The ATP 8GB EarthDrive claims to be the world’s first eco-friendly USB drive. The EarthDrive is made from bio-recycled plastics and is designed to be fully recyclable at the end of its life. A portion of all sales will be donated to American Forests and towards the planting of trees.

“The EarthDrive takes our more than fifteen years of effort, design and quality implementation in the memory marketplace to the next level. Now, more than anytime in the history of our company, we are committed to creating products that take into consideration the environmental impact on our world and our global community.” says Michael Plaksin, ATP Vice President of Sales.

The USB drive is shock and water proof, has a built in security software, drive partitioning and password protection. It has a capacity of 8GB and costs $47.99.

On this day, 63 years ago, USA dropped the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9, USA dropped a second nuclear bomb over Nagasaki in Japan. The bombs killed as many as 240 000 people. Thousands more died from injuries or illness attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bombs. In both cities, the overwhelming majority of the dead were civilians.

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July last month could have been better for the French nuclear industry. Several accidents occurred at the French nuclear site Tricastin-Pierrelatte. Now Greenpeace in France has launched two court cases in an “effort to find out what’s really been going on” at the nuclear plant.

“We’re suing French power company Areva and its subsidiary company Socatri for causing water pollution, and for the abandonment and illegal deposit of waste. Our aim is to bring into the public eye the circumstances that led to these problems and expose the terrible safety record of the nuclear industry.”

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The Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has released his “New Energy for America” plan. If elected some of the things in his plan are 10% renewables by 2012, one million plug-ins by 2015 and energy efficiency now.

John McCain’s energy plan in comparison is, let’s say, a bit weaker. He is all about nuclear energy, a $300 million battery prize, nothing on energy efficiency and an opposition to clean renewable energy.

Here are some of the energy plans Barack Obama has for America:

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Only a few weeks after the release of the Draft Report of the seriously flawed, pro-coal, Australian Garnaut Climate Change Review (4 July, 2008; see my critique on Green Blog, “Pro-Coal, Australian Garnaut Climate Review Damns Coral, Australia & World”), the Australian Federal Government has released a so-called “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” Green Paper (16 July, 2008).

Unfortunately the Australian Federal Government Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) Green Paper is FATALLY FLAWED and if adopted globally would be a DEATH SENTENCE for the planet’s biosphere.

Australia is referred to as “Downunder” by people in the Northern Hemisphere but in so many things Australian mainstream media and politicians turn the truth upside-down as well - and this is outrageously so in relation to man-made climate change. The Liberal-National Party Coalition State and Federal Oppositions and the Labor Party State and Federal Governments (these major parties being referred to collectively as the Lib-Labs) pay public lip-service to the problem of global warming but their de facto policies support Australia’s world-leading coal exports and Australia’s 92% fossil fuel-based power generation.

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The [re]Drive from SimpleTech is an eco-friendly external hard drive that would look great by the side of the new Studio Hybrid from Dell, or by any computer for that matter.

The [re]Drive is Energy Star Level 4 qualified and uses 30% less energy than other non Energy Star drives. The external hard drive is made and designed using recyclable aluminium and bamboo. According to the makers the packaging also comes from recyclable materials.

The external hard drive automatically powers on or off with your computer. It offers 500GB of storage capacity and 2GB free online. It works on both Macs and PCs and costs from around $200.

There have been a lot of discussions about the high gas prices in USA the past months and what exactly should be done to curb this trend. Some politicians, like McCain, Bush, and Gingrich, are taking advantage of the situation and tries to push for the ending of a 27-year moratorium on offshore drilling along the coastlines of USA.

But offshore drilling is not a “quick fix” and it won’t help to lower the gas prices. The only ones that will profit from this are Bush and McCain’s friends in the oil industry. While people are suffering from the high gas prices the oil companies are reporting record profits after record profits.

Greenpeace has listed a bunch of reasons why offshore drilling is not the answer to high gas prices at the pump:

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Earlier this May I reported that Dell was going to sell a “never before seen” eco-inspired computer with a bamboo casing later this year. We could also see an early design concept of the computer. And now Dell has released their brand new eco-friendly computer, the Studio Hybrid. It’s small and it looks great.

According to Dell the Studio Hybrid is their “smallest, most personalized and most environmentally responsible consumer PC” to date. The computer is about 10% smaller than the average desktop minitower. It also uses up to 70% less energy and is Energy Star 4.0 compliant.

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According to development economist Jeffrey Sachs the fight against climate change won’t cost us more than 1% of global income per year, a sum that the world can afford.

“If we look seriously at mitigation, it is not too expensive,” he told a conference in Geneva on the humanitarian impact of climate change.”

“If we invested around $700 billion per year, we would be able to create a sustainable energy system.”

“The United States spent just $3 billion on sustainable energy last year - equal to 36 hours of spending by the Pentagon on defence, according to Sachs, who is director of the Earth Institute at New York’s Columbia University.”

Jeffrey Sachs also criticised governments around the world for failing to live up to their promises to provide development aid and relief to poor people already affected by the effects of climate change, saying “how the rich world leaves the poor world to die is the biggest mistake on the planet.”

31% of men believe climate change “is a myth invented by the hippies.” At least that is the case if you take a look at the results from the 2008 great male survey from AskMen.com, one of the most comprehensive opinion polls of men ever conducted on the web.

31% might seem like a high number in the light of overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus in favour of man-made climate change. Luckily the majority are no climate change deniers as 69% the men asked are worried about the effects of global warming.

Besides all the ordinary sport, movie, celebrity and TV questions the men who participated in the survey were actually asked a couple of serious questions.

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