Archive: Feb 2012
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Couch surfers unite! Big business stomps on the sharing economy
Last year, the rental car industry smacked down car-sharing companies in Washington. Now, it appears that the hotel biz may have it out for folks who rent out their spare bedrooms via Airbnb. It’s all fun and games until greedy corporations get involved.
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Risky business: States require insurers to plan for climate change
After a record-setting year of climate disasters in the U.S., insurance companies in three states will now have to assess risks related to climate change.
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Four ways enviros can keep Walmart in the hot seat
The world's biggest retailer has gotten an undeserved free pass from many environmentalists. It's time to take a tougher line and set a higher standard, argues Stacy Mitchell in the conclusion to her series on Walmart's greenwashing.
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Mitt Romney ‘sings’ ‘America the Beautiful,’ ironically
Mitt Romney really likes “America the Beautiful,” as he says in this video compiled by ThinkProgress, but it’s not clear what he likes about it. It’s not the music, since he obviously has no fidelity to that. It’s not the message, which is all about purple mountains and fruited plains, which Romney’s oil-greedy policies would […]
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Government will develop wind energy off the Atlantic coast
The federal government has opted to move forward with wind energy development off the coast of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia, and Virginia’s Republican governor for one could not be happier. Sure, the party line might be that alternative energy is stupid — but when you have the federal government actively hunting down corporate […]
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Brad Pitt on why cars are stupid
Brad Pitt explained the premise of his film Moneyball to Jon Stewart by way of analogy to gas-guzzling cars. Most of the interview wasn’t about green stuff at all (his Celebrity Cause is building houses in New Orleans, which is sort of related but not totally related), but Comedy Central did get a pretty good […]
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Why Apple should pour money into clean energy
Google's success at making real money on its green investments suggests to Marc Gunther of Greenbiz that every tech company with gigantic cash holdings -- i.e. Apple and Microsoft -- should be parking at least some of them in targeted clean energy investments.
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Austin gets a super swank zero-energy suburb
How do you build a (nearly) net-zero-energy suburb in 2008, at the nadir of the economic crash, when no bank in the country is convinced you’ll be able to sell your more energy-efficient but pricier homes?
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Why we should all be drinking toilet water
If you live downstream from another city, you're probably already drinking treated wastewater -- and engineers want you to drink even more of it.