This house is extremely efficient.

Wouldn't it be cool if we passed a rule mandating that all new federal buildings had to be carbon-neutral by 2030? The feds buy and build a lot of real estate. An effort to wring fossil-fuel energy out of those buildings -- by increasing their efficiency and supplying them with renewables -- would seriously bolster domestic markets for efficiency and distributed energy. Beyond that, it would serve as a proving ground and an example for the communities where those buildings are located. It would be galvanizing.

"But," you're protesting, "we would never do something so radical. Germany might. Denmark, maybe. Not us."

Hark! I say to you. Hark to this sh*t: We do have such a rule!

Photo by Plant Chicago.

Soon, a former meatpacking plant in Chicago will replace carcasses and rendering vats with bakers and brewers and fish farmers and mushroom growers. The Plant (ho ho, a double meaning!) is gathering together a bunch of food-makers to create a self-sustaining system in the 93,500-square-foot abandoned space. As Fast Company reports, a former meatpacking plant is the perfect place to start a food business of this kind: It already contains "food-grade materials" which are safe for food preparation.

Photo by Ryan Tir.

Watch one episode of Mad Men and you'll see just how shady the advertising biz can be. But apparently the red-headed stepchildren of the advertising industry -- outdoor billboard companies -- are taking douchebaggery to new lows. An investigative report from Fair Warning details how billboard agencies illegally chop down trees to ensure that potential viewers get unobstructed looks at their signage. Don Draper's womanizing and debauchery isn't looking so bad now, eh?

Take Robert J. Barnhart, a former employee of Lamar Advertising Company, the largest outdoor billboard company in America. When trees got in the way of the company's Tallahassee, Fla., signs, Barnhart says his boss instructed him to kill them off using a mega-lethal herbicide. When Barnhart said he'd no longer act as a tree hit-man, Lamar gave him the axe. Barnhart's allegations are backed up by his former supervisor, and they're part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

And apparently Barnhart's tale is just one in an industry that's rife with illicit tree removal.

Walk Score put together a list of the country's top transit cities, based on the company's transit scores for more 1 million locations in the largest 25 cities with open public transit data. (Lack of data meant Atlanta and Phoenix were left out.) And, surprisingly, four out of the top five are on the East Coast: New York (No. 1), Boston (No. 3), D.C. (No. 4), and Philadelphia (No. 5).

San Francisco (of course!) is the one West Coast spoiler. (You can check out the full list is below the jump.)

I was surprised to see Boston and, in particular, Philadelphia come out on top of cities like Chicago and Seattle that I think of as public-transit friendly. One interesting wrinkle in the Walk Score methodology is that it measures not just the extent of public transportation but its "usefulness." 

Some things that look awful up close can look kind of beautiful from space. Like this enormous open-pit copper mine in northern Chile.

Sea levels are rising, which means that there's a greater risk of floods that reach well over the high tide mark. By 2030, the risk that coastal floods will go four feet or more over high tide will have doubled, Climate Central reports. And in that zone lie 287 energy facilities -- power plants, natural gas facilities, and oil and gas refineries -- that now stand a greater chance of getting an unexpected bath.

The state most likely to be screwed by this state of affairs is, of course, Louisiana. Not only is it full of oil and gas infrastructure, that infrastructure has been built on low-lying ground (which they have a lot of down there). More than half of the at-risk facilities that Climate Central identified are in Louisiana.

Why is Gen Y migrating to the cities? Because millennials are craving the things they didn’t get in their suburban upbringings, like connectedness and adventure. Basically, they’re throwing off their cul-de-sac childhoods and seeking out authenticity.

Nathan Norris, urban infrastructure planner, lays it all out at the PlaceShakers blog:

Now that gentrification has come to the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, N.Y., it's time to clean it up! The EPA is on the case, although it's going to take decades to cleanse this narrow cul-de-sac of a waterway so foul that nothing can live in its opaque waters.

In order to get people excited about the process of turning the canal into something that will stop depressing local property values, the Gowanus Community Advisory Group has decided that the project needs a mascot, reports Gary Buiso at the New York Post.

Detroit is undergoing a remarkable process of un-building, its residents literally transforming its denser neighborhoods into sparse suburbs. It's the inevitable consequence of the shrinking of a once-great city.

By estimates of the city and various experts, about 40 square miles of the city's 139 square miles are vacant today -- empty fields from which all structures have been removed.