The boxy little Mahindra e2o I drove around Bangalore back in January.

Back in January, I got the opportunity to test drive the Mahindra e2o, the first new electric car to be built in India in more than a decade. This wasn’t something I expected. On a visit to the new Mahindra Reva factory in Bangalore, I was scheduled to have a chat with the founder of Reva, Chetan Maini. But first I got a tour of the gleaming new plant and then the chance to take this four-seater hatchback around the block a few times.

Read about the experience about halfway through my story about the e2o that appeared recently in the New York Times.

The car had its much-anticipated release today in New Delhi. The colorful styling and high-tech remote controls will grab the attention of some, but I was dismayed to see the sticker price. Mahindra Reva had very much hoped that the government would supply a subsidy of nearly $3,000 for the car, but after waiting months for it to materialize, the automaker decided to stop waiting and release the car at the price of over $15,000. That may not be much by American standards, but it will send most Indians into sticker shock.

Check out the story about today’s release here.

A Test Drive of India’s New Electric Car is a post from: The Ferris Files

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India does have margins on the border of roads that might be defined as “sidewalks.” But the term “sidewalk” presumes that what occurs there is walking. This is patently not the case in India, mainly because there are so many other creatures and objects already occupying the space reserved for the hapless pedestrian. Many of these obstacles are surprising and most are outrageously unsafe. In a salute to Indian craziness, here is a partial list of what occupies the “sidewalks.” Enjoy.

Open Manholes

Cars

Peddlers of Wares

Trees

Bullocks

Sad Sleeping People

Rubble

Motorcycles

Jagged Pipe Ends

Scary Dangling Wires

Bananas

Photo Essay: What I Stumbled Upon in India is a post from: The Ferris Files

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K.S. Sivaprasad. Photo credit: David Ferris

Last month I sat down with K.S. Sivaprasad, an Indian engineer and entrepreneur, to hear about his plans to bring a waste-to-energy factory to India. I learned that this sprightly 80-year-old had been at this effort for quite some time. Forty years, to be exact.

The interview inspired a story I wrote for yesterday’s New York Times entitled “Why India’s Waste-to-Energy Industry Won’t Catch Fire.” Sivaprasad’s tortoise-like race to design and build a new kind of factory is interesting. But the story of why it is so hard to get such a plant built in India is the story that needed to be told.

I expect to write again about India’s efforts to cope with its waste and energy problems, so keep an eye out for another report, most likely in a matter of weeks rather than decades.

Lessons in Patience from an Eco-Octogenarian is a post from: The Ferris Files

Image credit: creepyhalloweenimages

For Americans, the automobile horn is emergency equipment, deployed to avoid collision or express road rage. For Indians, the horn is more of a conversational tool, used by everyone — and I mean everyone — as they jostle in traffic. The racket is deafening. One wonders if the Indian motorist is some sort of terrestrial bat, navigating with ears instead of eyes.

In this din, driving an electric scooter feels a bit insurgent. Ampere, a maker of electric two-wheelers, loaned me one of its bikes near the tail end of my two-month stay in India. I mentioned Ampere in a story about the connection between power outages and the electric vehicle industry in The New York Times, and wrote about the company’s frugal engineering techniques at Forbes.

I have nosed the bike cautiously through the streets of Chennai in the early morning and late at night when the traffic dies. If the street is quiet enough, pedestrians can hear the bike coming from behind. I can tell by the way they cock their heads that they detect an unfamiliar pitch. Here comes my electric scooter, emitting not the blat of a gas engine but that distinctive electric motor sound, somewhere between a buzz and a whine.  It is safe for them to gasp because I leave no exhaust in their faces.

Moving Through India’s Traffic at a Whisper is a post from: The Ferris Files

Photo credit: New York Times

Today, The New York Times published a story I wrote about the state of the solar industry in India. This is an issue I’ve been keeping a close eye on since arriving in Chennai, India last month. Chennai is the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, and Tamil Nadu is Exhibit A in what can go wrong when a government takes a hasty and haphazard stab at something as complicated as solar energy.

