This has been a big week for clean air, public health, and grassroots activism that is moving America beyond coal.

First, we can breathe easier this week knowing that more aging, polluting coal plants are being retired as South Carolina Gas & Electric announced the retirement of six coal boilers.  As I've said with other coal plant retirements, now we must ensure that the transition from coal to clean energy happens in a way that protects workers and communities. We've seen it happen before – from the Pacific Northwest to the Tennessee Valley - and today we call on SCG&E to work with the employees at its affected plants.

Then yesterday we saw a victory against coal exports when the Seattle City Council voted "Unanimously (and Symbolically) Against Transport of Coal"- marking their disapproval of coal exports through their city and the region. We've seen amazing work by dedicated residents of the Pacific Northwest to get communities along the coal export rail lines to oppose or raise objections to new coal export facilities. With six new coal export terminals proposed that would ship 150 million tons of coal per year to Asia, these hard-working activists have been sounding the alarm all along the train routes - from points east, to Spokane, through the Columbia River Gorge; and from Portland, Oregon, to Bellingham, Washington. This news came just as the Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its latest numbers, showing that coal generation was down to only 34% of US electricity in March - its lowest level since 1973, the first year the agency started keeping records. Meanwhile, wind increased by 28% from this time last year nationwide - Iowa is now getting 29% of its electricity from wind, and South Dakota hit 30%!

King Coal is struggling - they know Americans are fed up with their life-threatening pollution and their excessive lobbying for loopholes in our clean air and water laws. Americans wants clean energy. These winds of change are blowing not just on our coasts, but even in the heart of Appalachian coal country. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a major front page article that featured American Electric Power's massive 800MW Big Sandy coal plant as a symbol of both coal's decline, and the increasing pressure on ratepayers to prop up aging coal plants.

Later that same day, AEP announced it was withdrawing its plans to put a $1 billion scrubber on the Big Sandy coal plant, which would have caused local rate-payers' bills to skyrocket. It was a stunning reversal.

Until yesterday, American Electric Power was planning to sink over a billion dollars into new scrubbers on the plant. However, AEP faced strong criticism from the local community over a 30% increase in rates that would be required to finance the upgrades. This rate increase would have taken the average energy bill for a household from around $1,500 per year to over $2,000 a year.

"I went to the hearing and listened to AEP explain their plan," said Patty Wallace, an 82-year-old resident of Louisa, Kentucky and member of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth. "Their own presentation showed exactly why the proposal to invest more money in that old coal plant made no sense. On top of our existing bills, all of us would have to pay a billion dollars in surcharges. I said, 'We'd be fossil fools for sure to do that.' I'm glad to see that they are beginning to pay attention to what's going on in the world. It's time to invest in energy efficiency and clean energy."

Finally, there is a new voice in that fight for clean energy this week - in Indiana, the Sierra Club's new state Beyond Coal campaign representative, Dave Menzer, was the subject of a full-page profile in the Indianapolis Business Journal (article is behind a pay-wall). While the Journal said that coal interests in the state might see Dave as "the devil," his vision would seem pretty reasonable to most Hoosiers, and most Americans:

"It really makes sense to put that money into something cleaner, in our view, than into something past the point of its useful life," Menzer said.

Indeed.

When President Obama announced a new program during the recent G8 summit to help bolster food and agriculture in developing nations through corporate “pledges,” I was most struck by his choice of partners in the effort. A Reuters report on the announcement read:

The initiative includes a new partnership with agribusiness giants such as DuPont, Monsanto and Cargill, along with smaller companies, including almost 20 from Africa, which will commit some $3 billion for projects to help farmers in the developing world build local markets and improve productivity.

Those three companies are the good food movement’s equivalent of the law firm Dewey, Cheatem & Howe -- not the folks it wants to see put in charge of anything, much less “feeding the world.” These companies believe that exporting western-style industrial agriculture to the developing world (Africa in particular) is key to ensuring enough food for a growing population. And they maintain this position despite the growing evidence that industrial agriculture can’t solve the problem.

Photo by Jeremy Blanchard.

With the revitalization of American cities has come increased excitement about public parks; we may have less land to spare than in Frederick Law Olmsted’s day, but we’re finding creative ways to squeeze more open space and greenery out of brownfields, empty lots, and old train tracks. The mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., even turned his unused parking space into a mini-park.

