Christine MacDonald

Journalist, author

Debate over DC’s “Smart Meters”

Tags: , , ,

Chris Turner's smart meter at work. Click to watch video.

For those of us following the climate change debate, we’ve heard for years that to build a clean energy economy we first need a “smart grid” capable of plugging into an array of big and small power sources — from residential rooftop solar panels to massive wind farms. For some, however, the “smart meters” represent a  massive new assault on the airwaves and public health.

Read more about DC’s meter battle in my story in this week’s Washington City Paper.

 

Zero Waste revolution?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

"Empire of Dirt" By niXerKG. Creative Commons license.

After reading one too many reports that corporations were going “zero waste,” I began to wonder what this means for landfills. Could we really be headed toward a world without trash dumps and Superfund sites?

Considering that there’s possibly as much as 30 tons of industrial trash for every ton of municipal solid waste, we are talking a lot of trash; though corporations have even trashed the word and now consider their castoffs the fodder of new “profit centers.” But what happens to these newly branded “resources” after they’ve been “reduced, reused or recycled”? I learned the answer is far from straightforward. Read the story on Alternet.org.

Author of "Green Inc."

266

“In a no-holds-barred insider account, Christine MacDonald tells the story of how the biggest perpetrators of public relations "greenwash" are often the greens themselves. At their worst, she argues, conservationists sell themselves as willing dupes and apologists for some of the most environmentally unfriendly corporations on the planet.” - New Scientist

Recent Posts

Post Archives

RSS GreenDistrict Blog

  • New documentary highlights growing risks to whistleblowers
    Earlier this week, my friend Tom Devine invited me to a special screening of the new documentary, “War on Whistleblowers,” at the Newsmuseum. Tom is the legal director at the Government Accountability Project, a group that has represented hundreds of people in over the last few decades who have exposed criminal behavior and other wrong-doing […] […]
    greendistrict
  • Are these apps changing our lives?
    Hello! I’ve been writing a lot lately about how new apps and the proliferation of smart phones are changing our lives. Since I’ve neglected this blog for way too many months, I wanted to bring you up to date with some of these recent articles. Last week, the Washington City Paper ran my cover story […] […]
    greendistrict
  • Will Congress bargain away the last of old growth forests?
    My latest story for Alternet examines how some of the country’s last remaining ancient forestland may be bargained away this year as a political favor to the campaign benefactors of one U.S. Senator. READ THIS STORY […]
    greendistrict
  • New report takes aim at corporate funding for climate denial
    The Union of Concerned Scientists has just published a report outing corporations that publicly back action on global warming, while quietly bankrolling climate change denier groups. While the report acknowledged that not all corporations are engaged in this sort of Jekyll & Hyde behavior, it says many have adopted a strategy that “allows companies to ma […]
    greendistrict
  • WWF faces new charges of corporate greenwashing
    WWF faces new charges of corporate greenwashing […]
    greendistrict
  • Geo-medicine: Mapping our pollution exposures
    My latest post on The Atlantic’s Cities website explores geo-medicine, a new field that uses GIS mapping to correlate environmental conditions to health risks like heart attacks and cancer. There’s even a free app that allows you to map the types of toxic exposures in everyplace you’ve ever lived and correlate them to the likelihood […] […]
    greendistrict

Blogroll

Calendar of Events

April 2012
M T W T F S S
« Mar   May »
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30  

Recent Comments

© 2009 Christine MacDonald. All Rights Reserved.

This blog is powered by the Wordpress platform and beach rentals.