Read the story here, but here is the intro for the story, titled, “In India, Solar Ambitions Are Suddenly Outsize“:

After years of lagging behind China and the West in the adoption of solar power, some states in India are proposing to build solar farms at a galloping pace that leaves them at risk of falling short of electricity (a familiar problem here) or of paying higher prices for it.

In just the last five months, five Indian states have announced plans to bring giant amounts of solar power online within five years, including 1,000 megawatts in Andhra Pradesh, 350 megawatts in Rajasthan, 800 megawatts in Madhya Pradesh, 1,000 megawatts in Chhatisgarh and a whopping 3,000 megawatts in Tamil Nadu.

The story goes on to explain what happened last week when the rubber hit the road and Tamil Nadu received its bids for solar power projects. The results: underwhelming. Hit the link for more details.

How India’s Solar Plans Miss the Mark is a post from: The Ferris Files

This is one of my favorite topics in the nearly three years I’ve been writing the column. Humans have been working at turning solar power into electricity since the 1950s; plants and animals have been turning sunshine into energy for time immemorial. No surprise that they’re better at it than we are. In my research, I looked for instances where engineers and materials scientists stumbled upon discoveries made by biologists that had been lying around unnoticed.

Here is a brief rundown of the findings, though I recommend spending a few minutes clicking through the interactive graphic to understand sunflowers, leaves and butterflies and how clever they are.

• Tongxiang Fan, a materials scientist in China, discovered a remarkable property of wings that help swallowtail butterflies warm up in the sun, and then used the discovery to create hydrogen fuel.

• A team at MIT looked at the design of the center of a sunflower — the part where the seeds reside — and modeled a concentrated solar plant after the spirals found within it. The “Golden Angle,” as its known, also makes a concentrated solar installation take up a lot less space.

• A postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University named Jong Bok Kim wanted to find a surface for solar panels that would yield the most energy. The answer, it turned out, resided in a bush near where he eats lunch. The secret is the surface of the leaves, which appear smooth to the eye but at the microscopic level are more like mountains, full of jagged angles that make photons bounce around.

If you know about other instances where renewable energy follows biology (or ought to), let me know in the comments or in an email. Fascinating stuff, isn’t it?

Brilliant Ideas in Biomimicry is a post from: The Ferris Files

The “mosquito bat,” as it is known in Indian circles, is a most cathartic way to vanquish bugs.

The most unwelcome sort of wildlife here in South India is the mosquitoes. They are tinier, stealthier versions of their American cousins and are far more dangerous, carrying malaria and (most recently) an outbreak of dengue fever. This emergency calls for…the mosquito bat!

That isn’t its actual name — on Amazon it’s called an electronic insect catcher — but as with so many things, India has found its own odd terminology. I saw a mosquito bat leaning on the wall while we were visiting the house of my wife’s aunt Hemathe, which for some reason is always alive with the little buggers.

1) Switch on the mosquito bat; 2) swing it in the general direction of the mosquitoes with the alacrity of Aggasi; and 3)  ZAP! ZAP! BZZT! The mesh layers of the bat light up with blue flashes. Each flash is a kill. The little buggers are not just incinerated, but vaporized. Not even a wing or mouthpart remains.

I got so enthusiastic with the mosquito bat that the air got a little smoky and smelled of ionized violence.

To learn more about the local mosquito plague, check out my my most recent posts on Forbes:

Facing Dengue Epidemic, India Turns to Genetically Modified Mosquitoes

Is Ancient ‘Mocktail’ The Answer to Dengue Fever?

Die, Bloodsuckers, Die is a post from: The Ferris Files

The Raintree Hotel rooftop bar. Photo Credit: Chennai Notice Board

The Raintree is a high-rise luxury hotel on St. Mary’s Road, just a few dusty streets away from where I stay. From the polished lobby, one boards an extraordinarily quiet elevator and emerges onto a rooftop bar with a swimming pool, dining tables, and a perimeter bar underlit by blue neon and with an airy view of the city. The effect is striking because the bar is sleek and modern, while the street is strewn with piles of rubble.

