By Jess Zimmerman

I know football fans feel pretty strongly about doing things exactly the same way every time, lest their switch in underwear or beer brand or whatever be the butterfly’s wing that leads to their favorite team tanking. So I have some bad news for you guys: there will be some changes this year. But take heart. Even if this makes your team lose, it’s in the name of making Super Bowl XLVI the greenest one yet. 

It’s still going to use a gargantuan amount of energy, of course, not even counting the electricity you weirdos waste leaving the TV on to watch sexist commercials and men in capri pants all day. But the NFL is cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 14,000 tons. (No word on what happens with the nacho gas emissions. Hey-ooooo!)

They won’t be directly powering the stadium with alternative fuels or anything. What they’re doing instead is buying 15,000 megawatt hours of renewable energy credits from a wind farm in North Dakota. Through a little bit of environmental accounting mumbo-jumbo, this purchase offsets the Super Bowl’s massive energy expenditures — ALL OF THEM, reportedly, including a month of electricity use at the stadium and conference center and a week of occupancy in the four major NFL hotels.

Green Mountain Energy, which provides the credits, has a fun infographic showing the impact:

By Jess Zimmerman

Roseanne Barr already told Jay Leno she planned to run for president, but back then she was going to start her own party. Now, though, she’s seriously seeking Green Party nomination for the 2012 presidential run. The (presumably recycled) paperwork is in, and given that I have zero idea who the heck else is running, she might actually have a chance?

The actress-comedian said in a statement that she’s a longtime supporter of the party and looks forward to working with people who share her values. She said the two major parties aren’t serving the American people.

“The Democrats and Republicans have proven that they are servants — bought and paid for by the 1 percent — who are not doing what’s in the best interest of the American people,” Barr said.

This makes it sound like Barr picked the Green Party because it’s the only semi-viable third party option, which might be true. But she’s also in favor of combating global warming. Of course, she plans to do that mainly by growing macadamia nuts, as she explained last year on The View:

If people were to get their protein from nuts rather than beef, you see, there’d be no global warming, and there would also be enough grain to feed all the hungry people.

By Jess Zimmerman

A NASA photograph of the crack across Pine Island Glacier.

Normally when icebergs split off from glaciers, it’s called “calving,” but I think it would be fair to say that Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier is about to have a cow. Pine Island Glacier, which is the continent’s fastest-melting glacier and unusually well-situated to contribute to sea level rise, is getting set to shed a chunk of ice larger than all five boroughs of New York City combined.

Snaking across the floating tongue of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, the crack is expected to create an iceberg 350 square miles (907 square kilometers)—versus 303 square miles (785 square kilometers) for Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx combined, according to NASA.

A NASA map of the crack across Pine Island Glacier, with New York City thrown in for scale. (I had to move Staten Island a little.)

Glaciers cough up icebergs all the time. but the one that’s fixing to break off Pine Island is unusual in a couple of ways. One, it’s MOTHERFUCKING HUGE, but actually that’s not that weird — a glacier on the eastern side of Antarctica spawned an iceberg the size of Luxembourg a couple years ago. Two, it’s breaking off unusually far upstream, which indicates underlying changes in the region’s ice. And three, Pine Island Glacier is important for preventing sea-level rise:

“West Antarctica has ice streams, of which Pine Island is one. Those are fast-flowing streams of ice,” said [oceanographer Doug] Martinson, who specializes in polar oceans.

When ice breaks off the Pine Island Glacier, he said, more ice can flow in faster from the mountains above—ice that will eventually wind up contributing to sea level rise.

So Pine Island is kind of the goalie of western Antarctica, and it’s about to lose a lot of blocking power.

By Jess Zimmerman

Fifth-grader Clara Lazen was just messing around with a molecule modeling kit in class, trying to construct a stable molecule that followed basic chemistry rules. What she ended up with was a completely novel molecular structure, and a coauthor credit in the resulting journal article. Man, what were YOU discovering when you were 10? Masturbation and Faith No More?

