There are two important principles of veganism that most people don't understand. More food is vegan than is immediately obvious. But more seemingly innocuous products have animals parts in them than the average meat-eater imagines. Case in point: tattoos. As Tim Donnelly writes at The Atlantic, "The ink and processes at your average shop contain a veritable buffet of animal detritus: charred bones of dead animals in the ink, fat from once-living things in the glycerin that serves as a carrying agent, enzymes taken from caged sheep that go into making the care products." And you're putting that in your …

TransCanada officials announced last night that the company would re-route the Keystone XL pipeline away from environmentally sensitive areas of Nebraska. “I can confirm the route will be changed and Nebraskans will play an important role in determining the final route," an executive said in a statement. House Republicans are working on a bill that would speed up the re-routing process. (Nope, none of this is politically motivated. Not at all.) The NYPD forcibly drove #OWS from Zuccotti Park last night. They even threw away the bike generators, reportedly. The Northeast's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative saved money, created jobs, and …

One day, maybe, planes will be able fly on electricity alone, but until then, the best chance they have to get off gasoline is to switch over to biofuels. And that's actually happening! Over the summer, two biofueled flights made it across the Atlantic, and now Alaska Airlines is pushing an ambitious commercial biofuel flight program. Last week, the company flew across the country with a fuel that was 20 percent biofuel. The particular biofuel they used can come from algae, from chicken fat, or from a variety of other sources. There's also a growing amount of healthy competition among …

Hybrid cars like the Prius emit less carbon than conventional cars. But they also depend on rare earth materials to make their engines work. And the mining of rare earth extracts a heavy toll on the environment in other ways. China has most of the world's easily accessible rare earth (which isn't actually rare, just hard to find in concentrations that make extraction profitable), and it recently decided to cut off supply to other countries. But the United States is also jumping into the business. Here's the big environmental problem, as Mother Jones explains: Rare earths occur naturally with the …

Republicans aren't against environmental protections just because those laws "kill jobs." Supposedly they also damage national security. Canada sticks its fingers in its ears, sticks out its tongue, and tells the U.S. it'll just sell its tar sands oil to China. Forget Solyndra: California-based NRG Energy is a much more typical -- and much more successful -- case study for how energy subsidies work. Climate change denial is not just a river in Egypt, but now it’s also a river in Egypt; warming-related drought is threatening the Nile and Limpopo rivers. Data can help solve environmental conundrums by measuring sewage …

Not only is eating fish not the most sustainable of food choices, it's likely a rip-off. If you're eating a pricey fish like cod or salmon, there's more than a one in five chance that it's something much cheaper. The FDA, though, is developing a new regulatory program to fight fish fraud. The agency is building a library of fish DNA that it can use to test samples of raw, frozen, steamed, or deep-fried fish and determine the sample's species. This genetic identification process is known as DNA bar coding, and it's gotten so cheap that the FDA can do …

The Obama administration delayed approval of the Keystone XL pipeline! (You probably already heard that, but we're still excited!) The White House says the decision's not political but "based on the process that we've been going through" (that up until enviros started protesting was moving swiftly towards approval). Oh, and the decision will now come after the next presidential election. So. Not political at all. Maybe all these failed carbon capture projects should be telling policymakers something. Something like … this is not going to work. Does heating your home with wood make you a "modern-day Paul Bunyan"? We're more …

If you’ve ever looked at a wedding registry, you might have a sense of how many uni-tasking kitchen appliances there are on the market. Most kitchens have more gadgets than they can hold, and most people aren't using their canning equipment/bread machine/cider press very often. So wouldn't it make more sense to share? In Portland, a couple of collaborative consumption centers are working off of that idea. In north and now southeastern Portland, residents can borrow kitchen tools from a lending library of gadgets. North Portland Preserve and Serve is donation-based: just schedule some quality time with that steam juicer …

As president, Rick Perry would eliminate the Department of Energy, if he could remember he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy. Do countries have to officially declare a trade war? How will we know when the U.S./China trade war over solar power actually starts? Canada continues to prove that it’s just masquerading as a nice pleasant country. Now it's slashing its environment budget. It all seems kind of sinister, right? Climate change would benefit the country's farmers; Canada does have trees to spare; maybe it's enjoying all the attention? Hmmmm. Australia, meanwhile, is preparing to host refugees from Pacific …

The State Department seems to be seriously weighing a change in the path that the Keystone XL pipeline would take. A change in the route would be a victory for the pipeline's opponents, but only a partial one. There are two main environmental concerns connected to the pipeline project. One is the potential for spills in environmentally sensitive areas. Routing the pipeline around those spots would address some of those concerns. (For whatever reason, State didn't even consider that there might be more than one pathway the pipeline could take before enviros started objecting to the project.) The other concern …