Green Wombat

Green Wombat is moving

As you may know, I am now an editor at Fortune and Green Wombat has relocated to the magazine's site. Please go here to read Green Wombat and sign up for RSS feeds. (Sorry, the RSS feed is not active yet but will be soon.) The email subscription feature is not yet active and until it is I'll continue to post at the old Green Wombat site as well. Cheers.

Green Wombat is Back

Sorry for the radio silence, folks. Green Wombat has been literally off the grid in the Australian bush the past couple weeks but is back online. Posting will resume on Monday.

Business 2.0 RIP; Fortunate Wombat

As you may have read, Time Inc. is closing Business 2.0 magazine, where I work as an editor and which publishes Green Wombat. While it is exceedingly sad to see the end of B2, I'm happy to report that I'm joining Fortune magazine (along with eight of my Business 2.0 colleagues) and that Green Wombat is coming with me. We will remain in San Francisco as Fortune's West Coast bureau - the biggest of any business magazine. I'm looking forward to working at Fortune and continuing to report on the environment and technology at Green Wombat.

Green Media Payday: Discovery Buys TreeHugger

Discovery Communication's acquisition today of green blog TreeHugger - for a cool $10 million, according to the New York Post - is another sign of the shifting media landscape and how companies are turning to online magazines to reach green consumers. Not too many years ago a publisher seeking to ride a societal shift and rake in advertising would have started a print publication. After all, the great dot-com boom of the late '90s inspired a passel of dead-tree - and now mostly dead - magazines like The Industry Standard and Business 2.0 (Green Wombat's employer).  Not anymore. TreeHugger launched online in 2004 to chronicle a growing interest in the environment and the green lifestyle. Stylishly designed and tapping a global network of correspondents, New York-based TreeHugger serves up a mix of news, advocacy and product reviews through its blog and pod-and-vodcasts.  The purchase price might seem modest but Green Wombat bets TreeHugger's overhead runs at a mere fraction of a print mag's. TreeHugger's reach - 1.4 million visitors a month - clearly appealed to Discovery (DISCA), whose cable TV holdings include the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, the Science Channel, and the upcoming Planet Green eco-network.

And the Greenest City in America is...

photo: courthouselover
Hastings, Nebraska, at least according to Yahoo. The town has won Yahoo's (YHOO) "Greenest City in America" challenge by getting its residents to accumulate the most points by asking environment-related question on Yahoo Answers, using "eco-friendly mobile search terms" on Yahoo's mobile service, and taking a green pledge to do things like buying energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs, adjusting their thermostat by two degrees and carpooling to work once a week. Yahoo offered the winning city the choice of a fleet of hybrid taxis or the cash equivalent of $250,000. Not much need for cabs in a town of 25,000, so Hastings opted for the green stuff, which represents a little under 1 percent of the city's annual budget. The town will use the money to pay for various environmental initiatives.

The runner-ups in the Yahoo sweepstakes are:

• Pelzer, South Carolina
• San Carlos, California
• Mill Valley, California
• Topeka, Kansas
• Dover, Delaware
• Spring, Texas
• Lawrence, Kansas
• Walnut Creek, California
• Fairfax, Virginia

An Earth Day History Lesson

The challenges posed by global warming can seem insurmountable, demanding such radical economic, political and lifestyle changes as to be beyond the realm of the doable. But we've made such seismic shifts before, as Green Wombat was reminded watching an Earth Day program about the San Francisco Bay Area environmental movement on Quest, the half-hour science show produced by local public television station KQED. (In an apparent first for public TV, "Where We've Been, Where We're Headed" premiered online five days before it is to be broadcast tomorrow. Quest's managing editor is Paul Rogers, Green Wombat's former colleague from the San Jose Mercury News and one of the nation's best environmental journalists.) For those of us who live here, the Bay Area has been an ecotopia for so long now that it's easy to forget the dystopia that was developing in the 1960s, in the days before the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the EPA and the Bay Area Rapid Transist system. Today I can look out my 29th floor window (crappy camphone photo at right)  and enjoy the view of a sparkling Bay, the Marin headlands and Mount Tamalpais, thanks to the fact that the region suffers only a couple of smoggy days a year; in the Summer of Love era, the average was about 65 bad air days annually, though there were four million fewer people and some three million fewer cars in the Bay Area in the late 1960s. While Rachel Carson was penning Silent Spring, plans were afoot to fill in 70 percent of the Bay.  Not that you could enjoy much of the shoreline back then - only 4 miles were accessible and fire-prone landfills dotted the best bayfront real estate, as Quest minds us. Today, 200 miles of shoreline are available for hiking and biking. Where I mountain bike in Marin was to be the site of a new city, and let's not even talk about that six-lane coastal freeway and nuclear power plant planned near where seals frolic in Bolinas Lagoon. So what happened? As Quest shows, a grass roots environmental movement of hippies, housewives, conservationists and their allies in the local, state and federal governments changed the law and then an entire way of life  - one that we now take for granted.  That's not to minimize the incredible hurdles posed by radically lowering greenhouse gas emissions and revamping a global industrial infrastructure. But present-day enviros enjoy one advantage: while the nascent green movement of the '60s and '70s spent a signficant amount of time, energy and money fighting Big Business, Corporate America is beginning to enlist as allies in the fight against global warming, out of enlightened self-interest if nothing else. And technology - from the Internet to solar power - is being deployed to search for solutions rather than destroy.

Three Low-Tech Ways to Help Save the Planet

In Silicon Valley,  technological innovation tends to focus on creating knock-your-socks off products like Apple's (APPL) iPhone or some cool new Google (GOOG) mashup. Much the same is true in green tech, where a host of companies are working on advanced solar, biofuel and hydrogen technologies. But as Green Wombat's holiday sojourn in Australia comes to a close, I'm surrounded by examples of low-tech solutions to pressing environmental problems - a reminder that there's plenty of opportunity in the green tech boom to develop innovative but simple technology. Take three common Australian technologies used in my friends Susi and Andrew's home on the New South Wales coast, about four hours north of Sydney. We'll start up with the humble power outlet (or power point, as the Aussie's say.) We all know that our homes are increasingly filled with gadgets that remain on standby when plugged in, sucking electricity even when not in use. In Australia, every power outlet has a little button that cuts off the electricity when the outlet isn't active. It's a reflexive habit here to vanquish so-called vampire power by pressing a button. You can't get more low-tech than a clothes line but the widespread use of them to dry clothes saves untold kilowatts of energy. You'll find a clothes line in the backyard of just about every abode, from suburban tract homes to $3 million beach palaces. Dryers tend to be tiny, used mainly in winter. Australia's climate encourages line drying but there's also no negative cultural connotation as there is in the U.S., where people seem to associate the practice with poverty. Lastly, Susi and and Andrew have installed a rainwater tank behind their garage. Most of the rainfall in their coastal area goes straight into the Pacific Ocean but the tank collects runoff from their roof that can be used to water their garden and lawn. With a further investment, rainwater could be used to flush the toilets, wash clothes or even provide drinking water. Imagine the opportunity for some startup to come up with rainwater tank technology for use in urban but dry areas of the U.S.