What’s extra-rad about Lazen’s discovery is that the molecule, if it can be synthesized, has the potential to store energy and could possibly be used to make a new kind of battery. Or, you know, it could explode, which is maybe less useful BUT MAYBE JUST AS USEFUL and certainly cooler to a 10-year-old. (I’m not just guessing about that. In this news video, Lazen is kind of excited about the military applications of her molecule.)

By Heather Smith

Photo by DChris.

There are people around who remember the days when squirrel was a more commonly served meat on the American table than chicken. The Kentucky Long Rifle, with its long barrel and small caliber, was designed for squirrel hunting (the smaller the caliber, the more squirrel left to take home after shooting one.)

The ideal shot was aimed not at the squirrel, but at the tree branch directly below it, so that the animal would be killed by the concussion of the bullet instead of the bullet itself. Historians say that this is what won the Revolutionary war; even the most highly trained British soldiers were no match for squirrel killers trained by hunger.

Until recent decades, Americans ate squirrel meat because it was cheap, plentiful, and there, according to Hank Shaw, author of Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast. Domesticated animals may have been easier to catch, but, in the days before the industrialization of farming, they were expensive to raise and feed. “When Herbert Hoover promised a chicken in every pot, that was a big deal,” Shaw adds. The first edition of The Joy of Cooking, published in 1931, was heavy on the squirrel. As it moved into later and later editions, Hoover’s promise was fulfilled (by other politicians, if not Hoover himself) and chicken gradually replaced squirrel.

Shaw shot his first squirrel when he was working as a reporter for a daily paper in Minnesota. He’d made it through an underpaid stint as a cub reporter in Long Island by catching and eating his own fish. When he arrived in Minnesota, though, he could not help but take note of the squirrels. The state has such a vibrant squirrel scene that a cottage industry has grown up around trapping and removing ones that have moved into people’s homes. Shaw bought a few books about squirrel hunting off the internet, applied for a license to hunt them, and got to it.

In doing so, he placed himself on the vanguard of the re-squirreling of the American diet. Squirrel-eating has been trendy in Great Britain for half a decade now — spurred by a nationalistic fervor to kill as many as possible of the invasive American gray squirrel, which is outcompeting the domestic red squirrel (the latter had the good fortune to star in a Beatrix Potter book, one of the best ways to cement your status as charismatic megafauna).

In America, though, a surge in the deer population, especially east of the Rockies, has led most hunters to drift towards larger prey. “Our farming practices are ideal for whitetail,” says Shaw, who says that the whitetail in particular is becoming so habituated to humans that it is verging on domestication. “So are subdivisions.”

Squirrel meat may have its charms but hunting deer appeals to people on a primal level, says Shaw. “If you look at human evolution, people think that humans developed skills like running, big brains, and motor skills to hunt large animals. We’ve been hunting deer since before we were fully human.” That, says Shaw, and “if little Susie’s first animal is a whitetail deer that makes a hell of a better picture.”

The shift has left the squirrel hunting to the immigrant populations like the Hmong, who hunt squirrels in America because they’re the closest thing to the ones they hunted in the mountains of Southeast Asia. And it’s left them to people like Shaw — idealists who believe that, if you’re going to eat meat, it’s more noble (and thrifty) to kill whatever protein happens to be closest to home.

It’s hard to imagine more sustainable local game — squirrels are abundant, far from endangered, and don’t even require refrigeration the way that big game does. The standard rule of thumb is that one squirrel = enough meat for one dinner for one person. The squirrel is road food — the kind of prey that fed cross-country hikers, in the days before MRE and freeze-dried lentils. Squirrel is like the drive-through cheeseburger of the forest — albeit a cheeseburger that needs to be gutted first.

They’re also delicious, mostly because they eat nuts. “Rabbits — they’re grass eaters. The flavor is milder. Squirrels taste like something,” says  Shaw. “It’s gamey in a good way.”

