Green

How revolutionizng the workplace creates better ideas via @goldhirshfndtn

Official: Tesla pays back $465m DOE loan, Musk says 'I hope we did you proud' #green

The Great American Dream begins with neighborhoods. #HarveyMilkDay

Following a tsunami of bad news for electric car maker Fisker Automotive earlier this year, the company has been silent in recent months, as it’s been figuring out what will happen to it: will it be acquired, will it sell off its assets, will it declare bankruptcy? Well, according to Reuters, a group of investors that includes former General Motors exec Bob Lutz and Chinese auto tech company Wanxiang are offering to buy Fisker for $20 million in a prepackaged bankruptcy deal. If Fisker is bought for $20 million that would mean the company would be bought for less than 1 percent of its reported $2.2 billion valuation when it launched the Karma in the late summer of 2011. Twenty million dollars is not quite two percent of the total funding ($1.2 billion) that Fisker raised. Fisker also owes the U.S. government another $171 million to pay back its loan. That’s got to be one of the biggest losses in venture capital history. Row of Fisker Karmas Earlier this year there were media reports that Fisker was being bids for between $200 million to $350 million from different Chinese auto companies. But either those reports put the bidding high (if so, I would speculate they were leaked by Fisker to help with bidding), something changed in the valuation of Fisker (it plummeted), or the bidders realized a lower valuation of Fisker after looking under the hood. In a similar end game, solar thin film company Miasole was sold for $30 million to Chinese renewable power company Hanergy, after raising at least $500 million in venture capital funding. Both Miasole and Fisker were backed by Valley firm Kleiner Perkins. Fisker’s potential bidders include VL Automotive, which is a joint venture between Lutz and Gilbert Villarreal. VL Automotive wants to turn the Fisker Karma into an internal combustion engine car, stripping out the electric drivetrain and giving it an engine. Read my long investigative story on Fisker: A look under the hood: why electric car startup Fisker crashed and burned. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Tesla’s Model X could make the electric SUV a hitGreen IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVsGreen IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times

This simple straight dough French bread (not sourdough) is the perfect baguette recipe for new bread bakers. Note: If you're a beginning bread baker, you might find my Ten Tips on How To Bake Better Artisan Breads at Home helpful. And if you've been longing to learn how to make your own sandwich bread, my popular Farmhouse White Easy Basic Sandwich Recipe (which can also be made with whole wheat flour) is a great place to start. While e-mailing back and forth six years ago, I asked Daniel Leader, founder of the renowned Bread Alone Bakery in New York and my bread baking hero, to recommend a summer picnic bread from his new book, Local Breads. He immediately suggested I try the very first recipe, Parisian Daily Bread, or what he calls The Four Hour Baguette. "It's simple, it's foolproof, and it's delicious," he said, and he was right. I've been baking it ever since. I credit Daniel's wonderful first book, Bread Alone, with turning me into a bread baker, and I've been recommending it for years to anyone interested in learning how to bake their own bread. After 20 years it's still in print, and considering there are thousands of new cookbooks published each year, that's really saying something. My original copy of Bread Alone is in four pieces. My second copy was signed and sent to me by Daniel himself when he learned my first one was falling apart, which of course thrilled me to no end. (Sidenote: one of my favorite novels is also called Bread Alone, written by my good friend and fellow Daniel Leader fan, Judi Hendricks.) Fourteen years after he wrote Bread Alone, Daniel came out with Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers. It's the culmination of dozens of trips to Europe over two decades in search of bakers who are still using time-honored methods and ingredients to create loaves unique to their towns and cities. Part travelogue, part bread making class, and part gastronomic history lesson, the book is full of colorful stories of local artisans and 80 of their authentic treasured recipes. Beginning bread bakers needn't shy away from Local Breads. The first 60 pages are packed with detailed information on equipment, ingredients, and techniques, all of it clearly written and easy to understand. Even better are the several dozen Q&As throughout the book, which are Daniel's responses to the questions most frequently asked by his students at the Culinary Institute of America and other places where he teaches bread making. The only trouble you might have is ever making it past this first recipe. Recipe below. . . Click here for the rest of this post »

