Speaking of Bond villains and energy sources, here's an idea with no possible drawbacks: Turning a dormant volcano into a roiling cauldron of geothermal energy.

That capsized cruise ship in Italy could leak thousands of tons of fuel into a national maritime park.

A four-lane bicycle superhighway could go up between the Swedish cities of Malmo and Lund.

Rusty on your climate science? This open University of Chicago course covers climate research without getting too technical.

Commercial agricultural projects in East Africa are forcing Ethiopians from their homes, according to Human Rights Watch.

Orcas might be charismatic movie stars, but they are also killer whales. A family of beachgoers in New Zealand caught on film an orca fighting with a few sharks. One shark was so eager to get away from the whale that it beached itself in the shallow water.

Four years ago, a 14-year-old girl touched a fence in a city park in Baltimore and was instantly hit with a lethal 227 volts of electricity. An exposed underground power cable happened to be touching the fence, just one example of hundreds of sites throughout the city that are still "pulsing with potentially deadly stray voltage," according to WJZ, the city's CBS affiliate.

Scientists proposed in the journal Nature that one way to save whales is to allow people to hunt them. (The current approach is a "ban" on hunting, but 33,500 whales have been killed since it went into effect 25 years ago, so it's not exactly working, reports Bruce Barcott at OnEarth.)

It sounds nuts, but there's a catch: only so many whales could be hunted every year, and everyone could buy and sell the right to hunt them on a cap-and-trade-style market, like the kind that Europe uses to regulate its carbon emissions.

Before reading further in this post, ask yourself a question (and answer honestly): Which do you care about more, guiltless (if hungry) goats or the Galápagos Islands' giant tortoises?

If you answered goats, this post will make you sad.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon launchedthe Sustainable Energy for All Initiative and called for the world to double its use of renewable energy by 2030.

Climate change is joining evolution on the list of scientific topics that some schools won't teach as science.

China's planning a huge offshore windfarm, its largest yet.

Stephen Colbert has officially thrown his hat in the ring for definitely possibly considering a run for president. He's already out-polling Jon Huntsman! So what kind of environmental policy platform could we expect from a President Colbert?

Some chemists came up with a really clever way to observe the intermediate stage of an atmospheric chemical reaction, and then some PR flack got a hold of it and suddenly science has invented a brand-new molecule that will solve all our climate change woes! As usual, things that seem too good to be true probably are.

We here at Grist mock a lot of people. But we don't always manage to mock some sense into them. Which is why we're pretty psyched about the response to Sarah Laskow's feature story revealing that congressional staffers were making deadly wildfires into a fun office pool:

McKie Campbell, the [Senate Energy and Natural Resources] committee’s Republican staff director, said the contest has been stopped.

“It will never happen again,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “It was in no way indicative of disrespect for any of the folks who put their lives on the line to battle the fires.”