Lars Paronen

Newsweek, encroaching on territory usually mined by activist groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, has unveiled its innaugural NEWSWEEK Green Rankings, which ranks the 500 biggest U.S. companies based on their “actual environmental performance, policies, and reputation.”

The magazine pointed out that compiling such a list was a challenge “because comparing environmental performance across industries is a bit like analyzing whether Tiger Woods or LeBron James is the world’s greatest athlete—there’s an inevitable apples-and-oranges element.”

Still, it believes it’s system makes sense. To come up with the greenest company, the magazine assigned each a “Green Score” that was then compared to the average score of the collective group. You can find out more about Newsweek’s methodology here. But, in terms of weighting, Impact and Policies were each given 45 percent and Reputation received 10 percent.

The results? I’ll let you be the judge. But I found it noteworthy that the top two overall are also the top two PC makers in the world — Hewlett-Packard and Dell. And five of the top 10 are tech companies, blamed for manufacturing products that end up contributing to mountains of electronic waste in developing nations.

What do you think? Will the rankings affect who you do business with? What would your green rankings look like? Leave your comments in the box below.

Are the residents of Fiesch and Fischertal in Switzerland particularly pious, desperate or both? I wonder after learning that villagers there want Pope Benedict's blessing to stop the melting of Europe's longest glacier. That, after hundreds of years of praying for it to stop growing. Researchers predict winter temperatures in the Swiss Alps will rise by 1.8 degrees Celsius in winter and 2.7 degrees Celsius in the summer by 2050.

You can track the fate of the Aletsch glacier here, but don't expect to see a repeat of Spencer Tunick's 2007 naked photoshoot.

Undoubtedly, Switzerland's tourism industry has suffered this summer, with 148,000 fewer foreign visitors bunking at chalets and the like in June compared to the same month last year. Of course it's not clear if the decline was due to melting glaciers or the credit crisis.

Back in the United States, melting glaciers aren't a big source of concern.

A task force from the American Psychological Association, citing a Pew Research Center poll that found that climate change ranked last in a list of 20 compelling issues, concluded that psychological barriers like uncertainty, mistrust and denial were to blame. It added that habits can change, especially if money is involved.

Supposing you agree with the APA that green habits are important to develop, what ones would you consider most essential and practical, or even spiritual?

(PHOTO: Aletsch glacier, the largest glacier in the Swiss Alps is seen on August 18, 2007. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth)

So, how much do you want for your Aviator?

Once-proud SUV owners are gaining green street cred cashing-in on President Obama's $1 billion "Car Allowance Rebate" program giving car and truck buyers a $3,500 or $4,500 credit to swap their aging gas-guzzlers for new, more fuel efficient models.

While not an alternative to highway approved cars, it won't be surprising if those who value image most in switching to a more green way of getting around pass up Global Electric Motorcar's GEM e4 or Ducati Enegria's "Free Duck" quadricycle. Neighborhood Electric Vehicles have been the vehicles of choice for leaders at the G8 meeting in L'Aquila, Italy, who seem happy to sacrifice chic in the name of the planet and photo opportunities. Form aside, GEM cars get the equivalent of 150 miles per gallon, or two cents per mile, according to the company. And that's a lot farther than the boat of a truck you bought before the tech bubble burst.

Are you willing to trade in your clunker, and for what? If you already have, how easy was it to get your credit?

Shares in the suffering utility Pacific Ethanol shot up over 8 percent on Tuesday, reaping the rewards of cheaper ethanol prices, thanks largely to what is expected to be a bumper crop year for U.S. corn. Units of Pacific Ethanol that owned four ethanol plants filed for Chapter 11 protection last month, stung by volatile prices for corn, low fuel demand and the credit crisis.

A senior company official at India's Suzlon Energy said the wind power company was looking at selling assets and shares to lower its debt, dealing a major blow to its shares, falling 11.44 percent in Tuesday trading.

Shares in Pacific Ethanol lost almost half their value in morning trading after the biggest West Coast-based producer and marketer of ethanol announced that it had put its production facilities in California, Oregon and Idaho into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The company said on May 12 that it would likely need to file for bankruptcy if it was not able to restructure its debt.

A string of energy firms have filed for Chapter 11 recently, suffering from weak U.S. demand that has depressed prices and margins. VeraSun Energy, once the largest publicly listed U.S. ethanol maker, filed for bankruptcy last year.

(Track and comment on the emerging greentech sector by joining the Reuters Business of Green Portfolio community)

Indian wind turbine maker Suzlon Energy’s shares gained 8 percent on Tuesday, after sources told Reuters that Suzlon's founders are looking to raise up to $48 million through the sale of a 2 percent stake in the world's fifth-largest wind turbine maker.

