David Parker's "Light" depicts light pollution and wasted energy as a sort of Blob, not necessarily malign but relentless and implacable. In the film, energy-burning lights start dripping goo that covers the ground and finally drives people out of their homes -- but it's all very quiet and eerie, like a Chris Van Allsburg drawing. Showing light as akin to an oil spill draws attention to the wastefulness of using artificial lighting when it's not needed -- wasting energy does basically cover the planet with a gross oily substance, just not necessarily locally and not right away.

Brazil discovers that oil drilling is not good for the environment. Also, Congress is kicking renewable energy to the curb the way a mean person would a really cute puppy. Like these. Oh, wait, don't buy those, they came from puppy mills. People collectively put their fingers in their ears and go LA LA LA so as not to think about climate change. The Loch Ness monster wants to participate in the London Olympics. Geoengineering is cool and all, but it would be much cheaper to just not put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to begin with than to try …

(click to embiggen) Buildings are getting to be so tall that the Council on Tall Buildings came up with a new name for their most extreme versions: Megatall. This is density taken to an extreme that may not be all that helpful. For one thing, people, goods, and water have to be moved all the way to the top of these things, and that requires a lot of energy. In addition, above a certain height, structural elements take up more and more of a building's interior space, reports Sun Joo Kim at SmartPlanet. Here's the full list of the world's …

Politicians are always trying to sneak shit into important bills, so that when you vote to pass the Don't Starve America's Children Act you are also sneakily funding the Rich People Get To Use You As A Coffee Table rider. Because congressional Republicans evidently hate you and the world, they're shoving a bunch of anti-environmental riders into critically important spending and tax bills, holding those must-pass bills hostage unless they let environmental destruction come along for the ride. Here's some of the crap they're trying to get away with, as compiled by Natural Resources Defense Council: Blocking limits on toxic …

Russian scientists have discovered that the Arctic is releasing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enormous plumes of methane from the seafloor directly into earth's atmosphere. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years. This has some people messing their drawers because it’s strongly reminiscent of what is probably the worst possible climate scenario imaginable, a feedback loop so humongous and destructive that it would lead to runaway warming that makes today's runaway warming …

Canada's craven withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol just got the Taiwanese animation it deserves. For those of you who aren't up on your international climate treaties, it's hard to put it more succinctly than New Media Animation itself has: Canada is withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Environment Minister Peter Kent said Monday, abandoning its 1997 commitment to cut emissions 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2102 and cementing the transformation of the country’s image as a global leader in the fight against climate change into what critics are calling a “climate renegade.” By 2009 Canada’s emissions were …

There are still way more kinds of creatures out there than science knows about -- we're discovering new species all the time, and it always seems like the new ones are the weirdest yet. The World Wildlife Fund just released info about their 2010 discoveries in Asia's Mekong River region, which traverses Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and China. Among the new finds: A monkey with a pompadour and (effectively) no nose, nicknamed "Snubby." This description of Snubby from the report cannot be improved upon: Locals claim that the black and white monkey is very easy to find when it is …

Canada is pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, ostensibly because it's so far from meeting its goals it'll have to pay high penalties. Also it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault. In reality, though, this is all about tar-sands oil. For starters, it’s not exactly true that fines would be inevitable if Canada can’t meet its goals — the country has some options, like filing formal notice and renegotiating its goals, that would allow it to dodge the penalties. But why is the country so far off-target to begin with? Canada blames the United States for keeping out of Kyoto, saying that …

Big Map Blog has turned up a fantastically detailed map of California's bike routes in the 1890s. It was published by George W. Blum and endorsed by H.F. Wynne, the president of the California Cycling Club in 1895. Mr. Blum was based, it seems, in San Francisco, and that's where the map is centered. It shows that more than a century ago, cyclists could follow bike roads from the Bay Area, up to Sacramento, down to Los Angeles, or out to Yosemite, on trails rated "good, fair, poor, or very poor" and "level, rolling, hilly, or mountainous." The map advises …

Book lovers can sidestep the eternal question of farmed versus PVC (they both suck) and opt for a holiday display that's a monument to reading ... or bibliophilia, anyway, since trying to actually read any of the books in this display would be a holiday Jenga nightmare. You don't even have to celebrate Christmas to want one of these in your house. Heck, you can build one and still do your part for the illusory War on Christmas, provided you build it entirely out of copies of The God Delusion.