The meat industry is very energy intensive and the raising of animals for food takes up a lot of land. It’s no surprise then that to help save the environment one ought to eat less meat, but many people find it difficult to cut back their meat intake. Over at
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Things Are Good: Easy Ways to Eat Less Meat
The meat industry is very energy intensive and the raising of animals for food takes up a lot of land. It’s no surprise then that to help save the environment one ought to eat less meat, but many people find it difficult to cut back their meat intake. Over at
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Sense of Purpose is More Important Than Money for Workplaces
In this TED Talk Dan Ariely presents his research into what motivates people to do work and how they feel about their workplace. The findings are interesting because it’s not necessarily what people do but the reactions to what has been done that provides motivation.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Unilever’s Sustainability Strategy Saves Costs, Environment
Unilever is a massive corporation that owns a ton of brands from Q-Tips to Ben Jerry’s Ice Cream. They have recently pushed for more efficiency and sustainability across all their brands and have found that their environment-saving approach has saved money. The company’s sustainability director for manufacturing, John Maguire, echoed
Continue readingThings Are Good: Chicago Wants to be a World Class Bicycle City
Chicago politicians understand that people in their city commute sustainably via bicycles and that this is a great component to their transit planning. What’s more is that by building proper infrastructure for cyclists they can draw people to the city and show the world what the future looks like –
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cameras Capture How Safely Cyclists Cruise
It’s clear that car drivers don’t comprehend cyclists, and often I hear drivers complain that bicyclists aren’t safe and tend to be “dangerous” on the road. It turns out that cyclists are safer than cars, cause way fewer collisions, and are amazingly great at avoiding a collision. To reach this
Continue readingThings Are Good: Ontario Saves Experimental Lakes Area
The federal government of Canada is so anti-environment that it hurts everyone on the planet. Their unwavering support for the world-destroying tar sands, refusal to work with other countries to improve the planet, and their inability to acknowledge human influenced climate change is revolting and regressive. Now that I got
Continue readingThings Are Good: Be Optimistic by Learning About It
The book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Dr. Martin Seligman is not new, but it is to me. For others who have not heard about it before, it looks like an uplifting read. The central thesis of the book is to essentially learn what
Continue readingThings Are Good: Bacteria Creates Fuel Compatible with Gasoline Engines
The need for a biofuel that can be used in standard automobiles is needed more everyday as the bloody global thirst for oil only increases. Thankfully researchers have engineered a bacteria that can produce a fuel substance that can be used in standard internal combustion engines. To be used as
Continue readingThings Are Good: Paris Marathon Runners Generated Energy to Power Event
At the recent Paris marathon the runners literally generated electricity. Pavegen put down a series of tiles that create an electric charge when compressed, so all they had to do was lay the tiles along the marathon route. The resulting energy generated by the runners was enough to power signs
Continue readingThings Are Good: 10 MW Ocean Power Plant Planned for China
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) uses the difference in temperature at different water depths to produce energy, similar to how geothermal works. A green resort in China is going to be powered by the OTEC system and the companies involved in building the power plant are hoping that this will
Continue readingThings Are Good: Stop Desertification With Wildlife
Allan Savory wants to end desertification by helping grasslands flourish. Many parts of the world are experiencing desertification, including China which is planting trees to fight the growing dunes, so a solution to this growing problem is needed. Savory’s solution is counter-intuitve and absolutely brilliant:use wildlife to save the land.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Algae-Powered Building Opens This Week
Algae can be used for all sorts of wonderful things from cleaning up oil to producing energy. Architects in Hamburg have built a building that uses algae to power the complex and it opens this week. The building is meant to be a demonstration of cutting-edge sustainable architecture. “Using bio-chemical
Continue readingThings Are Good: New Homes in Lancaster, California Required to Produce Solar Energy
Lancaster, California has nearly half a million citizens and they want to reduce their carbon footprint. Their most recent step to being a green city is a world’s first as far as I know: every new residential development in the city is required to produce energy using the sun. “However,
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Solar Structure That Cools in the Sun
Keeping buildings cool in the summer is hard enough as it is and we have access to air conditioning technologies. Now, there’s a better way to keep buildings, cars, and whatnot thanks to some research out of Stanford University. Their new approach to cooling entire structures doesn’t require electricity and
Continue readingThings Are Good: 2012 Was a Record Breaking Year for US Wind Industry
2012 was a very successful year for the young wind-power energy industry in the United States. Throughout last year over 6,700 were installed around the country with the industry benefiting overall from new investments into the sector. Let’s hope this is a sign of the future of what;s to come
Continue readingThings Are Good: Measure Food in Exercise, Not Calories
Yesterday we looked at labelling gas nozzles and today here’s good news about a better way to label food. A series of studies add up to the conclusion that if people were aware of how much walking it would take to burn off food they eat less. Calories can be
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Proposal to Label Gas Nozzles
The overwhelming majority of personal cars use planet-killing, people-damaging, production-intesnive engines that consume a product that literally kills us. Most everyone understands this at some level, but it seems they don’t connect their fuel consumption with world hunger, polar bears dying, or even smog. A new organization in Toronto wants
Continue readingThings Are Good: Consumers Care About Social Responsibility
I recall early in the last decade that companies didn’t respond to calls for corporate social responsibility because consumers didn’t care. That seems to have changed, which is a very good thing. Since then, corporations have had to accommodate the growing concerns of people and have even gone so far
Continue readingThings Are Good: Australia Can Make Easy Transition to Renewable Energy
Presently, 10% of Australia’s electricity is produced from a renewable resource, and that number can grow easily with minor adjustments to federal policy. By cutting back subsidies for the oil and gas sector (yes, most developed nations actually provide subsidies to that insanely profitable sector) and upping the cost of
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