I was here to meet a new acquaintance, Ben*, an thirty-something American who has been living in Chennai for a year and who took eagerly to my suggestion of the Raintree as a place to meet — a little too eagerly, I thought, considering that I had suggested it only because I knew of nothing else. I figured Ben would know of grottoes and pubs much cooler than a hotel bar.

Ben ordered a mixed drink while I got a tall Kingfisher and we set to talking at the very corner of the bar with a maximum view. I had many questions for Ben and he obligingly answered. Yes, I was right that there are almost no Americans or other white people here, except for a few of the long-haired spiritual seekers outside the Kapaleeshwarar temple; yes, most of his friends are Indian; yes, he has his own apartment and a halftime maid who cleans his house and delivers his lunch every day. My next question: What is the nightlife like in this town?

“Well, there’s Havana down there,” he said, and pointed over the ledge to a little ground-floor hotel outbuilding with jaunty red awnings. “And there’s the Dublin over at the Park Sheraton, and there’s the bar at the Hilton. And then there are the A/C Tasmacs.”

The what?

TASMAC, it turns out, stands for Tamil Nadu State Marketing Association, or, in short, where Tamilians go to get their drink on. The state vigorously regulates alcohol and sells it only at state-approved stores. The TASMACs, apparently realizing they have a good thing going, have come to incorporate a bar of sorts where the patron acts as both bartender and customer, serving himself a snort of his newly-acquired whiskey (and of course enjoying the A/C). The fluorescent lights are harsh, Ben said, but it’s more convivial than your own living room. I told Ben he would have to take me to a TASMAC sometime soon, and he agreed.

I expected Ben to enumerate more night spots, but he fell silent.

“So that’s it?” I said. “A city of 4.5 million people, and the only places to party are three hotel bars and the A/C TASMACs?”

He nodded.

Chennai’s nighttime skyline, half-lit as usual. Photo credit: Ramesh Yanthra

We gazed out at the skyline, which was significantly less grand than the bar that framed it. Years of American nightlife, not to mention countless TV shows, have led me to expect certain sights from a rooftop bar: neon bouncing off of highly polished windows, Mercedes and BMWs prowling for parking spaces, chains of streetlights marching in rows off to the horizon. But Chennai doesn’t have a downtown, really, just the occasional tall apartment or office building poking up from a cityscape that rarely rises above four or five stories. And there isn’t enough electricity to maintain a metropolitan fantasy. Instead of a grid of streetlights there is a random scattering of streetlamps, some orangeish, some blueish, and combined with the headlights and lit windows they create just enough illumination for one to see  autorickshaws and scooters dodging potholes, and the thick cloud of smog that overlays the street.

During our conversation Ben had been texting someone, and now he informed me that his friend Anisha would be arriving as soon as she ditched her date. And momentarily she did arrive — not alone, but with a young man who introduced himself as Rohan. Anisha was a lovely woman somewhere in her 20s, with long raven hair and a pair of tight jeans and a tank top. Standard evening wear in the West, but here I found myself a little scandalized. It was the most skin I’d seen on a woman in public since arriving in the country.

As they ordered their own drinks, Anisha explained that she and Rohan used to date but now were just friends. Things worked out so much better this way, she said. I was fascinated, not because I am especially voyeuristic about the sex lives of twentysomethings, but because I know from my wife’s family that the concept of “dating” has been soundly rejected in conservative South India. When you socialize you do so with your family, and the drive to marriage is all-pervasive. Indeed, Anisha told me, when she goes out and meets a guy he will often propose marriage within a few minutes of saying hello, because what other option is there?

In Chennai there are no dating websites, but plenty of matrimonial ones.

