Green Leaf Report

I managed to get through the Christmas holidays buying almost all of my family’s gifts at Goodwill. I bought a complete Thomas the Train set with four engines, yards of train tracks and various other items, stacks of books, a few handmade dolls, a baby stroller, winter jackets, warm socks (every kid’s favorite Christmas […]

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I’ve visited a couple of different college campuses recently, recruiting entry level engineers.  At a recent campus visit, I was impressed at the environmental credentials of many of the interviewees.  Candidate after candidate described his or her environmental projects, experiences installing residential wind turbines or solar panels, and on and on.  One student […]

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A few weeks ago I was working from the site building at a customer’s wind farm.  A man came to the door and asked for the Site Manager, by name.  He had been told to come talk with the Site Manager about getting a job; as I looked over at him, I noticed […]

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Around wind turbines, farm and ranch life continues. On my first trip to one customer’s farm last year, the site manager took me on a tour. He made sure to bring me by turbine number 18, because, as he told me, the rancher’s horses always congregate under that wind turbine, […]

What is the difference between using a tax cut to create an economic stimulus, and determining where the stimulus money will be spent at a government level? (Answer: A lot!) These are two very different ways of spending huge amounts of government money, and the subject of apparently never-ending congressional debate.  Tax cuts will […]

Fast Company and BusinessWeek are currently running opposing articles on T. Boone Pickens and his wind/water plans for North Texas. The Fast Company article addresses his plans for a $10B wind farm in the panhandle and mentions the water project as almost an afterthought, while the BusinessWeek article talks about the $100M Pickens’ has […]

Recently a senior executive I interviewed went on a long spiel about a study that showed telecommuting could cause job dissatisfaction among the employees not telecommuting.  The idea he stressed was that employees don’t like feeling that they’re covering for other employees and having all of their meetings pushed onto a certain day when […]

Today for the first time, US gas prices reached an average of $4/gallon.
Over the past 15 years, many companies have been moving more of their content onto web platforms and secure electronic processes.  The companies that have embraced these developments are well positioned now to reduce operational costs and employee out-of-pocket expenses […]

When I bought my house about four years ago, we took advantage of the interest rate effect on home prices:  when interest rates are low, the monthly mortgage payment will be lower for a more expensive home. While the interest rate effect is established and known, a new factor coming into play is the […]

Sometimes the small things in life can be the most annoying. For example, when visiting the local cafeteria, why do they serve meals onto Styrofoam clamshell packages instead of onto washable, reusable plates?  A friend of mine asked one day, and was told: “We can’t use these Styrofoam containers in California anymore, so they […]