The gold, silver and bronze medallions slung around winning athletes’ necks as they step on to the winners’ podium at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games could well be made from the guts of an old Belgian computer.

The manufacturer of medals for this Olympics is for the first time incorporating token amounts of recycled material into the medals. Medals historically have been made of freshly mines ores.

The innovation – though largely symbolic – was directed by an Olympic organising committee which had vowed to put on the greenest games ever, raising the bar for London in 2012.

The Bloom box verses solar — what are your thoughts when you compare the two videos?

At first the course in carbon trading at the University of  Houston seemed like a sensible environmental idea, particularly because the business school teamed up with the law school.  But now that the Obama Administration has just announced that it is awarding clean energy tax credits, educators might be taking a more serious look at the interface between the environment and the legal issues involved.  Obama Awards $2.3 Billion in Clean-Energy Tax Credits 

Queen Elizabeth shows she knows how to go green.
Queen Elizabeth boarded a regularly scheduled commuter train yesterday for her trip from London to the royal estate at Sandringham for the Christmas holidays. The Queen and her security detail sat in a first-class compartment, which was separated from other passengers by a glass partition.
The Daily Mail reports that her fellow commuters were quite taken by surprise to see their 83 year-old monarch with a silk headscarf appear at King’s Cross.
The Queen’s son, Prince Charles, was recently in the news for traveling to …

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reduced its long-term forecast for global oil demand as the financial crisis continues to squeeze markets and countries increase their pursuit of alternative energy sources.
The news comes as global energy consumption is set to fall in 2009 for the first time since 1981 and CO2 emissions could shrink by as much as 3 percent - the steepest decline in the last 40 years.
According to the revised forecast contained in the IEA’s recently released annual World Energy Outlook, global oil consumption is now expected to expand 1 percent …

Overflowing landfills and a growing apprehension about their effect on climate change has many communities considering a “zero waste” strategy, according to the New York Times.

One of the most notable examples of a “no waste” society can be found in Nantucket, an island off the coast of Massachusetts whose want for landfill space and uneasiness about the cost of shipping local trash over 30 miles to the mainland encouraged its leadership to implement significant changes to it’s trash policy.  Like many communities, this no trash initiative was born not from …

A new report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science notes that the ice cap atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania continues to recede. The authors of the report, however, do not state a consensus of opinion on the reason for the continued melting.
The scientists compared aerial photographs of the mountain taken over time to obtain horizontal measurements of the retreating ice. To obtain changes in depth measurements, the scientists used instruments installed on Kilimanjaro in 2000.

The New York Times highlighted the concept of ” environmental patents to the commons,” which essentially means that anyone may use them at no cost.  Dr. Sarah Slaughter, coordinator of the M.I.T. Sloan Sustainability Initiative said in the interview, “We all want to save the planet, and the problems are bigger than any one firm, sector or country.” 

Do fear tactics work?
The British government produced a commercial featuring a father reading a bedtime story to his daughter about the catastrophe the world will face if CO2 levels go unchecked.  At the end of the story, flood waters pour in and a puppy is seen drowning.

Jonathan Foley,  director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of the Minnesota, where he is also a professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Ecology,  Evolution and Behavior, recently wrote for Yale Environment 360.   His concern, the global crisis in land use.