Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging, a multi-year initiative designed to alleviate "wrap rage," features recyclable boxes that are easy to open and free of excess materials such as hard plastic clamshell cases, plastic bindings, and wire ties. The product itself is exactly the same—we’ve just streamlined the packaging.

By comparison, the Tesla Roadster takes 8 hours or so to recharge its batteries, but it’s also capable of a sub 4-second 0-60 time, a 125 MPH top speed and a range of 200 miles. The Tazzari, which will presumably be far cheaper, is only capable of hitting 56 MPH, has a range of 93 miles and does 0-31 MPH in “less than 5 seconds.”

While it’s not a performance car, the Tazzari Zero actually looks like it has significant merit as a city runabout, having range and performance considerably greater than its main competition, the G-Wiz. Like that car, the Zero looks small enough to park virtually anywhere, and at less than 1,200 pounds, it’s seriously lightweight too. There’s no word on when the Zero will come to market, but when it does it looks like it’ll be available in Italy, England and France, where legislation and local preferences make vehicles like these extremely practical. [Tazzari via Smart Planet]

I went through the same thing when I got my 8-core about a month ago. I called AppleCare and they were very concerned at first. They wanted me to take the unit to an Apple Store, but since the nearest one is over an hour away, I started the DOA process. On the recommendation of a second level tech, I took it to a nearby Authorized Service Center to be checked out before they declared it DOA. They guy in the service center said that every Mac Pro he has set up has the smell at first, so it appears to be normal in his experience. He thinks it is caused by a protective resin coating on the RAM PCB's and/or RAM riser card PCB's and should diminish over time as it burns away. It's been about 3 1/2 weeks now and the smell has almost totally gone, though I still get a whiff every now and then.

A relative just got a MacBook and I set it up for her. During the first few hours of use I noticed a smell and I got lightheaded. I opened some windows and let the machine run for a few more hours and it seems to have dissipated. Try putting the machine through a "burn-in" period to burn off any original residues.

Since my previous post from the end of June, the smell has diminished a little bit... but not too much (still enough to give me a dry throat after 2 hours).Our local Apple Authorized Repair Center could not give me any timeframe when they could check the system ("because we have so much to do") and since I need my Mac nearly every day, I am not sure when I can take it to repair

(Photo by rudolf_schuba)

Wales says he didn’t create green Wikia so much to fulfill his passion for green living, but more to help deliver the truth of eco-info, which he says is sorely lacking: “I’m really passionate about having objective information in this area. It is really hard to get clear information on green issues.”

Doesn't Wales sound just like an oil-company executive insisting we need more research before we can really say if carbon emissions are responsible for global warming?

SmartPlanet catches Wales in a similar hypocrisy, asking him if Wikia has taken concrete steps to reduce the electricity used by its servers. The short answer: It hasn't.

Finally, there's this charge aired on the Wikipedia Review: That Wikia Green has taken copyrighted content without permission from other pro-environment sites.

But why should this be any surprise? Wikia Green, like so many of Wales's efforts, isn't an offshoot of some deeply held belief, besides his core principle — that other people should do the work that makes him popular and rich.

But it will give Wales something to chatter about the next time he runs into Bono or Sir Richard Branson at a party. We'd bet his celebrity friends are too polite to ask the notoriously cheap Wales if he's actually springing for carbon offsets to make up for all of the emissions he generates through his nonstop round-the-world jet travel. Oh, and should we get into the contribution to global warming he makes through all the hot air that issues from his lips?

• Estimated recoverable oil and gas in the ANWR is about 10 billion barrels. The rest of the United States has another 120 billion barrels. Worldwide reserves? Just over 1 trillion barrels. ANWR has about 1 percent of the world's oil.
• If the U.S. moves forward on drilling now, there still won't be any ANWR oil for another ten years. That's 2018.
• Price is what matters, right? ANWR oil will — according to the Bush administration's own stats — lower prices by less than a dollar a barrel. In 2026.

Valleywag's advice for Palin: Back off on the drilling and get some Tina Fey eyeglasses — they'd look great on you!

Cooling Man suggests that each Burner's personal contribution averages out to around one ton of greenhouse gas. If you buy one ton of credits, you can claim to have offset your impact. But you can easily lose an hour to option anxiety and bad website navigation trying to buy credits online.

Carbon offsetters charge different rates for tonnage. Carbonfund.org. charges $9.07 per ton on their precalculated packages. Like most funds, their site lacks a simple Pay Here Now button on the front door. But there's a custom donation page hiding on the site. Click here, scroll to the bottom of the page, type in $9.07, and then proceed to checkout.

