Green With Enviable Info
The same week that a U.S. Senate committee held a hearing investigating "media hype" of global warming, a report said Europe's alpine region is undergoing its warmest spell in 1,300 years. No matter what your opinion on climate change, it's clear that many billions of green dollars will be spent to deal with the issue and create sustainable economic development. The editors of the popular Worldchanging.com website track those approaches, and they've now compiled nearly 600 pages of fixes and solutions in Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century. The book, edited by Alex Steffen with a foreword by Al Gore, imagines a world where "new thinking, trade and collaboration ... swell bank accounts while shrinking our impact on the planet."
If you want to make your company more environmentally friendly or profit from the green desires of others, it's worth sampling the hundreds of bite-size articles. Read about recycled-glass countertops or the "zero energy house." Consult a handy checklist to see if your company is poised to prosper or perish in an environmentally focused future. Oh, and don't be surprised when you notice that seemingly every third article is about something that the Chinese government is doing. That nation's leaders have apparently already decided that its future needs to be green.
This story appears in the December 18, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.