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WorldChanging has a great summary of what’s been happening in sustainable mobility (mostly car stuff) in the past week. Lots of good stuff.

So, as you may have noticed, tonight I’ve been looking at Grist Magazine thoroughly for the first time. I now understand why so many people think it’s a totally rocking website. I really like their blog, Gristmill. They know what’s going on, and they write well about it. I’m going to be reading this regularly too, now.

Various eco- and frugality-related statistics from Grist Magazine

Lawns take a lot of anti-environmental maintenance, in the form of watering and gas-guzzling mowing. But a greener trend is creeping across the nation–instead of having a lawn, keeping a low-maintenance garden. It’s about redefining beauty. New York Times via Grist Magazine.

Zipcar is the most expansive company that facilitates car-sharing. Car sharing is really cool…basically, I guess, it’s as simple as it sounds (I just realized I don’t really know the details of it). You either don’t own a car yourself or don’t own a second one (more often the former, I think), and just use one of these shared cars when you really need one. But anyway, Zipcar is expanding, increasing its size in the Bay area, and starting up in Chicago.

Not that Priuses (I really feel it should be Prii) are skimpy on the mileage in the first place, but two companies are marketing plug-in kits that double the Prius’ peak mileage. That’s 100 miles per gallon, approximately. Pretty cool, eh?

There were a number of posts I liked on Treehugger today, ranging from really cool to mildly worthy of a read. Here they are:

Fair-trade-organic coffee is old hat, if we consider what Cameron’s Coffee does. Based in Port Perry, Ontario, pretty much their entire business is run using the greenest means possible. They use solar, biodiesel, “bullfrog power”, they recycle their grounds, they use vegetable ink and biodegradable cups. Reading about them makes me feel like my own F-T-O (is that an understandble acronym?) coffeeshop is not doing all it could…

Fleming College in Canada has a Sustainable Building Design and Construction course. That’s cool, but what drew my attention was the blackboard-scrawled quote that treehugger posted from the course: “The way to subvert the dominant paradigm is to have more fun than they do and make sure they know it.” I’m not sure that’s a foolproof strategy, but having fun is good. The effort to apply that concept surely would only result in good.

There’s a new eco-mag, this one aimed at “sophisticated consumers”. It’s called Verdant.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have assessed the energy efficiency and environmental impact of the entire lifecycle of both soybean-based biodiesel and corn-based ethanol. This is really cool, read more here. Basically, neither biodiesel or ethanol as they are now are good enough to replace gasoline, but they’re a good step. I can just feel all our green scientist friends working on ways to make better fuel. Change for the better will come, in time.

Also, the UK’s outlawing standby buttons on electronics, Prism Technologies is manufacturing a new kind of solar cell using holograms that is 25% more efficient than conventional PVs, and there’s a link to a great tutorial on water efficiency in the home from Inhabit.

Another link from Green Car Congress: the first hybrid schoolbus! We’re spreading everywhere…

I’m sorry, every time I read or write “Hugg“, I think of cuddly teddy bears. But anyways, there were a bunch of great links there tonight (I think the site is getting more popular, i.e. the number of “huggs” on each story is going up). Here they are:

Forbes Magazine has just listed the “least green” vehicles on the market for the first time. Surprise surprise, SUVs and pickups are at the top of the list, and also surprise, Ford is quite prevalent on this list despite its professions of greenness. It’s good to have such information at one’s fingertips.

In Scotland, there’s a new proposal for changes to the planning rules that would require all new buildings to generate on-site 10% of their energy via renewable sources. Go Scotland! from Sustainablog (who, if it were a competition, would have me totally beat).

I reeeeeeaaaalllllllly want a SmartCar. I think they’re amazing. And now, you can get electric ones too! I don’t know the numbers, but were they really that inefficient in the first place? Now we just need to find some way to get them on the market over here…

That’s it for now. Dream green.

From Treehugger, the star of environmental news blogs, come two interesting posts:

1. Think climate change is bad? What if it caused giant ice balls to fall from the sky? Sounds fishy to me, but wouldn’t that be scary? Something that could rip through your roof and kill you right now, getting more frequent? Ick. Scary indeed. Oh, and they’re called megacryometeors. That means huge chunks of ice falling from the sky, if you were wondering.

2. I’m getting vibes of greenification from the government these days, and I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad (bad because it ups their chances of keeping power). But the US Department of Energy just released a report saying that there is enough potential for wind energy off the US’s coasts to equal the current output of all the power plants in the country. That’s cool. Could we build lots of wind turbines? Please?