A hardcore Live The Changer, Stephen lists all the ways he Lives The Change.

Not long ago, solar panels seemed sort of quaint and out-of-date. But they're emerging as a trendy new status symbol, thanks to eco-friendly legislation in California.

Reware's solar powered bags do just what the company hoped: they get people thinking. At trade shows and in emails, the minds behind the Washington DC-based Reware constantly hear from consumers who are so electrified by their Juice Bags, they want to learn more about renewable energy. Customers ask: Where can I get solar panels for my roof? What are energy credits? How can you generate power from wind?

You may have heard that the future lies with nanotechnology - the manufacture of materials and machines on a microscopic scale - but wonder how this relates to a sustainable future. This month, leading U.S. scientists will explore just that at the annual American Chemical Society meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. As part of a new GreenNano initiative, they will present environmentally-friendly applications of nanotechnology manufacturing processes and explore how nanotech can be used to heal environmental damage.

The chorus of clean-energy advocates is growing louder – and more politically powerful – now that farmers are singing along. And they have good reason: Energy crops. Raw materials such as corn, soy, wheat, trees and even animal manure can be processed into cleaner-burning next-gen fuels. According to a new article in Grist.org, leaders of 70 agriculture groups recently joined the ambitious 25 x '25 alliance. It advocates that 25 percent of U.S. energy supplies come from America’s working lands – either from their crops or windmills and solar panels installed on those lands - by 2025.

Of the many rising stars in the field of green architecture, Richard Cook is arguably the brightest. He has a theoretical rigor and passion for sustainability on par with William McDonough. He has the design ingenuity of Frank Gehry. So it’s not surprising that Cook is quickly making his name known among the vanguard of 21st century architects.

 

If you could track the proliferation of self-powered homes back to one grassroots seed it would undoubtedly be Home Power magazine – the Bible for do-it-yourselfers committed to producing homegrown energy from solar, wind, and small-scale hydropower, and retrofitting their homes with efficiency measures. Read by off-gridders and city-dwellers alike, the magazine has been around for nearly two decades – since 1987 – and can safely be called a trend-setter.

Problem: You're boarding an airplane, dashing onto a bus, or hiking off the grid and your cell battery conks out or your iPod runs out of juice. Solution: Reach for your Solio – a cool new portable solar-powered charger that can collect the energy of the sun and transfer it directly into your hand-held devices.

Compatible with major brands of mobile phones, PDAs, digital cameras, and music and game players, the Solio has three photovoltaic strips that fan out like a flower to expand surface area when soaking up the sun. When folded up, the charger fits in the palm of your hand.

The fossil fuel behemoth formerly known as British Petroleum has been ridiculed by some environmental critics for the new name it adopted several years ago, Beyond Petroleum, given the negligible size of its alternative-energy division. But detractors can’t laugh any longer: On Tuesday, BP announced that it would funnel a whopping $8 billion of R&D funds into clean-energy innovation—eight times the $1 billion it spent in this area over the past decade.

As heating bills soar, penny-pinchers are turning to a cheaper source of warmth: woodchips. According to an AP article on the growing woodchip trend, Mount Wachusett Community College campus in Massacusetts started the trend four years ago: Instead of spending the usual half-a-million-dollar annual heating bill, the college ponied up a mere $31,000 for the woodchips, meanwhile reducing its greenhouse gasses 19 percent.