Who needs government loan guarantees? SolarCity is going to put solar panels on 120,000 military houses with financing from Bank of America-owned Merrill Lynch. (Er, down with the banks?) Environmental regulations have "benefits and costs." They do kill jobs, but they also create new ones. The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. is close to being a net exporter of petroleum products. Mother Jones takes a closer look at the WSJ's own reporting and says, "Eh, not so much." Here, the U.S. climate change envoy points fingers at China and India for trashing the chance of a Durban deal. …

It seems to be a pretty time-honored advertising strategy that when you want your message to really hit, you need to connect it to things men want/don't want to happen to their penises. In this example, found on Tumblr, wasting energy is ... blue balls, or maybe priapism? And turning off the light is an orgasm? In any event, if your light is on for more than four hours, consult a physician.

See the map This interactive map from NPR, which shows hybrid and electric car sales figures across the U.S., is a handy way of calculating the hippie concentration of your area at a single glance. But it also might help predict which areas will get EV infrastructure soonest, because of high demand. Also, it's kind of neat. San Francisco is leading the pack, no surprise there, and on the whole the West Coast is seeing more green car sales than the East Coast or the Midwest. I'm surprised that my city, D.C., had the highest hybrid and EV sales percentage …

Lest you get too caught up in Keystone XL and forget that tar-sands oil is super-destructive in general, NRDC has a new report about how a completely different pipeline will also lead to ecological disaster. The Northern Gateway pipeline, which would run from Alberta to British Columbia, has the potential to be just as destructive to Canada as Keystone XL would be to the U.S., if not more. Northern Gateway would threaten people and animals along its 2,200-mile length -- First Nations communities, people who depend on fisheries and forests, salmon, bears, whales, rainforests. You know, just most of the …

The new documentary The Crisis of Civilization is the most user-friendly exploration of imminent doom you’ll ever see. Through interviews, found footage, and animation, the film actually manages to make the unwinding of our conventional, fossil-fueled, more-is-more industrial civilization accessible. And importantly, it pays just as much attention to solutions as to problems. Nafeez Ahmed, the documentary’s narrator, whom I've interviewed in the past, is a professor of international relations and author of  A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It. He’s also smart as hell, knowledgeable on a broad scale, and a master of …

Now that condos and a Trump Tower line the banks of the Chicago River, the Windy City is finally thinking about making it less gross. It's one of America's most exploited waterways -- in 1900, the city literally reversed the river’s flow to keep all the sewage it channeled from entering Lake Michigan -- and the sewage of millions is dumped into it every day, untreated. At a price of $250 million, Chicago is finally going to start treating all the waste that comes out of its pipes, which currently flows into the river and thence to the Mississippi. The …

Homes and strip malls in America's outer-ring suburbs, which contained most of the country's most expensive homes in the 1990s, are now worth less than what it cost to build them. And the land beneath them is worth effectively zero, says Brookings Institution senior fellow Christopher B. Leinberger, in a powerful op-ed arguing that the future of the country is urban and walkable. Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered. What's driving this transition? The two …

I have complicated feelings about animal testing, at least when it comes to science. But I have very uncomplicated feelings about dogs, and this video of nine beagles being set free made me blubber unattractively. These dogs have lived in cages their entire lives, testing medicines, cosmetics, and household products (which does not qualify as science!). The video captures their first human affection, their first time leaving their metal crates, and their first steps onto grass. This will definitely be in my head next time I'm looking for cruelty-free products. The group that produced the video, Animal Rescue Media Education, …

In Australia, a virus called Hendra, which has had a 60 percent mortality rate in humans, is on the rise. There were 18 outbreaks of the disease this year, more than in the 16 previous years combined, and scientists suspect that climate change had a hand in this year's surge. An animal-borne disease like West Nile or SARS, Hendra can be transmitted from fruit bats to horses to humans. Only seven humans have been infected with Hendra so far, but scientists believe that flooding in Australia is connected with the increase in Hendra outbreaks. In this type of ecological upheaval, …

As oil and gas companies wander ever further offshore in search of fossil fuels, the government's putting some money into technology that safeguards against oil spills. The amount they’re spending -- $9.6 million -- is a paltry sum as federal investments go. But the important thing here is the result, which is robots. And not just robots, but cool underwater robots that have 3D laser vision more accurate than any diver's analysis. Ok, actually, that's just one project. The rest of the funding is going to technology like "reverse-circulation primary cementing," which reduces pressure in deepwater wells, and "coil tubing …