Ever wonder why your dryer sheets have such aromatic names as ''Ocean Breeze,'' ''Summer Orchard,'' and ''Spring Garden''? It's not just a marketing ploy -- it's a necessity. Dryer sheets and fabric softeners are heavily scented because they contain extremely smelly chemicals -- extremely smelly, toxic chemicals. In fact, recent studies ...

A new report, prepared by the Global Humanitarian Forum, offers some eye-opening numbers on the economic and humanitarian toll of climate change. The group, led by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, says that global warming contributes, directly or indirectly, to 300,000 deaths and $125 billion in economic losses on an annual basis.The ...

Amit Chatterjee doesn't have a crystal ball, but he didn't need one to figure out that ''the next set of regulations for which businesses would need compliance software...[would be for] greenhouse gas emissions.'' So, the founder and CEO of Hara, a software start-up whose name comes from the Sanskrit for ''green'', began working on a software ...

Data compiled in recent studies suggests that the United States could reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by sources of lighting by 50 percent, simply by swapping traditional bulb-powered lights for LEDs.Besides being far more cost-effective, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are extremely energy-efficient. With better than double the ...

It’s no surprise that air travel contributes to global warming (currently about 3 percent of US total emissions), but scientists predict that these levels could triple by 2050. This statistic has prompted aircraft manufacturers and airlines like Boeing, Virgin, New Zealand Air, Japan Airlines and GE Aircrafts to test new aviation ...

Queen Elizabeth, aka Aussie actress Cate Blanchett, took a stand against climate change at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen on Monday. (See our original COP15 post) A member of the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Benjamin Button actress urged business leaders to cut down on emissions and invest in ...

Obama’s Nobel prize-winning green guru and US Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu claims that painting your roof white can help reduce global warming significantly.   Speaking yesterday from London prior to a conference on climate change, Dr. Chu said that making the planet's roofs and pavement a lighter color could result in the ...

June 5 marks World Environment Day, and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is celebrating this year’s event with the Twitter for Trees campaign. For every Twitter follower of UNEP and You between now and June 5, UNEP will plant one tree. The goal of the campaign is to plant 100,000 trees for 100,000 followers (although more trees will ...

Last week MIT hosted a panel of nuclear power industry experts to address nuclear waste recycling and disposal options. Considered by many analysts to be the chief barrier to building a new generation of nuclear power plants, the debate around what to do with high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants continues to be the industry’s ...

In December, world leaders will converge on Copenhagen to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. Leading up to the new agreement governing global action on climate change, the World Business Summit on Climate Change kicked off yesterday in Copenhagen to bring together business and science leaders for a three-day ...