Fuel cells, which can convert any fuel into electricity and make it more efficient, have snuck into the energy mix of major corporations almost unnoticed during the national sprint to more wind and solar capacity.

Linde fuel cell forklift on duty

The clean technology runs 24/7, the price has plummeted as many more varieties become commercially available, and more companies are taking advantage of their versatility to store power generated by other means and deliver it more efficiently.

Passenger cars will emerge from the demonstration phase and hit the general market by 2015.

“Everything’s better with a fuel cell,” Ruth Cox of the US Fuel Cell Council tells us.

FedEx, for example, successfully introduced 35 fuel cell-powered lift trucks into their fleet. The company handled refueling by teaming up with Air Products to supply hydrogen at its distribution center.

(more…)

Asking for retweets in your Twitter posts is a good way to build buzz.

We’ve heard this a lot recently, including from our friend Alan Rosenblatt of Center for American Progress Action Fund. He told a recent Turner Strategies panel on the “MediaMorphosis” (and yes, that’s a hashtag, which means you can search for it on Twitter), that he gets the best results on his “please retweet” requests between noon and 3 pm from lunchtime web surfers.

We sat in on a Vocus conference, “Retweet: Engagement Means Business,” which featured these other top social media takeaways for an evolving PR industry: (more…)

The Transition Towns movement is one of our favorite causes. It’s helping America prepare for peak oil by encouraging more urban areas to bring back old-school skills like home canning, shopping at farmer’s markets, and making friends with the neighbors.

Such local self-reliance was on the mind of Cristy Latagan, Youth Farm Co-Manager at Sligo Creek Farm, this week. She wrote this column for the newsletter of their Community Supported Agriculture operation, from which some of our staff members pick up organic fruits and vegetables all summer long. We repost it here with her permission.

Sligo Creek Farm and Our House visit the White House Farmers Market. (Cristy Latagan is third from the left.)

Happy National Farmers Market Week!

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack proclaimed August 1-7 National Farmers Market Week. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, there are currently 5,274 listed farmers markets in the country—an exponential increase from just 1,755 in 1994.

Numbers are expected to continue to rise thanks to the growing interest and realities of the economic, social, environmental, and health benefits of local foods.

Farmers markets are vital to local producers, consumers, and neighboring communities. They provide a direct outlet for small- to medium-sized farms, and the USDA approximates roughly 100,000 farmers and food producers sell at markets each year, which simultaneously creates jobs for residents and keeps monies within the local economy.

Farmers Market Coalition estimates that Americans annually spend $1.3 billion at farmers markets.

The presence of farmers markets has the power to rejuvenate downtown areas and neighborhoods, and in turn, can attract new small businesses. Markets also allow producers and consumers to directly interact—an opportunity lost in grocery stores. Consumers can learn first-hand about products and farming practices, and candidly ask burning questions—why does my chard have holes and why do my tomatoes look like brains?

(more…)

While The Hill’s staff is in the midst of its annual 50 hottest people ranking, we at Cool Futurist are more interested in hearing about who’s the coolest.

EPA just came out with a list of top 50 green power purchasers, and it says the Green Power Partnership buys as much green power as about 1 million average American homes. The partnership includes Intel, Kohl’s Department Stores, Whole Foods, the cities of Houston and Dallas, Dell, Johnson & Johnson, Cisco Systems, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Air Force. (more…)

Marshall Ganz, the civil rights organizer, who currently lectures on public policy at Harvard, has said that “grassroots organizing is about building power.”

Grassroots organizers harness the power of the individual to add to the power of the community to spread a message and create change.

Having just executed a successful grassroots effort to get 5,000 people to call for more funding and research into the issue of intersex fish in the Potomac River—the “Fish Mystery” campaign—here’s what we found works best.

1. Develop your team

At the core of a successful campaign is the quality of the team. From the beginning, it is vital to assemble highly committed individuals who can serve in leadership roles. Giving them ownership of the campaign is important.

