It is easy to think of America as the land of Hummer-driving, ginormous burger-eating environmental vandals, but of course there are good green things happening there. The Economist this week has two interesting accounts:

* the first big concentrating solar power plant since the 80s (who says solar isn’t a “mature technology”?) has just been opened in Nevada.

* there’s apparently (by the Economist’s judgement anyway) a boom in green building. What that it were the same in Britain – whenever I catch the train those hideous quasi-Georgian brick boxes packed on the outskirts of towns and villages make me despair.

Slowly, far too slowly, the multinationals are being forced to notice environmental campaigns. The Independent reports:

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, which between them account for 55 per cent of the global soft drinks and mineral water market, have vowed to overhaul their operations to recover and recycle the billions of plastic containers used to sell their products worldwide…
Coca-Cola announced last week that it intended to recycle all its plastic bottles in the US within five years. A £30m recycling plant will be built in South Carolina with a capacity to handle two billion bottles a year with similar facilities planned for Austria, Mexico and the Philippines.

You might think I’d say “good”, but I won’t. Recycling was a simple first step that got people involved in “going green”, but once you build that £30m plant there’ll be enormous pressure to run it at full capacity. Instead, much better would be to first reduce the number of bottles used (promotion of good ol’ tap water would be a good start), and then resuse bottles, rather than recycling them. And the only way that latter is going to happen is by governments showing just a tinsy bit of courage.

… just technology a century and a half old, and it is called the bicycle. Cycling England has calculated that “making a £70m annual investment in cycling initiatives the government could cut up to 54m car journeys a year by 2012 and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 35,000 tonnes”.

But to really make it happen, what you have to do is go back not quite to the start of the bicycle, but certainly the best part of a century, and make the roads, at least the small city and suburban roads, do what they were originally designed to do – get people around by foot and slow transport (then animal, now bicycle), and made motor vehicles a highly restricted, rare form of transport, used only when strictly necessary, for the disabled and for transport of goods that can’t practically be carried any other way.