Anisha has a science degree but is underemployed in a job teaching corporate Indians to speak unaccented English. She has applied for a two-year graduate program in Germany and her longing for it to come to pass — for her escape plan from India to take effect — was as clear and hard as the ice cubes in her drink.

I glanced again at the city skyline and saw that the young and cosmopolitan of Chennai bear a resemblance to the Raintree rooftop bar: rearing up above the ramshackle, darkened city, dressed to flirt, and desperately seeking a Western kind of good time.

* Names of the people in this post have been changed to prevent any party fouls.

To Be Young and Cosmopolitan in Chennai is a post from: The Ferris Files

Entrance to an alleyway wedding hall, glimpsed during a walk on CP Ramaswamy Road this morning.

It is my good fortune to be writing to you from southern India, where I will be stationed for the next two months or more. On the coast of the Bay of Bengal, near the tip of the subcontinent, in the bustling city of Chennai, home to 4.5 million souls, your correspondent will be ensconced in a cabana overlooking a pool and an aggressive flock of pigeons.

Nearly four years ago my lovely fiancee Anjali brought me here to be married in an arya samaj, an abbrevated version of a Brahmin wedding ceremony that cuts out the parts that are irrelevant if the groom is not Brahmin, not Hindu and not Indian. (Even in this shortened form, it lasted a day and a half). Now we’re back. The little lady is taking a break from work and spending some tea time with her relatives, who in this city alone number in the dozens. Meanwhile, my goal is to capture some of crazyquilt India in stories, both here on the personal blog and in publications of greater repute.

India is modernizing so quickly that one can observe the changes on a drive through town. First off, the cows have disappeared. On my first visit, I saw a few staring vacantly at the traffic as they nibbled on piles of trash. Cows are terrible urban dwellers under the best of circumstances, but are especially troublesome here, where, in keeping with Hindu scripture, the sacred cow wanders untethered. If one steps in front of your auto-rickshaw for snack on the median, well, it’s brake lights for you. But now some sort of bovine cleansing has occurred, at least in the daylight hours. During a predawn walk today I saw a total of three, which tells me that the cows aren’t gone, just hidden. But where does one hide a cow?

Another vanished species: Wild-eyed, grey-bearded men in lungis (skirts) pedaling rickshaws. While young cyclists continue to brave the traffic, the old men seem to have retired or died, and in their place are legions of motorbikes, piloted by young men in moustaches. Women appear more confident. It’s common to see a young lady striding along talking into her cellphone, and in the early morning, the older women take fitness walks on CP Ramaswamy Road in their salwar kameezes and Adidas tennis shoes.

The mosquitoes are small and stealthy as ever, though perhaps more dangerous, since their stingers bear not just the threat of malaria but a growing epidemic of dengue fever. They have none of the manners of the American mosquito, which courteously announces its presence by whining in your ear canal. The Chennai mosquito just grabs a drink and leaves me scratching an ankle.

Not everything changes, of course. The same soft breezes off the Bay of Bengal stir the palm trees, and the Adyar river still stinks of sewage. The elevated rail system remains half-finished, with lines ending abruptly, tendrils of rebar extending out into nothing. At the dirt lot across from our apartment block, kids play cricket in the morning and a few musclemen take turns doing bench presses with a rusted old barbell. More observations to come; watch this space.

India, the Extended Remix Edition is a post from: The Ferris Files

Corwin Hardham, the late founder and CEO of Makani Power. Photo credit: Makani Power

Today I posted an obituary on Forbes of Corwin Hardham, the founder and CEO of Makani Power. I had been following Makani and Corwin with interest for a few years and was greatly saddened to hear of his passing last month.

Besides his talent as an engineer and business leader, figuring out new ways to convert the power of the wind into electricity, Corwin was a top-class athlete in wind sports such as windsurfing and kitesurfing. This mixture of the geeky and the adventurous manifested in Makani’s product, the Airborne Wind Turbine. From the blog post:

At the ARPA-E conference outside Washington, D.C. last February, Hardham’s 26-foot-long wing was the centerpiece of the lobby. Clean-energy entrepreneurs are a creative bunch, but their products — black solar panels, smart-grid apps, high R-value windows — aren’t very exciting to look at.