Shares in leading solar cell maker Q-Cells closed the day up 2.39 percent after it reported profits that missed market forecasts and CEO Anton Milner and CFO Hartmut Schüning tried to assuage investor fear over solar project funding.

German solar peer Solon posted a bigger-than-expected first-quarter net loss and echoed Q-Cells' financing concern.

(Track and comment on the emerging greentech sector by joining the Reuters Business of Green Portfolio community)

Several exhibitors took up the “green” theme at CES 2009 as the “Pre” party continued. Any chance Dell had to upstage Palm disappeared in a cloud of secrecy with the “Adamo” laptop it briefly presented, but gave no details about.

Fuji said its EnviroMAX alkaline batteries were made of more than 90 percent recycled materials, had no mercury, cadmium and were PVC free.

Singapore-based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies said their “HydroPack” water-activated and portable power system HydroPak could provide 4 to 5 hours of 50 watt emergency power without pollution or noise.

Design conscious Areaware showed off a retro and playful radio called “Magno”, that it said was made in Indonesia with sustainable harvest timber.

And Greenpeace held a press conference praising gadgets by Lenovo, Sharp, Samsung, Nokia and Toshiba in its 2008 Green Electronics Survey.

Intel rolled out the next generation of its netbooks aimed at the education sector and emerging markets. The third generation Classmate PC netbook is actually a netbook tablet, adding a touch screen and powered by Intel's Atom processor.

Check out this slideshow for a look at some of the shiny new toys in various shades of green and grey featured at CES 2009.

(Photos: Fuji's EnviroMAX batteries, HydroPack system by Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies)

The official start of the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas saw PDA pioneer Palm unveiling its answer to the popular iPhone smartphone and a new, Web-oriented operating system. Investors pushed the stock up 30 percent for two consecutive days and bloggers affirmed their optimism in early hands-on reviews.

Gizmodo’s Adrian Covert admired the Palm Pre’s intuitive design and “beautiful” screen. And Engadget's Joshua Topolsky found switching between applications graceful and simple.

Elsewhere in Vegas, Sony continued blazing the organic light-emitting diode trail showing off a bendable OLED video screen that would make it possible to literally wear what you want to display. Actor Tom Hanks demonstrated a pair of prototype Sony eyeglasses with built-in video screens for watching full-length movies.

Sony Ericsson offered up a clamshell-design music mobile phone for style-conscious consumers and a candy-bar shaped phone boasting Sony’s “Smile Shutter” technology, which is supposed to make taking pictures of people grinning easier.

Motorola lived up to the “green” theme of this year’s CES introducing its W233 “Renew” mobile phone, which it says is made partly from recycled water cooler bottle plastic and by purchasing carbon offsets to counter the energy needed to produce, use and dispose of the phone.

Samsung displayed a semi-transparent active matrix OLED screen and a mobile handset that does double-duty as a video projector.

And flash memory card maker SanDisk rolled out a family of fast solid-state hard drives (SSDs) designed to replace traditional hard drives in notebook PCs.

(Photos: Palm's Pre phone, Tom Hanks wearing Sony's movie-watching glasses, Motorola phone made of recycled water cooler bottles/ REUTERS)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a new line of MacBook notebooks made partly from recycled aluminum with "faster graphics" and LED-backlit glass displays.

They're sexy and sure to be the object of your friends' envy (until the next announcement). And the beefed-up video card performance should appeal to gamers and graphic pros.

That said, time will tell if Apple learned from problems that plagued the initial release of previous models, including battery issues.

But at almost $1,300 for a basic 13.3 inch MacBook that includes the new 9400M Nvidia graphics processor and aluminum body found on the $1,799, 15.4 inch MacBook Pro, could it be that Apple has found the sweet spot in terms of performance, aesthetics and price?

(Edited to remove reference to swappable hard drives)

(Photo: Reuters)

As Britain battles to hold back the worst floods for 60 years, bloggers and journalists have been debating the cause. The daily green linked the floods to more intense rainfalls and stopped short of blaming climate change. Michael McCarthy, environment editor of The Independent, said no-one can yet attribute the floods directly to global warming, but said the "catastrophic" events "are entirely consistent with repeated predictions of what climate change will bring." Paul Simons, writing on The Times Online blog, dismissed reports of global warming causing the record rainfalls, accusing Britons, accustomed to drier summers in recent years, of suffering from weather amnesia. He said the rain was more likely a natural blip in the climate. Olive Heffernan acknowledged in the Climate Feedback blog of the journal Nature that, while single events like the floods in the UK and China cannot be attributed to climate change, a Nature article to be published Thursday will present the first evidence that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions changed rainfall patterns in the 20th Century. A recent paper in the journal Science suggested that global warming may result in more rainfall worldwide. What do you think? Is the flooding in the UK and elsewhere a normal weather event or a sign of climate change?