Biologically speaking, the squirrel family is an old one. According to the fossil record, it originated in North America around 36 million years ago, and then proceeded to scuttle across land bridges and conjoined continents to settle in Eurasia, Africa, and North and South America. That’s an impressive amount of territory to settle without human assistance, especially over millions of years of significant climate fluctuations. In other words: Squirrels are badasses.

Photo by Chrissy Wainwright.

Some parts of the United States never lost their taste for squirrel. In the mid-’90s, about 11 people in Kentucky came down with a disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob. The cases temporarily illuminated a still ardent regional love of squirrel brains — one that cut across all levels of society.

“Someone comes by the house with just the head of a squirrel,” Erick Weisman told The New York Times back in 1997, describing the scene. Weisman is clinical director of the Neurobehavioral Institute, where the patients were treated. The gift giver, Weisman continued, gave it to the matriarch of the family, who “shaved the fur off the top of the head and fried the head whole. The skull was cracked open at the dinner table and the brains were sucked out.” Alternately, he added, the brains were often scrambled with white gravy, or eggs.

Squirrel brains aren’t the only thing that most hunters avoid. Ground squirrels — like prairie dogs, and chipmunks — can carry the Bubonic Plague. “And that’s not,” says Shaw, “good eatin’.”

What does the future hold for squirrel eating? On Shaw’s book tour this autumn, he was pleasantly surprised to find that squirrel eating was still alive and well in the South. And squirrel was not the only rodent either to persist as a regional delicacy. In Delaware and Maryland, people wanted to talk muskrat, so much so that he thought he was being set up, until he read that it was for sale at local markets. He hasn’t caught much squirrel himself since moving to northern California — the squirrels aren’t as plentiful but the ducks are many. Still, once or twice a year, he’ll catch one for nostalgia’s sake. He cooks it in a simple braise, with white wine and chicken broth.

Related video:

By Jess Zimmerman

Someday we’ll fix infrastructure and the environment in the same way that Arizona suburbanites fix their lawns: By slapping on a coat of paint. Science has already made great strides on carbon-eating paint, and the kind of paint that can make windows into solar panels. And now researchers at at Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde have developed paint that can detect underlying structural problems in bridges, mines, and turbines, allowing engineers to head disaster off at the pass.

This “smart paint” incorporates carbon nanotubes, which allow it to communicate wirelessly with electrodes attached to the bridge, turbine, or whatever. Minute signs of damage to the underlying structure — corrosion, micro-cracks, unauthorized moisture — change the paint’s electrical conductivity, transmitting a signal to the electrodes that something’s about to go wrong.

It’s still going to be a while before we can bring a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge to Home Depot and have them mix us up a bucket of orange nanopaint. The researchers are only at the prototype stage. But if this setup works on a large scale, it can avoid massive damage while costing only 1 percent as much as current monitoring systems.

By Sarah Laskow

Yesterday, TIME published the news that the Sierra Club had taken more than $25 million dollars from the natural gas industry — specifically, from employees and subsidiaries of Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest natural gas companies around. The donations came at a time when the environmental movement was rallying behind natural gas as a “bridge fuel” — an energy source cleaner than coal that could lead to a renewable energy future.

But in 2010, the Sierra Club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, decided to end the financial relationship, forgoing an additional $30 million in funding — an amount equal to a quarter year’s budget for the club. By then, issues with hydrofracking had become more apparent, and as Brune told TIME, “We need to be unrestrained in our advocacy … The first rule of advocacy is that you shouldn’t take money from industries and companies you’re trying to change.”

That Brune is talking about this now shows a real shift in how environmental groups are thinking about clean and renewable energy. In a post on the Sierra Club’s own blog, Brune wrote, “It’s time to stop thinking of natural gas as a ‘kinder, gentler’ energy source … as we phase out coal, we need to leapfrog over gas whenever possible in favor of truly clean energy.”

The Sierra Club’s executive director, Michael Brune, revealed that from 2007 to 2010 the environmental group took more than $26 million of donations from people and companies connected to the natural gas industry.

