The Israeli electric car company Better Place is seeing rough times (it just hired its third CEO in as many months after firing two others), but it has reduced its leasing plan to about $400 a month including charge and battery swaps to attract more customers. Thanks to the millions in marketing done by Better Place, […]
For the two years I lived in Jerusalem, I tried to bike with my crappy communist throwback – a mini gearless green metallic wonder that I bought for the flat streets of Tel Aviv. The bike looked too pitiful to steal and that’s why it suited my tastes. Transplanted to Jerusalem, the labyrinth of hilly neighborhoods, […]
Not exactly the 2014 Corvette, this smaller and cheaper electric model may be popular for older purchasers and the eco-aware in the Middle East This past year, a lot of adverse publicity issues surrounded the Better Place electric car network company, that included the firing of its international CEO Shai Agassi. This was followed by […]
Is Better Place hiring a new CEO? In a surprising article in the Israeli business newspaper Globes today, Israel’s electric car network company Better Place seems to have lost its new CEO, Evan Thornley from Australia. This is after a short three months on the job. Thornley was put in place to start a recovery program […]
Tel Aviv University professors tell Green Prophet that it’s just a matter of time: Tel Aviv will flood again. It’s warming up again this week in Israel, just after a series of storms last week that began with major flooding on the Mediterranean Coast and ended with Jerusalem of Gold turned to white after a […]
The Kishon River where it enters the Haifa Bay Unlike pastoral rivers in Europe where bathers can jump in without alarm, Israeli rivers are all too toxic to swim in. Most toxic of all is the Kishon River. The Kishon was once a notorious dumping ground for seven chemical plants, with the result that the entire […]
A few short decades ago, the ladies of Lakiya had a very different life. Their traditional Bedouin clans lived in encampments throughout the Israeli Negev Desert, herding animals. When their families were relocated to government-built towns, the women became aware of how their illiteracy, and their society’s rule against mingling with men who are not […]
An absurd situation where one ministry approves the marine reserve and and another gives a license for oil drilling. Nothing new for Israel. If Greenpeace has won the battle against Zara and its use of toxic chemicals, this new potential environmental threat should have the Greenpeace Mediterranean headquarters on full alert: the Israeli government eager […]
Israel, like other rich countries in the Middle East, has had to rely a lot on desalination plants to supply much of its drinking water. Desalination now supplies Mideast countries like Saudi Arabia, which is said to have the world’s largest desalination plant. The country receives almost all its fresh water supplies from this energy-intensive process. […]
Are Jordan’s snow and Israel’s floods signs of climate change or are they simply flukes of weather? People might argue this for decades there is strong evidence that Mideastern climate has changed dramatically over thousands of years and there is evidence that humans can negatively impact their environment over a much shorter time period. The […]
Bedouin hospitality is considered the best in the world. And that hospitality is found among Israeli Bedouins who have roamed the Holy Land and Levant region for centuries. Now a unique tour company Bedouin Experience –– run by an Israeli Jew and her Bedouin partner –– offers a unique window into Bedouin culture and what […]
The year in retrospect has been a positive one. Despite civil unrest, dangerous regimes, and appalling environmental crimes and neglect, there are good green things afoot for the Middle East. Today we recap some of our green leaders of 2012, the people of the Middle East and for the Middle East who have made 2012, […]
Checkpoints set up by the Israeli military and social expectations don't stop members of the Middle East's first all-women racing team as they speed between the cities of the West Bank in high-octane car races.
I interview one of Israel’s main solar energy entrepreneurs and researchers, Jacob Karni. Israeli solar energy pioneer Prof. Jacob Karni was born just two years after Israel became a state, in 1950. Already back then, the country’s leaders were tangibly aware that Israel needed to develop its human resources in order to build a country […]
A new seed treatment could stop the use and need for GMOs. Even though organic agriculture and sustainable farming practices are on the rise, feeding a hungry world demands that commercial farmers rely on genetically engineered (GMO) seeds to boost production and fend off diseases. But environmentalists fear that GMO crops are a sort of […]