Gamesa, a Spanish wind turbine manufacturer, has hammered out its first-ever U.S. union contract with the United Steelworkers (USW). Workers at two Gamesa facilities in Pennsylvania voted to approve…

Scorecard.org, a project of Green Media Toolshed, has been nominated for a Progressive Source Award in the category of Most Innovative Advocacy Tool. This is the first year for the Progressive Source Awards and the goal is to recognize organizations that are using the Web to effectively spread their messages with provocative videos, arresting homepages, and informative resources to motivate, educate, and inspire.

The awards are hosted by a new NYC-based firm called Progressive Source Communication. Voting ends on Monday, June 25th, so if you have a moment, please vote for the Scorecard site!

You can vote here.

Thanks for your support!

As regular readers of GO know, the world of green technology is moving forward at a blinding pace. Every week (shoot, sometimes every day) brings many exciting stories about breakthroughs and…

At last, the climate revolution is getting — well, consumer-friendly.

Today marks the launch of Climate Counts, a new nonprofit initiative to rate major consumer brands on their climate commitments and performance.
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(Posted by Joel Makower in Climate Change at 2:19 PM)

Art by Chris Jordan depicting the 2 million single use bottles used in the U.S. every five minutes. Though it's unusual for someone living in the US, as a general rule, I don't buy foods that…

We find ourselves, as I wrote a bit ago in an essay called The Empire of Crime, without a contemporary sense of our immediate surroundings or much of a model for a working future. This lends an air of surreality to our thinking. Like the hero of William Gibson’s story The Gernsback Continuum, we are shadowed by visions of a future not our own: Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot. Indeed, we’re irrationally hung up on the past’s visions of the future. Check out Gareth Branwyn’s photo tour of steampunk hobbyist artifacts: Retro-futurism is all… (more)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Imagining the Future at 11:03 AM)

On the day of the national Step It Up events, we walked into downtown Seattle from Capitol Hill to check out the demonstration. As we headed along 1st Avenue, we noticed a line of birdseed running down the sidewalk ahead of us. It continued for blocks. A number of shop owners and restaurant workers were outside their storefronts sweeping the seed into the gutter. When asked what this was all about, one flustered employee replied, “Some group of protesters,” and indicated down the street. We kept walking and eventually came upon the head of the lengthening line — a group of people with fanny packs filled with birdseed, dispensing it as they moved slowly forward. We asked them what they were doing, and they explained they were marking the point to which sea levels would rise in the next few decades of we don’t address climate change (rather like the Future Sea Level project, but on a much larger scale). We asked if they were representing a particular group or organization, but they seemed to be a hodgepodge of concerned citizens, identifying only as involved participants of Step It Up. We headed on our way and eventually the intervention faded… (more)

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Climate Change at 10:00 AM)