The Makani wing, though, was something else. It brought a dash of swagger, a hint of Howard Hughes romance to a room full of guys in ties. In its presence, the quest to harness the Earth’s renewable energy felt both noble and risky. A fixture by the wing was Hardham himself, who, as a high-tech Bay Area CEO, might have been expected to be bragging and preening. But Hardham pretty much just hung out, earnest and talking warmly to anyone who happened by.

I welcome comments, either here or on the Forbes blog, by anyone who knew Corwin and has a story to share. Or visit his memorial page.

Remembering Corwin Hardham is a post from: The Ferris Files

See my review, and don’t miss the trailer:

On Sunday, I rode my bike to a theater near the White House to hear author Bill McKibben speak as part of the “Do the Math” tour. McKibben is a gangly, bookish hero of the movement against climate change, and he is starting a provocative crusade against oil, coal and gas companies. From my Forbes blog post, entitled, “Is It Time To Divest From Exxon?“:

Bill McKibben, the author and activist famous for halting the Keystone XL pipeline, led a rally in Washington, D.C. yesterday to build momentum toward a larger, harder and much more controversial goal: persuading colleges to drop their investments in companies like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and BP because the burning of their fossil fuel reserves will warm the planet beyond recognition.
“They’re trying to wreck our future,” McKibben told a jubiliant young crowd that nearly filled the 1,800-seat Warner Theater near the White House. “So we’re trying to take away some of their money.”

The story prompted this comment from a Forbes reader:

Yeah, divest from the most profitable company on earth because some guy from Vermont says so. Right. Let me get right on that. Regardless of hybrid or electric cars, gasoline powered vehicles are still the standard…until someone builds a better mouse trap, which has not happened yet.

Finally, today, I posted a story based on some interesting new figures from the recent International Energy Agency. While coal use is dropping like a hot rock here in the U.S. — good news for our carbon emissions — the atmosphere will continue to steadily warm because China and India are burning far more coal than we’re saving. Here’s a relevant passage from my post titled, “As Coal Use Drops in U.S., China and India Burn Even More“:

This news confounds the narrative about coal that has started to take hold in the U.S. The story goes that coal, nudged toward extinction by a glut of cheap, domestic natural gas and stiffening regulations, will begin to disappear as a fuel source and cause emissions of global-warming gases to decline.
But the rest of the world, especially Asia, is going in exactly the opposite direction, projected to use an additional billion tons a of coal each year by 2016. During that time, China will add the equivalent of 160 new coal plants while India adds 70. The atmosphere doesn’t make a distinction between coal burned in Ohio and coal burned in Shanghai.

Three Perspectives on Climate Change is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Check out the print version of the story at the link above, or, if you prefer to get your news from talking heads, watch me in conversation about it with Sierra senior editor Paul Rauber. This was the first-ever Google+ Hangout for both me and the magazine, so pardon any rough edges.

What’s Up with Rooftop Farming in NYC? is a post from: The Ferris Files

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A windmill at the American Wind Power Center and Museum, another stop on our Texas wind-energy tour. Photo credit: David Ferris

Two weeks ago I decamped to Lubbock, Texas, for the 22nd annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. A highlight of these conferences is fleeing the hotel for field trips to places I would never otherwise see. Last year, at the Miami conference, it was the Everglades; this year, it was the wind power installations on the plains of West Texas.

Our tour bus dropped in on Dusty Choate, a sales rep for Aermotor, the largest windmill manufacturer in the United States. Wait, windmills? Aren’t those relics from Holland, or maybe rusting behind a ranch somewhere in South Dakota? In fact the windmill business is alive — though not quite well. I just posted a story on Forbes about the prospects for the U.S. windmill industry, and its brightening opportunities on foreign shores.

