Cities aren't perfectly efficient energy machines, you guys. They're great, especially when transit and density make it possible for city dwellers to use less energy, but cities still release a lot of waste heat out of tailpipes and chimneys. And all that waste heat has to go somewhere.

According to a new study published in Nature Climate Change, that waste heat is disrupting the jet stream and warming up other parts of the world, thawing winters across northern Asia, eastern China, the Northeast U.S., and southern Canada. From Reuters:

That is different from what has long been known as the urban-heat island effect, where city buildings, roads and sidewalks hold on to the day's warmth and make the urban area hotter than the surrounding countryside.

Instead, the researchers wrote, the excess heat given off by burning fossil fuels appears to change air circulation patterns and then hitch a ride on air and ocean currents, including the jet stream. ...

It's a bittersweet moment for direct environmental action against nasty tar-sands pollution. (So many moments are bittersweet in the fight against nasty tar-sands pollution ...)

On the sweet side, Canada's Idle No More movement has gone global today, mobilizing protests around the world to highlight mistreatment of indigenous peoples and the environment. The movement has been galvanized by plans to pipe tar-sands oil across First Nations land in British Columbia and by the Canadian government's attempts to roll back environmental protections for most of the country's waterways. Actions are already rolling across Canada, at U.N. headquarters in New York, and as far away as Australia and Greenland.

Settler in Solidarity #IdleNoMore twitter.com/CaitlinTolley/…

— CaitlinTolley (@CaitlinTolley) January 28, 2013

Canada stand up! #IdleNoMore twitpic.com/bz1xue

— FP Jewellery (@FredrickPrince) January 28, 2013

"This day of action will peacefully protest attacks on Democracy, Indigenous Sovereignty, Human Rights and Environmental Protections when Canadian MPs return to the House of Commons on January 28th," organizers said in a statement.

But for the bitter: The Tar Sands Blockade, which is fighting ongoing construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas, faced a significant setback in court on Friday.

You're riding along on your bike, minding your own lane, when suddenly a driver flings open a car door right in front of you. If you're lucky, you brake in time or swerve out of the way. If you're not lucky, you could die.

As the Atlantic Cities reports, earlier this week the Virginia state Senate easily passed a bill that makes opening car doors into traffic "unless and until it is reasonably safe to do so" an infraction punishable of a fine up to $100. Not much, but better than nothing, right? Well, not if you're Virginia House Speaker William Howell (R) or Virginian-Pilot columnist Kerry Dougherty, who called the bill "stupid" and "asinine," respectively.

According to Cyclelicious, 40 states plus the District of Columbia have anti-dooring laws of some kind. But come on: How many cyclists do you know who have been doored, and how many drivers do you know who have ever gotten in trouble for it?

Being doored is why I essentially ride in the middle of the lane. Sorry, drivers that follow me. Getting doored could kill me.

— Michael Perkins (@perkinsms) January 25, 2013

After getting doored yesterday for my first time in SF I've got a bike messenger interview today. Hope I make it there safe!

— Matthew McKenna (@mpmckenna8) January 25, 2013

Just 'doored' a kid in the Tesco car park! Serves him right for running around really.

— Joe Boissevain (@JoeBoe1) January 25, 2013

This week the "gritty" "fascinating" "illogical" "thriller" The East debuts at Sundance. The film stars Brit Marling as an ex-FBI agent hired by an evil corporation to infiltrate an eco-anarchist group. Watch this while I try to take some deep breaths and calm the fuck down.

The film's writers Marling and director Zal Batmanglij did not exactly do in-depth research before embarking on the project. They could've read Green is the New Red, or gone to a protest action. Instead they spent a summer dumpster-diving. From the Huffington Post:

In reality, Marling and Batmanglij -- who previously teamed up for the 2011 Sundance entry "The Sound of My Voice" -- seem to have nothing but wide-eyed admiration for the people they met during their summer off the grid. "You learned how to hop trains, but you also learned how to take things that are given away to the service industry back for yourself," Marling said. "In many of these collectives, you'll learn: How do you fix your bike? In fact, how do you build it from scratch? If you have a car, how do you convert it to biodiesel? How do you learn homeopathic remedies from weeds you can forage from dumpsters?"

They were foraging weeds from dumpsters. This should tell you all you need to know.

"Marling and Batmanglij's experience among real-life 'travelers' helps give the film authenticity," says one of the most generally clueless articles I've ever read at the (generally clueless) Huffington Post, which ends with the filmmakers saying that the glorious dirty angels they encountered were "so happy, and not in a simple way" and also "very handsome."

This week, McDonald's announced that it will start serving a lot more fast-food fish starting next month, in the form of "Fish McBites" that it hopes will boost sales.

