After the engaging lesson with James Tansey, I poked around the internet and found a gem of a green business blog at www.green.blogs.nytimes.com, under which there is a business section. This blog emphasizes all that James talked about in class, as each and every article highlights some innovation, discovery, or decision that enterprises are making to increase the environmental sustainability of their business.

One particular blog post on the afterlife of the electric car battery caught my attention. ABB and GM are partnering up to turn the spent batteries of the Chevy Volt into power storage devices for homes. The goal is “providing a market for past-their-prime batteries, giving them a resale value that will lower their cost of ownership, and providing distributed storage that could [. . .] absorb energy from intermittent sources like solar panels and wind machines”.

This post addressed my major concern with hybrid cars: I had previously read that hybrids weren’t as green as people believed, due to the pollution caused by its manufacture and the disposal of its batteries. Therefore, what GM is experimenting with is a prime example of turning “green to gold”. They are reacting to consumer concerns and investing in sustainable innovation that will definitely benefit them in the long run.