Until one drives through West Texas, it’s hard to grasp just how littered with energy it is. At one point, I looked out the window to see, on a single stretch of flatland,  the bobbing heads of pumpjacks, giant cylindrical storage tanks, the flames of gas flares, and looming behind all of that, a bank of towering white wind turbines.

Texas is blessed with every kind of energy. One can only hope that the state figures out how to transition from the underground fossil sort — the kind that is dangerously warming our atmosphere, and that will eventually run out — to forms of power that rely on the sun and wind that bless those endless plains.

America’s Other Wind Industry is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Two scientists at the University of California at San Diego, Carlos Coimbra and Jan Kleissl, are creating hyperlocal forecasts with the help of fisheye cameras pointed at the sky.

These sky cameras, engineered by Coimbra and Kleissl and sometimes called Cloudtrackers, take in about five square miles of sky, depending on the height of the installation. By snapping high-resolution photos every 30 seconds and processing them through a computer algorithm, Coimbra and Kleissl can predict with great accuracy where a cloud will move within the next 3 to 20 minutes.

All of these images are of the sky above the UC San Diego, where Kleissl and Coimbra work. Photos 1, 2, and 3 of this series are taken from an installation on the roof of Engineering Building II. San Diego's ever-changing coastal fog is difficult for the researchers to forecast.

Images 4, 5 and 6 of this series are taken from an another building on campus, the seven-story home of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

When the clouds are just so, the camera's image of the sky looks strangely like a photo of Earth from space. The spindly weather instruments on the margins appear to me like the sensors attached to a satellite.

In fact, the equipment you see on the edges are (at 9:00) an Eppley SMT-3 Solar Tracker with several instruments mounted on it, including a pyranometer, a pyrheliometer and a sun-tracking camera. At 10:00 is a spectral shadowband pyranometer. At 11:00 is a microwave antenna that is not involved with cloud research. The structure looming at 3:00 is part of the building's HVAC machinery.

Back on the Engineering II building is a SunCam, developed by Coimbra and Kleissl to track the clouds immediately around the Sun.

The black dot is a saturation spot and indicates the position of the Sun.

Coimbra and Kleissl, who have been working together for only two years, believe that future versions of their forecasting engine will be far more accurate than today's.

All images are credited to Carlos Coimbra and Jan Kleissl at UC San Diego.

Clouds Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Image credit: Brimstone / flickr Creative Commons

Years ago, on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains with my friend Eric, we stopped to rest in a lake basin beneath a giant blue sky. We had been in the backcountry long enough that our minds had unchained from the city, and it seemed obvious to ask Eric to name his favorite force of nature.

“Clouds,” he replied, as we gazed up into the sky where a few of them wandered lonely. “Because they’re the one force on Earth that Man can’t control.”

I’ve thought about Eric’s answer often, and especially in the last week or so while I reported a story for the New York Times on the new science of solar forecasting. The discipline could as easily call itself “cloud forecasting,” since that is the phenomenon that prompted its rise. As solar power has started to emerge as an important part of the energy grid, especially in California, the erratic flight path of clouds has turned from a topic of idle speculation into one of serious concern.

The lead subject of the story is Carlos Coimbra, a fluid engineer at the University of California at San Diego (coincidentally, my alma mater). He and another engineer, Jan Kliessl, have hit upon a way to track the path of clouds with far more accuracy than existing techniques. The innovation could save a lot of money for the companies that build and operate solar plants, as well as utilities and operators of the power grid, and even the homeowners and businesses that use electricity.

But the discovery may be even more significant  in creating hyperlocal weather forecasts. The exact path of storm in the next hour is a matter of life and death for an airline pilot or a crew battling a forest fire. A fine-grained weather prediction could be invaluable to farmers who watch the sky for the next cloudburst that will water their crops, or the hailstorm that could ruin them.