The Obama administration is moving forward with offshore wind development.

Warming oceans are encouraging the growth of coral … for now.

An MIT scientist used grass clippings to help power a new solar panel. It’s not very efficient though.

On bear bile farms in China, bears choose to stop eating and die rather than continue living in the farms’ conditions.

By Lexicon of Sustainability

Editor’s note: This is your weekly installment of images from Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton’s Lexicon of Sustainability. We’ll be running one image every Friday this winter, so stay tuned. If you have your own sustainability terms, you can add them yourself to the Lexicon of Sustainability.

Click for larger version.

Can a new word change an entire industry?

Yes. When consumers first heard the term “cage free” eggs, they voted with their wallets at their local supermarkets and much of industry has been forced to change its practices. Will it happen again when they learn about “free range” and “pasture raised” eggs?

Alexis Koefoed of Soul Food Farm hopes consumers can learn to distinguish between “cage free,” “free range,” and “pasture raised” when they go to their local supermarket.

Cage free: Chickens that are not kept in cages. This means chickens are still confined to a barn with limited or no access to outside. The term “barn-roaming” more accurately describes this principle.

Free range: Outside the United States this term refers to a method of farming where the animals are allowed to roam freely rather than being contained in any manner. In the United States, USDA regulations apply only to poultry and indicate solely that the animal has been allowed access to the outside. These regulations do not specify the quality or size of the outside range nor the duration of time the animal must be allowed access to this space.

Pasture raised or “pastured”: Animals, like Alexis Koefoed’s chickens, that have been raised on pasture with access to shelter. This term is being used by farmers who wish to distinguish themselves from the industrialized “free-range” term [but it is not legally binding].

If possible, try to get to know the farm and learn what’s behind the terms they use to describe the eggs you buy. And tell us what kind of eggs you buy in the comments section below!

By Greg Hanscom

Rep. John Boehner thinks trains and buses are bogus, apparently.

It was apparently not enough to obliterate funding for bike lanes and walking paths and kids trying to get to school. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) wants to keep our tax dollars from paying for public transit as well.

Earlier this week, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) unveiled a draft transportation bill that would cut all designated funding for bike and pedestrian infrastructure, the Safe Routes to School program, and grants that have encouraged “complete streets” projects. Still, it looked like the more egregious provisions would be stripped away as the legislation — titled “The American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act” — ran through the lawmaking process. And at least the bill maintained the country’s longstanding, if weak, commitment to public transportation.

Then, Wednesday night, Boehner and the leaders of the House Ways and Means Committee proposed killing a longstanding rule that sets aside a portion of the gas tax to fund trains and buses and other public transportation systems.

“We were all expecting some weird stuff,” says David Goldberg with the nonprofit Transportation for America, which has raised the alarm over the latest move. “But we weren’t expecting this now.”

In his attempt to reverse a longstanding commitment to transit (the “mass transit account” was created in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan), Boehner may have gone too far. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials — that is, the people who build this country’s roads — has come out against the move, and there are rumors that even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may oppose it.

What could Boehner possibly be thinking?

It’s not unimaginable that he really does see trains and buses as a threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of getting where we’re going in a great big hurry. But as always in Washington, there’s political calculus involved. Boehner may just be trying to score points by handing Obama a “jobs” bill that the president will not sign. (If this is indeed the game, it’s ironic: Transit projects generate more jobs than roads do.)

Lest you think that all the Republicans in the House are enjoying this particular game of political football, several of them, led by Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.), tried to amend the draft bill to restore funding for bike and pedestrian projects and Safe Routes to School. Despite backing from Democrats, they were voted down. We’ll be watching to see of any of them step up now to defend mass transit.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, a more balanced version of the transportation bill has passed committee with unanimous bipartisan support. Apparently not everyone is playing games.

In the House, the antics are bound to continue for another month or more, as Congress has until the end of March to pass a new transportation bill. But Boehner, at least, has made it clear where he stands — and it’s not on some sissy metro line.