas is one of several companies moving into the algae business. Because it doesn’t compete with food and has a high energy density, algae has a lot of potential as a source of biodiesel.

But it will take years before algae biodiesel will make a dent in the petroleum diesel market, said Bionavitas CEO and co-founder Michael Weaver.

So in the short term, the company is growing algae for alternative markets: oils for pharmaceuticals and waste water treatment.

For a full-color, graphic version of this newsletter, go to http://www.greenbiz.com/enewsletter.

Approaching Efficiency as an Investment
By Tilde Herrera
Cost is the perennial barrier to green corporate investments in energy efficiency, but a new approach from Economist Jerry Jackson, the author of “Energy Budgets at Risk,” can help companies evaluate these expenditures using tools created by the financial industry.

Corporate Execs Must Take Charge of Green IT, Report Says
Hiring a C-level ‘Energy Czar’ position and creating a corporate average data-center efficiency metric are among some of the top-level changes companies should adopt in order to make serious reductions in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report released by the Uptime Institute and McKinsey.

Dow Chemical Wins ESS Excellence Award for Environmental Reporting
Dow’s project, lauded as the best of the year by crisis-management software company ESS and BNP Media, saved the company more than $2 million by using IT to streamline and improve the accuracy of its reporting processes.

U.K. Dairy Industry Unveils Plan for Packaging, Energy, Emissions
In the Milk Roadmap, industry and government have come together to set goals for reducing milk’s impact on the environment in a number of ways.

GreenTV Program Aims to Clean Up the Tube’s Life-Cycle
From manufacturing to energy use to end-of-life, the LCD TV Association’s new GreenTV program brings manufacturers together with vendors to shrink the television’s ecological footprint.

Verso Paper Met Most Environmental Goals for 2007
The papermaker now gets most of its energy from biomass and has steadily reduced its greenhouse gas emissions since 1998.

OfficeMax Unveils Line of TerraCycle’s Made-from-Waste Office Products
Among the new offerings the retailer announced yesterday are binders, pencil cases, trash cans and cleaning products that are made from reclaimed waste materials and environmentally beneficial ingredients.

U.K. Greenwash Complaints Quadrupled in 2007
The Advertising Standards Authority received 561 complaints about environmental and green claims in advertising last year, more than four times the amount of complaints in 2006.

Ford and Timberland Lauded for CSR Reporting
Ceres and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants recognized Ford and Timberland as top sustainability reporters in their annual competition that judges transparency in corporate environmental and social reporting.

Suppliers See Climate Change Regulation as Business Risk: Survey
The Carbon Disclosure Project queried suppliers about what emissions they report and if they feel greenhouse gas regulations and climate change will impact their operations.

Waste Mgmt. Plans Landfill Gas-to-Fuel Plant in California
A facility set to open in 2009 will turn gases from a Waste Management landfill into fuel for the company’s trucks.

Dr. Bronner Files Lawsuit Over Organic Claims
Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps filed a lawsuit this week against several competing personal care brands alleging the companies, such as Estee Lauder, Juice Organics and Stella McCartney CARE, are misleading consumers with false organic labeling.

SAS Develops Software to Analyze, Recommend Sustinability Efforts
Business intelligence software developer SAS has releases SAS for Sustainability Management to help companies better understand their current and future environmental impact.

Tesco Adds Carbon Footprint to Product Labels
Shoppers at Tesco supermarkets can now see the carbon footprint of certain items just by checking the label.

Eco Trademarks Made Big Gains in 2007
Submissions of environmentally-focused trademarks applications helped create the busiest year since 2000 for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Rivals Boeing and Airbus Partner for Greener Aviation
The partnership will work to save fuel and reduce emissions by increasing aviation efficiency and reduce air traffic congestion through better routing, more effective arrival management and speed control to wipe out unnecessary delays and air time.

Wood Products and Carbon Protocols
This report from Dovetail Partners looks at how the storage of carbon within wood products and the low energy and fossil fuel intensity of wood products has been ignored by policy analysts.

Can Business Conferences Ever Be Green?
By Danny Bradbury, BusinessGreen
There are plenty of measures firms can take to limit the environmental impact of business conferences, even in the least-green of locations — although ultimately holding fewer events may be most sustainable answer.

Toward a Real-Time Macroethical Assessment for Sustainability
By Brad Allenby
As shown by the current uproar over the use of food crops as stock for alternative fuels, we need to incorporate a flexible and highly adaptive system of ethical guidelines to our plans for addressing the environmental problems that loom increasingly large over human activity.

Joel Makower’s Two Steps Forward
GreenBiz and GreenYour: Something Old, Something New

Marc Gunther on Corporate America
KKR meets Environmental Defense

David Wigder’s Green Marketing Strategies
Making What’s Inconvenient Matter

Andy Savitz’s Triple Bottom Line
Six Ways That Businesses Are Prodding And Dragging Government Toward Sustainability

Read the full story in Technology Review.

Hybrids, plug-ins, and extended-range electric cars are hitting the market. Use this interactive primer to learn how they work.

Read the full story in the New York Times.

Drivers have long known that slowing down on the highway means getting more miles to the gallon. Now airlines are trying it, too

This presentation from Nielsen//NetRatings takes an in-depth look at which companies are “winning the green race” and what influential sustainability bloggers are saying about them. They review how the growing sustainability movement has spurred changes in consumers and corporations alike, and how the Internet itself has pushed the issue to the forefront.

Read the full story in the New York Times.

Air travel is the fastest-growing source of global greenhouse gases, making the race to find an alternative to kerosene crucial.

Via ResourceShelf.

EIA Launches Plain Language Series to Explain Energy Topics

Energy in Brief, released today, is a new series from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) that explains important energy topics using plain language.

As the source of official energy statistics from the U.S. Government, EIA provides the most accurate, policy-neutral energy data and analysis available.

The new Energy in Brief series strives to make EIA information more accessible to energy novices.

“Energy education is a critical part of EIA’s mission. At a time when American consumers face many energy-related challenges, it is more important than ever to provide the public with reliable energy information in a format that is useful and accessible by the widest possible audience,” said EIA Administrator Guy Caruso.

Each Energy in Brief concisely answers a question of importance to the public. The goal is not to be exhaustive but to clearly cover the main points. The Briefs are designed to be visually-engaging web pages that are also printer-friendly.

The articles released today address the following:

• How dependent are we on foreign oil?
• What are greenhouse gases and how much do we emit?
• How much renewable energy do we use?
• What is liquefied natural gas and what is its role as an energy source?

+ Energy in Brief — What everyone should know about energy

Source: Energy Information Administration