4.30.12: Seven World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, and 41 Cooper Square are all LEED certified. LEED, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a point-based rating system established by the U.S. Green Building Council to drive energy and resource efficiency innovation in the  construction and building industry. LEED certification has become a proxy mission statement for energy efficient buildings made with sustainable materials, nontoxic components, and airy, daylit working environments. But LEED is often criticized for encouraging “point chasing.”

NNR producer Sarah Bacon spoke with four LEED industry experts to understand the differences between certification levels; why developers would seek LEED certification and why some choose not to, and the importance of a post-occupancy performance. She met Jody Grapes, Director of Facilities Management at The Cooper Union’s LEED Platinum 41 Cooper Square; Chris Garvin, Partner at planning and design firm, Terrapin Bright Green; Brooks Perlin, CFO of ECO Supply, a green building materials vendor, and green developer Seth Brown, CEO of Aspen Equities.

03.22.12: How much can cleantech investing change with geographic region, culture and market? Potentially, a lot. Sarah Bacon talked with two cleantech investors working in vastly different entrepreneurial landscapes, co-founder and investment director of Sustainable Technologies Fund in Stockholm André Heinz, and partner at Aquillian Investments, Bill Tarr, in San Francisco. We covered the pace of deal flow, sustainable mindsets, technologies borne of resource availability, government policies, and more.

2.24.12: NNR Producer Ben Pomeroy visits the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 300 acre industrial park in the heart of New York City which has been overhauled with solar street lamps, rainwater harvesting, and other sustainable features to accomodate 6,000 occupants.

Ben talked with a handful of the Yard’s 275 tenants about their sustainable business models, including sculptor Michelle Green, the VP of exhibitions and programs at the Navy Yard’s museum Building 92, and IceStone, the manufacturer of durable recycled glass countertops.

Walk the Sustainable Scavenger Hunt with Ben.

2.10.12: In the latest installment of Ask The Expert, producer Ben Pomeroy visited with Emily Landsburg, CEO of Black Gold Biofuels to learn about the infrastructure scourge and energy potential of used cooking oil’s less glamorous cousin, restaurant grease trap waste. Unlike yellow grease from cooking oil, grease trap waste had no practical applications until Landsburg and her company created one that’s now adding value for towns and cities.

10.28.11: Last year the Gowanus Canal was designated a Super Fund site by the Environmental Protection Agency in order to remove the chemicals, heavy metals and volatile organics from what that agency called, “one of the most extensively contaminated waterways in the nation”.

Producer Ben Pomeroy visited the Gowanus and the surrounding neighborhood to learn some of it’s history and the people who live and work around it’s banks.

He discovered that behind it’s somewhat mistaken reputation as a fetid body dump- is a Revolutionary War battle site, a tree from China, a third generation family company and a foster home for the set pieces of the next blockbuster movie.

1.27.12: NNR’s Ben Pomeroy talks in depth with energy policy blogger and NNR contributor Andrew Schenkel about the election-friendly energy agenda laid down by the President in the State of the Union.

1.18.12: Film director Larry Fessenden (pictured above) boasts a prolific career scaring people. Of all the horrors he been part of, Larry may be most frightened by what’s happening in real life on planet earth. Many of his films find their terror from present day ecological and resource crises, like climate change or water shortages.

When he’s not grave robbing on the screen, Larry runs the website Running Out of Road to give voice to the environmental issues and personalities that motivate (read enrage) him.

Producer Ben Pomeroy talks with Larry about horror movies as cautionary tales and how a good Hollywood scare flick can help carve some edginess into the green movement.

12.28.11: From the debates on federal oil subsidies, the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant to the fight over fracking in New York State, environmental news in 2011 mirrored the contentions and unknowns also found in the economy and the world of politics.

In our year end retrospective we bring you the varied voices from some of our stories that were the news of 2011: political insiders in DC, ethanol growers in Iowa, dishwashers at Occupy Wall Street and a fisherman in Louisiana one year after the BP oil spill.

12.16.11: Climate negotiators from around the world gathered in Durban, South Africa last week to discuss how the international community might beat back global warming. Though the United Nations Framework on Climate Change summit yielded a consensus to renew the Kyoto Protocol and fund mitigation and adaptation measures in developing nations, heavy hitters like India, China and the U.S are still resistant to the policy framework. To make matters worse, Canada, one of the world’s top ten polluters, dropped out of the Protocol entirely after the conference concluded.

Brad Johnson, editor of the Think Progress Green Blog at the Center for American Progress, talks us through the existential state of affairs over the world’s only climate summit.

12.2.11: Hundreds of people crowded an auditorium in Lower Manhattan this past Wednesday to voice their  opinions on a plan to use hydraulic fracturing in order to extract natural gas in New York State.

An overwhelmingly anti-fracking crowd, that was at times raucous and rowdy, spoke urgently before the Deputy Commissioner of Environmental Conservation, in the fourth and final public hearing before the DEP’s report on hydraulic fracturing goes to the Governor’s office for review.

Producer Ben Pomeroy visited the hearing to gather some of the perspectives and stories from the front line of the fracking battle.

The public comment period through writing continues until January 11th.