The company also announced that all those bites, plus its Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, will be made from sustainable, wild-caught Alaska pollock, with the Marine Stewardship Council's stamp of approval right there on the box.

The MSC "is proud to support McDonald's and its commitment to sustainability." The fast-food giant has been serving four kinds of MSC-labeled sustainable fish in European locations since October 2011.

Is this the part where I'm supposed to say, "Yay McDonald's"? Because yeah, that's not happening.

Trees! Everyone loves trees. They soak up carbon, make stuff pretty, and have been shown to keep crime down in cities. It's pretty clear our fates are tied to the trees'. Sooo, what happens when they all die? Uhh, so do we.

Millions of ash trees in the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. are being chomped to bits by a beetle called the emerald ash borer. But those beetles aren't just hurting trees. From Discovery:

[I]n the neighborhoods hit by the beetle that kills ash trees, researchers noticed a stark rise in human mortality from cardiovascular and lower respiratory disease: there were 15,000 more deaths from cardiovascular disease, or 16.7 additional deaths per year per 100,000 adults, and 6,000 more deaths from lower respiratory disease than in unaffected areas, or 6.8 additional deaths per year per 100,000 adults.

Ken Schmier is a Bay Area transit guru. He's essentially responsible for the limitless Muni Fast Pass in San Francisco, and created the NextBus application in the 2000s to help people catch those ever-elusive city buses. But now Schmier is thinking transit may not be all it's cracked up to be.

“Frankly,” the Bay Area attorney and businessman told Next City, “I think transit agencies are obsolete.”

Blame that damn sharing economy.

Schmier is now all about what he calls “Micro-Transit” -- in other words, ride-sharing, or turning regular cars into taxis.

The Bay Area already has Casual Car Pool, a long-standing ride-share project that relies on a vintage website and message board instead of the smartphones and big money of new ride-sharing ventures. It’s kind of an organized form of hitchhiking, and it really works.

Schmier wants to make this general idea more efficient, scalable, and tech-savvy. From Next City:

High-fructose corn syrup was our sweetener of choice in the late '90s, when we were all high on junk food and the potential for this crazy new thing called The Internet. Those were fast times!

Now we are jaded and less interested in the sweet stuff. According to the USDA, this year only 4.5 percent of the U.S. corn crop is expected to be used for production of high-fructose corn syrup, the lowest amount since 1997.

Fuck you, soda!

Corn costs have tripled since 2004, making the syrup a less cost-effective sweetener. And some health advocates say efforts to combat obesity have helped to curb HFCS consumption, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s much-despised and much-lauded big soda ban.

From Bloomberg the news source, not Bloomberg the mayor:

Are you sick of micro apartments yet? Well, too bad. Yesterday New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winner of a competition to design teensy live-in closets for an East Side apartment complex of 55 units. Here are drawings of the winning design, showing how an apartment might be adapted throughout the day:

From the Associated Press:

To make up for the shoe-box dimensions, the building will offer residents common spaces like a rooftop garden and lounge area on nearly every floor. The aim is to offer more such tiny apartments throughout the city as affordable options for the young singles, cash-poor and empty nesters who are increasingly edged out of the nation's most expensive real-estate market...

If the pilot program is successful, New York could ultimately overturn a requirement established in 1987 that all new apartments be at least 400 square feet.

A third of Manhattan residents live alone, and apparently hate the idea of communal housing, so Bloomberg says the city needs these units to "keep us strong in the 21st Century" with "new ideas" and the young gentry that hatch them. Young gentry like Manhattan resident Sam Neuman, who loves his tiny apartment, but not in a super-healthy way:

"I've developed this weird Stockholm Syndrome, which you identify with your captors," said the 31-year-old publicist. "When I go to other people's apartments, I think, 'Why do they need more than one bedroom?' I'm really very happy here. There's not really time to let things accumulate because ... where would I put them?"

The Sierra Club seems like the kind of folks who button the top button, not the ones who hang out on the barricades. Until now.

For the first time in the hallowed green group's 120-year history, it will be engaging in civil disobedience at the Feb. 17 Washington, D.C., rally against the Keystone XL pipeline. Is the Sierra Club really getting wild? Well, probably not. The group won’t say what the civil disobedience will be exactly, but it will be invite-only (!), it's been approved by the board of directors, and it’s a one-time-only event.

From the Club's Executive Director Michael Brune:

Next month, the Sierra Club will officially participate in an act of peaceful civil resistance. We’ll be following in the hallowed footsteps of Thoreau, who first articulated the principles of civil disobedience 44 years before John Muir founded the Sierra Club.

Some of you might wonder what took us so long. Others might wonder whether John Muir is sitting up in his grave. In fact, John Muir had both a deep appreciation for Thoreau and a powerful sense of right and wrong. And it’s the issue of right versus wrong that has brought the Sierra Club to this unprecedented decision. ...