You can find such people for your campaign through a variety of methods. We found posting messages on targeted listservs and community forums to be the most effective way to attract volunteers to ours. (more…)

Dyn Global 24/7 Water Filtration Unit

“Six months have passed since the earthquake that shook the coast of Haiti,” opens a New York Times op-ed by Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Six months and still only 10 percent of the funds pledged at a United Nations conference in March have reached their destination. Six months and 1.5 million are still homeless, media coverage is waning, and Haitians are wondering what it’s going to take.

With hurricane season already upon us, time is of the essence and relief efforts need a boost. Contributions aren’t a one-way street, as Bellerive and Clinton point out. “There are ample opportunities for investments with longer-term dividends,” the two chairs of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission remind us. “In agriculture, construction, tourism, manufacturing, service industries and clean energy, especially solar.”

(more…)

As I type this, CNN is reporting on the oil spill. Anchor Don Lemon is interviewing Amber Lyon, who went diving with Philippe Cousteau, a famous oceanographer, to explore the impacts the disaster is having on aquatic life, and will have on our ecology for years to come.

I am glad for the coverage. BP should be held accountable. Yet something is missing from virtually everything I’ve heard about this tragedy.

The Hydra

It’s not just CNN, of course. Everywhere you look—in the news, on Facebook and Twitter, at work, in grocery stores and restaurants— there’s more on the oil spill. It is especially no secret to me as a publicist, calling reporters who cover energy on an hourly basis. This issue is at the top of the agenda, and will stay there until the gusher is stopped.

And yet. After the spill, several members of the media who know that I work on these issues contacted me to ask if any of my clients have solutions to offer.  My excitement peaked! I have lots of clients with solutions for getting our nation off oil.

(more…)

He may not be in jail, but climate activist Ted Glick says he isn’t exactly free.

While BP CEO Tony Hayward sailed in a regatta and coal executives at Massey Energy somehow neglected to repent for the 40th mine-related death this year on their watch, Glick was preparing for his July 6 sentencing for unfurling two banners on Capitol Hill.

Last September, Glick peacefully unfurled the banners from a balcony in the Hart Senate Office Building. They read “GREEN JOBS NOW.” and “GET TO WORK.”

Big whoop, right?  Not exactly. He was convicted May 13 for “unlawful conduct on Capitol grounds.” And because of two previous convictions for peaceful acts of climate-related civil disobedience, he faced up to three years in jail, even though his crime hurt no one and caused no property damage. (more…)

“All politics is local,” former House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said after he lost his first race. (It was a seat on the Cambridge City Council he was running for, while still a Boston College senior.)

That’s the theme of a big party we’re throwing tonight, if you think about it.

Movie screening tonight

All global warming will ultimately be local. And it will be far worse if we don’t learn the lesson Tip O’Neill did, and work in our own neighborhoods and communities to control it before it’s too late.

How is local action even possible, since this is a global problem born of virtually every aspect of modern life?

Not just by insulating our attics, although that’s a good place to good start. It’ll be by changing our conversations and making sure that they trickle up to our elected representatives, who are the only people with enough power to overrule the big corporate polluters and get this problem solved.

(more…)

Al Gore has launched a new slide show to go with his recent book on global warming solutions, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (Rodale Press, November 2009).

Gore spent eight hours on Sunday in Nashville’s Wildhorse Saloon unveiling the new presentation to over 670 of the 3,500 presenters he’s now trained around the world as part of The Climate Project, calling them the core of a “mass movement” that it will take to avert the crisis.

Featured  in the Oscar-winning movie of 2006, An Inconvenient Truth, the long-running slide show (the original is in Apple’s Keynote, not Microsoft’s PowerPoint) is regularly updated by Gore and presenters themselves, who often add slides on local impacts.

It has created a category for other causes and non-profits, but remains “the hottest presentation in the world right now,” presentation trainer Anthony Wilson of Executive Influence told the presenters in Nashville.

Gore was just back from launching a new branch of The Climate Project two weeks ago in China, and training 300 Chinese citizens.

Among the slides in this new version of the official Al Gore slide show presentation:

(more…)