Posts by — Sally Buchan

One of our readers commented recently “It’s sad that municipalities force people into huge homes, by refusing to let people build small homes. It’s all about the money (taxes) that they want to rake in.”
but now help is at hand, in the suprising shape of the National Association of Home Builders. The size of new homes shrank in 2009 for the first time in three decades, figures from the NAHB show.

The recession has driven the trend, but financial necessity isn’t the only reason behind the move to downsize. (more…)

Which would you choose? Earning money or having a meaningful, engaging life?

Suddenly people are talking about
Your Money or Your Life

- funny how it goes like that. The book was first published 17 years ago – but there is something very contemporary about its injunction to start living and stop being a wage slave – the authors call it “making a dying.”

We hope to run a diary soon from a young investment banker in Toronto who is about to start living in his car (a Porsche presumably) partly as a result of reading this book. (more…)

America needs to promote the use of renewable energy including wind and solar power to secure a stable energy supply amid a rise in global energy demand due to rapid growth in China and other emerging economies.

On a scale of 1 to 10, we give the US a score of 2 in evaluating America’s energy self-sufficiency, including nuclear power generation.

The US ratio of renewable energy to overall energy supply is far smaller than the ratios for Germany and Spain, which are promoting the use of renewable energy. (more…)

Off-Grid ideas are flowing from the classrooms of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford and Virginia University into commercial products in rural India.
Here’s a look at how a new generation of off-grid whiz-kids are creating affordable, scaleable, high-tech business models to improve quality of life in rural India.

An extraordinary bunch of entrepreneurs is attempting projects ranging from rural electrification to solar-powered refrigeration systems. (more…)

A UK green weekend in Nottingham will hear a keynote speech this evening from Mark Boyle, who has been living without money for more than a year.
His talk is part of a weekend of environmental events in Nottingham at the Art Organisation, Station Street, as part of the Space For Life: Big Green Weekend event. (more…)

2012, the Movie, is aimed at really stupid teenagers, and was made by a really stupid foreign guy.

The Europeans, as we all know, hate America, but Roland Emmerich born 1955, in Stuttgart,  has such a bias, one has to wonder if he’s French.

Emmerich blew up the White House and New York and most other American cities in “Independence Day” (1996). In 1998, he picked on the Big Apple again, having “Godzilla” stomp most of it with incompetent resistance from a number of pinheaded Yankees. (The only characters who seemed to know what they were doing were a team of French commandos — French, mind you! led by Jean Reno.) (more…)

750 Germans cant be wrong A tiny village in Germany ends its dependence on the grid this month.   Juhnde in central Germany has attracted the attention of renewable energy advocates because it makes all the electricity and heat for its residents from a combination of manure, silage and wood chips. (more…)

Wait a year before buying solar panels – that’s the advice from industry experts who think the price of solar PV will fall, grants will rise, and the cost of grid power will rise too, delivering a triple whammy in favor of solar power.

But not just yet.

Although the cost of solar panels has fallen as low as $2.48 a watt according to the latest issue of Homepower magazine, its likely to go to $1.50 next year.  A company called Skyline Solar hopes to achieve grid parity before the end of 2010 — way ahead of the rest of the industry.

(more…)