Be REALLY green - dine on insects (repost) #green

Artist and provocateur @aiww addresses China's tainted milk scandal and Hong Kong's fears in this powerful piece

A new generation of gardeners are interested in growing their own food, and The Patch, a new self-watering planter, helps guide newbies through the process. The planter, which is designed for urban gardeners, solves the most common challenge for novice gardeners: over-watering. The Patch Planter is an easy, self-watering and flat-packable planter that addresses this issue by providing the plant with the perfect amount of water at all times — yielding more nutritious and delicious food. The planter is currently in the beta stage, but Let’s Patch is raising funds through Kickstarter to take its manufacturing process to the next level. + Let’s Patch + Let’s Patch on Kickstarter The article above was submitted to us by an Inhabitat reader. Want to see your story on Inhabitat? Send us a tip by following this link. Remember to follow our instructions carefully to boost your chances of being chosen for publishing! Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | digg Post tags: herbs, kickstarter, Let's Patch, Patch planters, self-watering planter, The Patch, vancouver, vegetables

Math. It's one of those things that most people either love or hate. Those who fall on the hate side of things might still have nightmares of showing up for a high school math test unprepared, even years after graduation. Math is, by nature, an abstract subject, and it can be hard to wrap your head around it if you don't have a good teacher to guide you.

On Sunday, I wrote about the real scandal of the century that the media is ignoring or misreporting — unchecked global warming (see “Worse Than Watergate“). Now I have a name for this growing scandal — No-Water-Gate. It is increasingly clear that the gravest climate threat to the most people in the coming decades will be Dust-Bowlification and the impact that has on food security (see Oxfam: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World). As I wrote in my 2011 Nature article, “The next dust bowl,” which reviewed some of the vast literature on the growing threat of prolonged warming-driven drought, “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.” You’d think that a New York Times front page story on our current return to Dust Bowl conditions — and how farmers need to adapt — would discuss some of this vast literature. Or at least mention climate change. Once. You’d be wrong. And so this NY Times story is one of the inspirations for naming the greatest scandal of our time No-Water-Gate: The failure to discuss climate change renders the piece less than useless — it is scandalously misleading. The article focuses on how the drought has accelerated the depletion of the High Plains Aquifer by Kansas and Texas farmers: Kansas agriculture will survive the slow draining of the aquifer — even now, less than a fifth of the state’s farmland is irrigated in any given year — but the economic impact nevertheless will be outsized. In the last federal agriculture census of Kansas, in 2007, an average acre of irrigated land produced nearly twice as many bushels of corn, two-thirds more soybeans and three-fifths more wheat than did dry land. Farmers will take a hit as well. Raising crops without irrigation is far cheaper, but yields are far lower. Drought is a constant threat: the last two dry-land harvests were all but wiped out by poor rains. In the end, most farmers will adapt to farming without water, said Bill Golden, an agriculture economist at Kansas State University. No, no, a thousand times no: Farmers aren’t going to “adapt to farming without water”! Farmers might adapt to farming without water from the aquifer for irrigation — but only if the climate is not changing for the worse! An important, if under-reported, 2012 study from the The National Center for Atmospheric Research “strengthened the case” that, unless we reverse emissions trends soon, we risk having a situation by the end of the century where ”most of southern Europe and about half of the United States is gripped by extreme drought” a great deal of the time: [Author Aiguo] Dai’s new work stresses that the drying effect of human-produced greenhouse gases should overwhelm natural variability by later this century. “The U.S. may never again return to the relatively wet conditions experienced from 1977 to 1999,” he says. How will farmers adapt to no aquifer water and dwindling precipitation and rising temperatures (see We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming.) Worse, how will they adapt to no aquifer water and dwindling precipitation and rising temperatures – and the media and other opinion-makers ignoring the latter two irreversible (but not unstoppable) trends? The No-Water-Gate scandal is that the nation and the world has chosen not to heed decades of warning by climate scientists that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases would cause ever-worsening droughts. A 1990 Journal of Geophysical Research study, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century. Ai