Now, the nonprofit Trust for Public Land (TPL) has devised a system that allows you to keep tabs on your city’s progress, and compare your hometown to the burg next door. It’s called ParkScore, and it measures and ranks the park systems of the country’s 40 largest cities. It’s not like Walk Score, where you can type in your address and get a walkability rating for your immediate neighborhood, but I’m sure the data could be used the same way (and similarly co-opted as a real-estate selling point).

And the winners? San Francisco came in first, followed by Sacramento, New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Bringing up the rear is Fresno, Calif., where more than 60 percent of the population lacks easy access to public parks. Charlotte, N.C., Louisville, Ky., and Indianapolis are also at the bottom of the heap.

80-year-old photos of the Helheim Glacier.

While cleaning out a basement at the National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark, researchers found a box full of glass photo plates from a 1930s expedition to Greenland. The forgotten photos showed detailed aerial and ground-level pictures of 132 Greenland glaciers -- which allowed scientists to study how the glaciers changed over a much longer period than was previously possible. The verdict? Many glaciers in the 1930s were actually melting even faster than they are today.

Poster by Reddit user JayJay_90.

Tyrion Lannister is my favorite character in Game of Thrones (both the HBO series and the book series, which I refuse to call by its goofy official name), and Peter Dinklage is super-handsome and deserves 300 Emmys. So it's nice to know that, unlike Tyrion, Dinklage wears his good-heartedness openly -- he's the new national spokesperson for the Farm Sanctuary's Walk for Farm Animals campaign. Book series fans, maybe don't tell them about Pretty the Pig.

Today at Grist we celebrate the end of our transition from our co-located infrastructure to the cloud.  This change, which included moving our CMS and primary hosting, migrating our donation and membership applications and changing our email broadcasting technology, has seemed like a long process at times, but has resulted in a Grist that is infinitely more flexible and ready for growth than we were at this time last year (and given how we're growing, that's a good thing.) If you're curious about where we're hosted now instead of on these boxes, we're hosted on the WordPress.com cloud through Automattic's …

This adorable terrier-looking pup was hanging around a group of cyclists when they took a break, so one of them gave her chicken. Well, you know what happens when you give a dog chicken: She never leaves your side again, even if you're riding your bike from China to Tibet, covering nearly 40 miles a day and climbing 16,000-foot mountains. The dog, nicknamed Xiaosa, had no choice but to run alongside the bikes for more than 1,000 miles. Because love. And also chicken.

Corporations are officially people now, and like people, sometimes corporations will loudly say that they believe one thing while their actions reveal another preference entirely. Like a lady who says she wants to settle down but dates only dudes who are apt to move to Hawaii at a moment's notice, American companies having been saying they’re concerned about climate change at the same time that they have been fooling around with trade organizations, think tanks, and lobbying groups that have been working to undermine climate action.

In a new report, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) calls companies out on this behavior. Being an organization staffed by scientists with “scientists” in the name, UCS approached this in a rigorous manner: Its team identified 28 publicly traded companies that had intervened in the climate debate in some way, and looked at their lobbying, campaign donations, advocacy work, SEC filings, earning calls, funding of think tanks, and press materials. You know, basically every shred of evidence the companies had left behind.

The Bush EPA was tougher on oil and gas producers than the Obama EPA -- enforcement actions are at their lowest level in years.

New York City could ban the sale of large sodas.

Properties close to national wildlife refuges have greater value.

Photo by londoninflames.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: The success or failure of my No New Stuff challenge hinges on a bottle of mousse.

I stood in the hair aisle of the salon for a good five minutes a few weeks ago, holding an intense internal debate. Was I allowed to buy it? Pro: Mousse could technically be considered a toiletry item, therefore exempt under my original No New Stuff terms. Con: I already owned a bottle of a different hair product. Pro: But that stuff doesn’t work. Con: But shouldn’t I finish the bottle -- which would take months under my intermittent blow-drying routine -- before re-upping?*

Banning new purchases, even if it’s just for a month, certainly brings fresh philosophical questions to the formerly simple act of buying stuff. Do I really need that dress, that toothbrush, that couch pillow? Could I get by instead by repairing something I already own? And if only a new one will do, does it have to be brand-new, or can I save money and materials by picking up a new-to-me item?

I handled a few key repairs and refurbishments last time around, so it’s time now to consider the secondhand solution. I’m already a huge fan of resale shops and online marketplaces, so I figured that used shopping would be an easy out for my retail desires. That coveted lime-squeezer thingy? That shoe rack I’ve been meaning to buy? Surely Craigslist would have my back.