Peak News and Blog

The “green” Joe Biden The United States officially rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement last week. The Keystone XL Pipeline was canceled. Climate action has been defined as an urgent national security threat. The federal government has committed to a transition to an electric vehicle fleet. The 11th hour, 59th minute Arctic Wildlife Refuge oil lease sale is…

The next big push for green buildingFor the building industry, reducing embodied carbon is the next big challenge. Green building uses less energy. Today, and in the years ahead, the building industry will need to think about not just a building’s operational emissions but all the energy that goes into creating it—from the harvesting and manufacturing…

A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry Twirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam’s harbor is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building…

Why Are We Throwing Money Away? Take-make-waste isn’t working Take… make… waste isn’t working. Under the current linear take-make-waste economy, we throw $10 billion worth of materials into landfills across the United States! Rethinking this with a circular economy lens would address our systems as more connected and more resilient. Who doesn’t want to reduce the…

70 percent of freshwater is used for agriculture The World Bank says that in most regions of the world, over 70 percent of freshwater is used for agriculture. By 2050, feeding a planet of 9 billion people will require an estimated 50 percent increase in agricultural production and a 15 percent increase in water withdrawals. The USGS says that…

Soil moisture monitoring: more important than you think Soil moisture monitoring improves agriculture, both ecologically and economically. Then, I’ll examine some of soil moisture monitoring’s less widely known—yet still extremely important—use cases. Finally, to aid you in your soil moisture monitoring goals, I’ll also investigate several different options for soil moisture monitoring. The California Almond…