I happened upon Coimbra’s and Kleissl’s work in 2010 while seeking a topic for the eco-technology column I write for Sierra magazine, and I ended up doing an entry about their discoveries. But the column didn’t provide enough space to explore the subject fully. Earlier this year I asked around again and found that government and private industry were waking up to the possibilities of a good cloud forecast.

We still can’t control the route that clouds take through the heavens, and I hope we never do. Like Eric, I prefer to live in a world that hovers beyond our complete control. But using our smarts to guess where clouds are going exhibits both cleverness and an admirable humility.

New Story About Solar Forecasting in the New York Times is a post from: The Ferris Files

Urban farmer Ben Flanner of the Brooklyn Grange. Photo by JJ Sulin.

Today at noon PT / 3 pm ET, I’ll talk with Sierra magazine’s senior editor Paul Rauber about the rooftop farms springing up across New York City. Please join us.

The occasion is “Up on the Farm,” a feature story I wrote for the magazine’s November/December issue. Back in July, during a steamy heat wave, I visited Brookyn Grange and Gotham Greens — pioneering urban farms with drastically different approaches to feeding the city.

We’ll be talking about those different routes to local food, as well as the phenomenon of farming in the Big Apple, which has a prouder history and more momentum than most people realize. Here’s an excerpt:

Everyone knows that New York is full of foodies, but few realize that it is also full of farmers. City farmsteads are cropping up all over, and New York has more of them—and more on rooftops—than anywhere else. In addition to at least 7 rooftop enterprises, there are 17 ground-based farms in the Big Apple and 1,000-plus community gardens, far more than in any other American city.

Growing food in a city’s dense core, urban farmers say, can turn back the diesel-chugging trucks hauling salad mix across the country, lower energy bills by replacing hot black-tar roofs with cool greenery, slim waistlines by supplying bodegas with fresh-picked tomatoes, and let children reared on concrete learn the joy of yanking a carrot from the soil.

I first learned of Brooklyn Grange while reporting a couple of stories (here and here) about urban green roofs for American Way magazine. Words fail to convey the beauty of some of these gardens, however, so also I assembled this video of NYC’s best topside greenery.

What I discovered through reporting the Sierra story is that rooftop agriculture has manifold benefits to the city. It reduces stormwater runoff and cools the city down, like other green roofs, while also creating jobs and an extraordinarily local source of food. Furthermore, these sky farmsteads make the production of food visible and accessible to city dwellers — bringing a patch of our rural past to the concrete landscapes where most of America actually lives.

Lettuces growing within sight of midtown Manhattan aren’t just a novelty, but a significant development in agriculture and urban design with lots of room to grow. I look forward to answering your questions. See you at the hangout!

Rooftop farms in NYC? Join me for a Google+ Hangout is a post from: The Ferris Files

This year it is even more special because I am moderating my first-ever conference session. The topic: “Will Economic Growth Destroy the Environment — or Save It?”

The session is the brainchild of Marc Gunther, a fellow Washington, D.C. environmental journalist, but he was unable to moderate due to a conflict. I’m happy to be stepping in for him and hope to guide a substantive conversation.

The participants include Brooke Buchanan, the head of sustainability communications for Walmart; William Caesar, the head of recycling and organics for Waste Management; Brian Czech, the founder of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy; and Bud Weinstein, a applied economist from the University of North Texas.

Learn more about the panelists at today’s blog post on Forbes. While there — or here, for that matter — chime in on what you think I should ask.

Will Economic Growth Destroy the Environment — or Save It? is a post from: The Ferris Files

The Ocean Sentinel, a platform for testing wave-energy harvesters, bobs off the coast of Newport, Oregon.

Last week found me in Oregon, hanging out with inventors and entrepreneurs who are focused on one goal: Turning the massive waves of the Pacific Ocean into a reliable and clean form of electricity.

You don’t hear much about the wave power industry, compared to other alternative energies like solar or wind, because it is just now emerging from its wild-eyed-inventor stage and starting to wear a suit. Or, better yet, a spiffy looking North Face jacket (this is Oregon, after all).

