Image from ESA There is still no light at the end of the tunnel for fire-besieged Northern California. According to some reports, there are still over 1,000 wildfires burning in the region with little hope for improvement in the near future. Over 1,400 square kilometers of land have already been burnt, and there are more than 19,000 firefighters on hand, many from around the country, helping to put out the blazes. The image was captured by the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite on June 25. ...

Image from petrr Given all the recent backlash, it seemed inevitable that the EU would be forced to revise its misguided biofuel targets. The final push may very well have been provided by a World Bank report concluding that biofuels may have caused global food prices to rise by up to 75 percent. Four percent from renewable sources by 2015 In light of this, Claude Turmes, a EU lawmaker, has proposed changing the EU's target so that only 4 percent of vehicle fuels be derived from renewable sources by 2015, reports Reuters' Pete Harrison. Claiming broad parliamentary backing, Turmes said there would be a review in 2015 to decide whether to keep the 10 percent target for 2020....

Why Fly When You Can Float? It has been more than 70 years since the giant Hindenburg zeppelin exploded in a spectacular fireball over Lakehurst, N.J., killing 36 crew members and passengers, abruptly ending an earlier age of airships. But because of new materials and sophisticated means of propulsion, a diverse cast of entrepreneurs is taking another look at the behemoths of the air. ::New York Times See also Zeppelins are Back, Too Earthquake and Fire Proof Floating Houses Coming to Los Angeles ... The upside of $200 oil: Rising oil prices don't have to mean an economic apocalypse; it might reinvigorate our cities, and reward entrepreneurship. And it could make us a little skinnier, too. ::National Post See also: What Happens When Gasoline Exceeds US$7.00 Per Gallon? Stop Whining About Gas Prices High Gas Prices Changing Society ...

We know it sounds like putting a square watermelon in a round hole: but Wal-Mart claims it is the nation's largest buyer of locally grown produce. The scaling of centrally managed industrial agriculture in the USA will be transformed. More changes are coming.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to buy and sell $400 million worth of produce grown by local farmers within its state stores this year, an effort the company says will only grow.

One obvious upshot is diversification of the supply chain. Smaller contracts with more farmers & distributors. ...

It's that time of year again, and with the official G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit finally getting under way here in Japan next week, the question on everybody's lips is, "will the G8 see a formal commitment to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cuts?" The G8 Summit is the source of no end of speculation on this policy or that policy, but with news items like such as MSNBC's piece on the possibility of an ice-free arctic by the end of this summer, climate change is looming large on everyone's lips, and their keyboards. We go on the hunt to see what the latest news and views are from around the world....

Penguin life has gotten more precarious since this 1913 NOAA photo. Penguin populations have been declining and shifting globally as a result of oil pollution, overfishing, guano mining (!) and increased coastal development, according to research by Dee Boersma from the University of Washington, published in the July-August edition of the journal BioScience. Climate changes cause dramatic shifts Boersma sees penguins as marine sentinels of the Southern Hemisphere. They depend on predictable climate for their breeding cycles and need high ocean productivity for the krill and fish they survive on. A warming Antarctic is causing varying changes - for some ice-requiring penguins like the Adelie it is detrimental, while for ice-intolerant species such as the gentoo and chinstrap it could be beneficial. Penguins an ecotourism favorite But Boersma contends that demonstrated declines in penguin populations overall show that humans aren't managing their ocean resources and habitats well enough. Penguins are a huge ecotourism draw - for example, as many as half a million people visit just one of the many penguin species, the blue penguin, on Phillip Island in Australia. But there is only sporadic, uncoordinated monitoring of the 43 different penguin colonies that make up most of the global penguin population....

Ray Anderson started his company, Interface, back in the 1970s to make carpet. Like any business man, he wanted to shake up the market and make a healthy profit, which he’s done, and Interface now has 17 manufacturing locations on four continents. But this is not business as usual. Not anymore. Since having a sustainability epiphany, as he calls it, Ray has starting steering Interface toward one hell of a goal: zero negative effects on the planetary ecosystem by the year 2020, a goal he admits no corporation has yet reached. TreeHugger has long found inspiration in Interface’s elegant design solutions—products like modular carpet and FLOR—and in Anderson’s own sagely words. ::TreeHugger Radio Listen to the podcast of this interview via iTunes, or just click here to listen, right-click to download. Special thanks go to CraigMichaels, the organizer of the Sustainable Operations Summit, for arranging this interview. (Full text after the jump)...

School may be out for the summer, but the truth is that many PTA’s and school organizations start planning for next year’s fundraisers a good deal in advance. And there’s an eco-minded fundraising company called Growkids that’s offering 50% of the proceeds to your school or organization, a vast improvement over some of the organizations offering much, much less that we told you about in a post called “Green Fundraising with One Big Caveat” not so very long ago....

Stealing some of California's thunder, which itself outlined a new plan to significantly reduce its carbon emissions, Massachusetts' governor, Deval Patrick, unveiled the Green Communities Act a few days ago to great fanfare. The bill's primary aims are to encourage businesses and homes to become more energy efficient and to stimulate clean energy development in the state. The Green Community Act's major provisions Some of the provisions detailed in the legislation, as reported by the Boston Globe's Beth Daley, include providing rebates to pay for energy efficiency measures, allowing homeowners and businesses to rent solar panels from utilities and easing consumers' ability to sell surplus energy from renewable sources to the grid. ...

Because of the price of gas, Americans drove 1.4 billion fewer miles in April then they did in the same period a year earlier. Nearly 20 billion fewer miles have been driven this year than last. That is a problem for Mary Peters, the Secretary of Transportation, who is getting less gas tax money and complains "We're burning less fuel as energy costs change driving patterns, steer people toward more fuel efficient vehicles, and encourage more to use transit. Which is exactly why we need a more effective funding source than the gas tax." What, change the fixed gas tax of 24.4 cents a gallon? How about making it proportional so that it goes up with the price of gas? How about cranking it up so that enough revenue comes in to actually fix the collapsing infrastructure? Isn't steering people to more fuel efficient vehicles and transit exactly what we should be doing? Not in America. She is probably planning to tax bicycles. Or maybe transit. ::Environmental protection...

One million wishes - that is the goal of the Tanzaku Action! Making a wish is a part of the tradition of making a wish to the stars on Tanabata Day on July 7, a holiday. Now you can send a message to the G8 leaders by writing your hopes on a Virtual Tanzaku. Tanzaku is a slip of paper on which people write their hopes or wishes and hang it on a bamboo tree. For the G8 Summit, the NGO Forum will display all the Tanzaku messages to get global leaders to take the necessary actions to change the world for better. ...

VW's 282 MPG Super Fuel Efficient Car The 1-Liter car has been around in prototype form since 2002 and greens everywhere have been drooling at its 282 miles per gallon fuel economy (or 1 liter of gasoline per 100 kilometers, hence the name). VW has finally decided to make more and sell them, and a limited edition (estimated in the thousands) should start selling in 2010. 1-Liter Car Technical Specs The One-Liter car (or 1-Litre, over in Europe) weights only 660 pounds. The body is made from carbon composites and it is shaped to be extremely slippery, giving it a coefficient of drag of only 0.16 ("the average car comes in around 0.30 and the Honda Insight had a Cd of 0.25"). The prototype was powered by a 1-cylinder diesel engine, but the production model should have a 2-cylinder diesel (which means it could be powered by algae-biodiesel!), and maybe even a stop-start anti-idling feature (to cut the engine when the car is stopped)....