I haven't been able to find a carbon credits site that takes PayPal. Anyone?

(Chart by Cooling Man)

• The environment, burning enough fuel to power a car for a year in just one hour.
• Public safety: Even though private planes incur the same air-traffic control costs as commercial airliners, commercial planes pay for 95 percent of FAA air-traffic control costs in $2,015 in taxes per flight, while just accounting for 73 percent of air control capacity. Private planes only pay $236 per flight in taxes.
• Tax revenues: Private plane buyers can take a larger deduction their first year owning a new jet.
• The war on terror: The Department of Homeland Security IDs private planes as a particular risk.

Say a bunch of guys in the carpenter's union don't know how to work with bamboo. Well, here are some young people who have been trained to work with bamboo. Suddenly, rather than them being in the back of the line for the less-skilled blue-collar jobs, these kids have the advantage.

After all, the Valley free-enterprise culture is rabidly antilabor — why pay a competitive salary and offer health benefits when illegal immigrants will landscape your Sand Hill Road office grounds for a subsistence wage? The reason that those union carpenters of yesteryear could afford to become homeowners, take vacations, and bring their kids to the hospital wasn't because management just handed them collective bargaining agreements, forty-hour work weeks and health benefits.

Jones is right in pointing out that construction and installation work aren't like the manufacturing jobs that could easily migrate abroad, leaving American inner cities in tatters. But while a green building boom could last for a generation or two, it won't help the aging unemployed today. And it will eventually leave inner-city communities high and dry once again — unless it's accompanied by fundamental structural changes in social policy.

I admit, it's easy to get seduced by Jones's optimistic rhetoric, and easier still since he's a proven success in terms of getting money for job training programs for Oakland residents. Like Jones, I like to poke at the pretensions of "lifestyle environmentalists" in the "eco-elite," so I'm willing to keep listening. But history still makes me tend toward skepticism that cleantech will guarantee sustainable urban economies — and downright cynical when it comes to believing whatever new jobs are created will go to the communities that need them most. (Photo from Van Jones)

What the project doesn't do is compare the environmental cost per person-mile to that of Google's private commuter bus fleet. Nor does it compare the total carbon footprint over time of a newly-manufactured plug-in electric hybrid to, say, converting an existing automobile or improving public transportation. But then, shiny new cars are the classic California status symbol, and alternative-fuel vehicles are just the latest form of conspicuous consumption — the paint job just screams, "Look at me and how environmentally conscious I am!" (Photo Google.org)

Our green issue is that Google pretends to do something about the environment by trying to find sources of energy that are cheaper than coal, while its datacenters whir away, chewing up electricity all the while. Oh, and let's talk about the fact that Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley are located off a freeway exit, making public transit a virtual impossibility for most of its employees who work odd hours. All the Wi-Fi-equipped buses in the world won't make up for that.

Oh, and let's talk about Silicon Valley's electric-car business. Sure, they don't spew hydrocarbons while they jaunt down the highway, but where do you think the electricity that charges them comes from? Coal or natural gas, mostly. Here's a tip on the vehicle that's going to save the planet: It's called a bicycle. But you're never going to trade your car for a Trek, so forget I even mentioned it.

And then there are the gadgets themselves. Computers are designed to last three years, tops; if you get anything more out of them, consider yourself lucky. Cell phones? Replaced every 18 months on average. And if that fancy flat-screen LCD TV develops one bad pixel? Into the junk-heap it goes. A corollary to Moore's Law: Every year or so, you'll be able to buy something more powerful than what you already have. But ask yourself this: Would you be so unhappy if you just kept using your stuff a little longer?

Oh, and then there's Burning Man. People keep trying to make that event green. But until people stop driving massive RVs to it, it's still going to be a massive generator of pollution. Most of the carbon emissions from Burning Man result from driving to and fro. A suggestion: Move it back to a beach in San Francisco, and have the hipsters ride the frickin' N-Judah streetcar there.

Carbon offsets? A lovely market for Wall Street to trade on. But do they make any difference? No. They don't actually reduce carbon emissions; they just shuffle them around. Anyone who thinks buying a carbon offset actually solves global warming likely thinks they're going somewhere when they walk on a treadmill in the gym, too.

So there's Valleywag's green issue. Glad you asked?

"Green" technology I live next to Whole Foods, so I overhear the most ridiculous self-serving pseudoscience while in line for my organic espresso. People think they're saving the Earth from Republicans by buying the right dishwasher soap to drive home in a Lexus hybrid that spews as much greenhouse gas per mile as the gasoline-engine version. You want to clean the planet? Demand that Al Gore stop India and China from becoming the world's new pollution supersource.