I came away with two insights. First, the machines that actually create wave power are a freakish menagerie of steel and fiberglass, with new specimens arriving all the time. One paragraph from a post for Forbes entitled “What the Future of Wave Energy Looks Like“:

While the wind industry has, for the time being, agreed on the design of wind turbines (tall, white, three blades) and the solar industry knows what a solar panel looks like (flat, black, rectangular), the endeavor of turning ocean energy into usable electricity is experiencing a Wild West of innovation.

For a proper rundown of the kind of wave devices that are competing to deliver electricity to your power outlet, check out this column I wrote for Sierra magazine, or this beguiling set of animations.

Second, I discovered how earnestly and diligently Oregon is working to make itself the hub of this promising new industry. And promising it is. From a second Forbes post, entitled “Oregon Races to Catch Up to Europe in Wave Energy“:

The foundations for a new heavy marine industry are being laid in Oregon, where the prospect of turning the powerful waves of the Pacific Ocean into electricity is starting to be recognized as a multimillion-dollar, economy-building enterprise.

At a wave-energy conference last week in Portland, signs were evident that Oregon’s government, universities and private sector are coalescing around a long-term plan to use the state’s punishing ocean swells to create megawatts of power, in the process gaining an advantage over other hopefuls like Hawaii and California and laying the groundwork for a wave-industrial complex that could pose serious competition to Europe, which overwhelmingly dominates the field.

At the end of the week, I joined other conferees on a bus to Newport, Oregon, boarded a tour boat, and motored a few nautical miles offshore to see an innovative wave-energy installation.

Check out my video of the Ocean Sentinel below, and also a video I took of a small-scale wave-energy device being tested in Oregon State University’s Tsunami Wave Basin.

Oregon Takes Wave Power to the Next Level is a post from: The Ferris Files

Nike's marathon singlet is dyed without a drop of water. Photo credit: Nike

During the Olympics, sportswear giants Adidas and Nike made simultaneous announcements of a new dyeing process that uses carbon dioxide instead of water. Though few noted it at the time, this development is a very big deal.

It is estimated that the dyeing of polyester clothing uses 2.4 trillion gallons of water every year, much of it in Asia, where water is becoming an ever more scarce commodity. By turning to CO2 instead, the companies aren’t just garnering a green badge, but gaining a long-term strategic advantage.

But how do you dye a shirt with CO2, which most of us think of as a gas? Read all about the new technology.

Dyeing Sports Clothes Without a Drop of Water is a post from: The Ferris Files

In Shanghai, growth is ready, set, go. Photo credit: Marianna at flickr Creative Commons

A “megacity” is a metropolis of 10 million souls or more. Back in 1950, the world had exactly two:  Tokyo and New York. As of 2010, the world had 23 megacities, with 12 located in Asia. By 2025, according to the U.N., that number may rise to 37, with 21 of them in Asia. How are countries like China and India adjusting to such an epic migration?

According to a recent report from the Asian Development Bank, not so well. An eye-opening series of charts and figures make the case that the continent has barely begun to grapple with problems of waste, air pollution, and the prospect of floods that are more likely this century as the climate continues to change. I collected the most revealing data in a blog post on Forbes,  “Asia’s Megacities Pose A Stark Environmental Challenge.”

The picture is not entirely foreboding. The report looks to urbanization on other continents and finds that concentration in cities eventually leads to lower infant mortality, higher levels of education, a braking of population growth, and a greater desire to protect the environment. Some large cities have made significant strides to lessen their impact, which I detailed in another post, “From Asia, 5 Inspiring Ways To Green The City.”

I’m interested to know how these facts and figures jibe with the experiences of people who live and/or work in the megacities of Asia. If that describes you, please reply in the comments here or (even better) in the articles on Forbes.

The Great Weight of Asia’s Megacities is a post from: The Ferris Files