Pretty much no one wants to wait around for their theoretical EV to charge, which is one reason why people aren't buying them in droves yet. But in the near future, charging won't take more than 10 minutes, thanks to Nissan. Along with a Japanese university, the car company developed an EV charger that takes a fraction of the time of current chargers without compromising battery life. Right now, charging an EV generally takes about eight hours, or 48 times as long as this new charger will need. It's still a little bit longer than a stop at the gas …

Eeek. A huge crack has opened up in the hull of the ship leaking oil off the coast of New Zealand, and the ship could break up apart "at any point," according to Maritime New Zealand. In the U.S., the Justice Department had to sue Transocean to force the company to answer government subpoenas related to the Macondo well spill. Can we feed people without killing the planet? Yes, says a new study, but it’ll take money, planning, and eating less meat. The EPA is speeding up Great Lakes clean-up efforts. Offshore wind is doing its thing, trying to get …

Sorry to have to bum y'all out, but here is a new way that we are all destroying the planet without even realizing it: by washing our clothes. And, yah, I know you wash your clothes in cold water, but I'm not talking about the energy your machines use. I'm talking about how whenever you wash clothes made of synthetic fibers, tiny bits of plastic flake off and get flushed with the wash water into the sewage system. Those tiny bits of plastic get washed out into oceans and shorelines worldwide. According to the study that came up with this …

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is learning the hard way that politicizing a government report is much, much harder after you've hired a reputable and principled scientist to write it. John Anderson, the author of the agency's report on Texas' Galveston Bay, says the agency removed references to humans' contributions to climate change. Anderson and the research center that gave him the assignment are fighting against the release of the edited report. Jim Lester, the VP of the research center, told the Houston Chronicle that the report's release has been held up for a year because of the agency's …

The only thing that stands between us and eating fish riddled with genes that some dude spliced together in the lab is the Office of Management and Budget. The FDA has finished its evaluation of genetically engineered salmon and recommended that the fish be commercialized. The GE fish grows fast and big, which means more fish for all of us. But it also could have worrisome impacts on the environment, because it's a fish that we programmed in order to bend its entire existence to our will! It probably won’t interbreed with regular fish. The GE salmon is supposed to …

Republicans have been arguing that environmental regulations kill jobs. But research keeps showing that it's just not true. An independent analysis of the coal ash industry, for instance, reveals that stricter safety regulations would create 28,000 jobs overall. These jobs come from the need for waste management, wastewater treatment, construction, and the continued operation of clean-up facilities. As long as we're mining coal, they won't go away. Really, environmental regulation is a win-win: we get more jobs, and we get to slow down how fast we’re killing the planet and, by extension, our way of life.

In America, most corn is no longer meant for eating, at least by humans. Only 20 percent of all the gazillions of ears of corn the United States grows make it into a person's mouth as corn. The rest goes to feed animals (which do make it into people's mouth as beef and other meats) and to brew corn ethanol. In one year, we used more than 5 billion bushels of corn for ethanol, which we don't even use that much of! But it's our corn, and we can do what we want with it, right? Well, a new report …

Australia's carbon tax bill passed its lower House by a thin majority; it should easily pass the Senate and make it into law. An oil cleanup contest awarded $1 million to the winning Team Elastec/American Marine, which soaked up 4,670 gallons of oil per minute and got to 89.5 percent of the oil, on average. China is going to tax the hell out of oil and gas and reinvest the money in nuclear reactors and wind farms. Rick Perry's secret economic sauce: domestic drilling for oil and gas in ANWR and off the eastern seaboard. Apparently there are whole worlds …

Virgin Atlantic is promising that within a few years, they'll be able to make their long haul flights with half the carbon impact that their jet fuel creates now. The key technology here captures gases from steel production and makes them into jet fuel. It's supposedly better than biofuels, in part because it doesn't raise the same land use concerns. Virgin's not making the transition on its own: the company is partnering with Boeing, Swedish Fuels, and New Zealand-based Lanza Tech. The first flight using the fuel could take off within a year or a year and half, but the …

It's official. Environmental groups are disenchanted enough with the Obama administration that they've decided to hit it with the same tactic they used for Bush, a tactic that the environmental movement has relied on since time immemorial to get done what needs to be done: suing the crap out of the government. Today, a suite of environmental groups that includes NRDC, EDF and Earthjustice revived a 2008 lawsuit they'd first brought against the Bush administration. Its aim is to keep people from breathing nasty, dirty, health-threatening air by forcing the government to tighten smog standards. The Obama administration was going …