Twenty years and $350 million after President George H.W. Bush first signed an act to restore Washington State's Elwha River, the process to bring down two gigantic dams has begun. That could save the Elwha’s population of salmon. The dams have blocked fish from swimming upriver and salmon populations in the river have dwindled. The New York Times reports that Chinook salmon populations had been down to 3,000 fish in the Elwha because of the dams, but could now swell to almost 400,000. As part of the restoration project, the federal government helped fund the creation of new power sources …

China is making solar power cheap in order to drive solar growth. Since 1963, U.K. fishing boats have tossed $1 billion worth of dead or dying cod overboard to keep within their quotas. In Washington State, what The New York Times calls "the largest dam removal project in American history" will destroy two dams and help salmon regrow their population. Protected areas aren't enough to stop biodiversity from dwindling. Vermont might not be as dedicated to freedom as New Hampshire (live free or die!), but they're still obsessed enough with civil liberties to object to smart grid technology on the …

Back in 2006, Dr. Charles Monnett published an article that included observations about polar bear deaths in the Beaufort Sea. In the report, co-authored with another scientist, Monnett reported seeing four dead polar bears in 2004. Monnett works for the federal government, and this month he was put on administrative leave while the government investigates "integrity issues" connected to that report. Administrative leave means he has to put all current research on hold. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a watchdog organization, has formally complained about the investigation. In its complaint, the group includes portions of an interview the Department of …

For the climate skeptics who dragged us all through Climategate on the conviction that climate scientists are lying jerks, here is the data you wanted to see. Here it is. The University of East Anglia put it online for all to access. This might make it harder for scientists to get shared data in the future, since people don’t always like it when you give away their work for free, but it is worth it just to shut you up. Happy now? Oh, what, you actually have no idea how to interpret this raw data?   Trevor Davies, who's in …

Photovoltaic cells, the basic unit of solar power systems, turn light into electricity. But fueling photovoltaics with sunlight isn't always practical. MIT scientists came up with a way around this issue: They found a really efficient way to turn heat into light. Scientists have known for awhile that this is possible, but the MIT scientists figured out how to use a certain type of pitted material to force heat into generating the sort of wavelengths the PV cells love the most. Basically, it's as if this material turns grass into chocolate: both are forms of energy, but humans like to …

Japanese people are already kicking Americans' butts when it comes to energy efficiency: They use half as much energy as we do already, despite their proclivity for gadgets like automatic toilets. But since the Fukushima meltdown, they've gotten even more hyper-aware of the need to save energy. In Tokyo, the government is hoping to cut electricity use during work hours by 15 percent compared to last year, and they're on track to do it. Offices dim the lights and keep the thermostat hovering around 83 degrees, businessmen are wearing shorts, and plugging in a fan at your desk is a …

Both options currently on the table for raising the debt ceiling would cut environment and energy spending. The president will announce new fuel economy standards -- cars and light-duty trucks will need to be at 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The EPA is proposing the first air standards for fracking. Flat screen TV use less than half the energy they did in 2008. The secret is just using LEDs. Jon Huntsman believes "conservation is conservative." Maybe the next president will appoint him head of the EPA. Consumers are starting to wonder if it's such a good idea to clean …

What do you do with the empty plastic bottles that you really shouldn't have been drinking out of, anyway? These British school children spent a year and half collecting 1,500 of them and used the bottles to construct a greenhouse, in which they are very successfully growing tomatoes.

Mountaintop-removal mining is not only bad for the environment, it's bad  -- very bad -- for the health of the people who are exposed to it. A new study, based on a door-to-door survey, found that in communities exposed to this type of mining, cancer rates were twice as high as in communities that weren’t exposed. That's after controlling for all of those other cancer-causing factors: age, sex, smoking, occupation, etc. Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones puts this in context: Nationally, 3.9 percent of Americans are cancer survivors, according to the Centers for Disease Control, but the rate in West …

Here's a novel idea: if your local extraction industry is causing hundreds of earthquakes, make them stop doing whatever it was that was causing the earthquakes. That's exactly what the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission did yesterday, when its members voted to shut down a fracking fluid disposal well and ban the drilling of new ones. The Associated Press explains: Those wells are near a fault system that has spawned dozens of earthquakes this year. A magnitude-4.7 earthquake in February near Greenbrier was the most powerful to hit the state in 35 years. After two of the four stopped operating …