Beijing Olympic Village is world’s first green neighborhood

Read the original press release here.
The Beijing Olympic Village is the first Olympic Village to achieve certification under the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system.  The 42 buildings that housed 17,000 athletes from around the world earned a Gold rating, one step below the highest Platinum rating. The residential complex is [...]

Responsible Roundup: Yao Ming the champ, costly clean air, a new library, sustainable Olympics, green dragon, and fancy footwear

A roundup of this week’s interesting and important stories, brought to you by ResponsibleChina.com.

YAO MING IS A CHAMPION IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE.
Sure, he’s China’s most famous superstar athlete. But did you know he’s also the UN Environment Programme’s first-ever Environmental Champion? Found this scoop via China Crossroads. Maybe that cute little kid Yao walked [...]

Op-Ed: Chinese environmentalism

An essay by my friend and former classmate Timothy Gutmann, who currently teaches English in Beijing and studies Chinese.  A Boston University graduate, he hopes to return to America to study East Asian and Islamic modern philosophy.
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By Timothy Gutmann
Environmentalists have felt justly skeptical of China’s claims of a “Green Olympics.” Quantitatively, greens can find [...]

Green Olympic sponsor: ExxonMobil

I’ve been watching Olympics coverage on NBC like a fiend. It’s an addiction. Those dramatic intros, that heart-pulsing music, those bite-size pieces of sports footage and that occasionally dorky commentary by Bob Costas–it’s pure entertainment. And let’s face it, I have Phelps Phever. I even friended him on Facebook.
And those commercials! I practically shed a [...]

The Beijing Olympics are greener than you think

I can’t help but open this post with a scientific fact: the Opening Ceremony for the Olympic Games kicked some serious sit bone.
Beijing 2008 Opening Ceremony Video Links:

United States coverage

China coverage

With 5,000 years of rich culture to draw upon, the Opening Ceremony was thoughtful and mesmerizing.  I was transfixed, really, just STARING as the scroll [...]