The semantic Web Tim Berners-Lee asks that you please stop having so much fun on the Internet. It's time to return control of the whole thing to a bunch of postdoctoral researchers who publish long tomes titled "Thoughts on a metamodeling architecture of Web ontology languages." You can read about it in this month's Scientific American, but — wait for it — the article's not published on the Web.

Facebook I use Facebook daily and truth is, there's not much there to write about. So I'm not sure why the entire mainstream media suddenly replaced "MySpace" with "Facebook" in the exact same overreaching misreportage they've been writing for three years. My theory goes like this: Every time some kid makes a few billion on paper, editors who know in their hearts they'll be juggling spreadsheets to make the mortgage payments for the rest of their lives get a little crazy. At the rate Web 2.0 is minting rich kids it's going to be a long, long year.

A scary 2005 BBC documentary overplayed the doomsday angle. The planet has actually gotten brighter over the past 15 years. The term "global dimming" refers to the reduction of solar radiation hitting the planet's surface, caused by the proliferation of aerosols in the atmosphere. Though industrial soot plays a role, nothing affects sunlight like an erupting volcano. Since 1991, when the eruption of Mount Pinatubo caused the Earth to get much dimmer for about two years, there has been an overall brightening trend. According to NASA worldwide aerosol levels in 2005 were 20 percent off their late 1980s peak. But the amount of sunlight hitting each square yard of Chinese soil has declined by 3.7 watts in the past 50 years; India has experienced a similar decrease. The two nations' surge in aerosol-producing economic activity hasn't been accompanied by regulations to control emissions. Aerosols may actually mask global warming at the planet's surface, but recent research shows the brown cloud over Asia is heating up the lower atmosphere from approximately 6,500 to 16,500 feet. That's bad news for the Himalayan glaciers, which are melting at a rapid clip.

(Above: An animated, narrated video timeline of the Cosco Busan accident.)

They're floating marvels — 50 times more carbon-efficient than trucks, packed with information technology that tracks and controls everything, able to calmly navigate the stormy, misnamed Pacific Ocean and then glide smoothly beneath our bridges, sometimes with only a few carefully computed feet to spare. The accident that caused the Cosco Busan to hit the bridge was an astounding statistical anomaly, even accounting for human error. Journalists, who seem unable to count past three, have climbed over each other to portray the admittedly bad spill (the wildlife death toll is past 2,000 counted, with many more surely uncounted) into an oh-my-God catastrophe that proves Man's folly and Earth's fragility, by which they really mean big businesses suck, boo. Jeez, people, how do you think that 99-cent hipster hat you bought in the Mission got here?

It may warm their hearts, but UPS's left-hand turns do nothing to chill the planet. The left-hand turn prohibition at UPS is not news; the shipper has been doing it for years, as part of its regimented efficiency scheme. New York Times writer Bob Tedeschi even wrote about it almost exactly one year ago.

What does that mean? First, that the Times fell for UPS's PR spin, not bothering even to consult the morgue. Second, that Digg users fell for the Times story — and they also didn't bother to consult the site's archive. UPS should be commended for running its operations efficiently. And heck, let's pat UPS PR on the back for confabulating about an existing practice as green business.

But does this really mean that we're not polluting the planet when we order books on Amazon.com and get them shipped to us on a UPS truck? Of course not. Only in the dreamlike fantasy world of Digg is that true.

It's a sensible game plan. Apple has proven too tough a target. So now, Greenpeace has started tracking a few more companies. Highly notable companies with staunch defenders who will give the nonprofit some attention by ranting and raving about its charges, but who will be, hopefully, less defensive than Apple's Web warriors. Hence, Microsoft and Nintendo are now the worst polluters in the eyes of Greenpeace. Fanboys vs. environmental fanatics: We look forward to this deeply cynical battle. May the most outlandish argument win.

After testing the iPhone in U.K. laboratories, Greenpeace researchers said they found it contains toxic brominated compounds, indicating the prescence of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and hazardous PVC. Sounds unpleasant. Greenpeace published a full report here. In reaction to the news, The U.S. National Center for Environmental Health said it will file suit against Apple for breaking a Californian law which requires products containing certain chemicals to carry a warning label, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. The takeaway? However much you love your iPhone, please, for the love of Jobs, do not pry open the case and rub its innards up and down your crotch. It's tempting, we realize. But don't.