If you never quite believed your parents when they told you big, scary animals have more to fear from us than we do from them, consider this, via The New York Times' Joanna Foster: Sharks kill two or three people every year. People kill 73 million sharks in the same time period. To protect these sharp-toothed scapegoats, Micronesian chief executives have decided to create a shark preserve of 2 million square miles in the western Pacific -- the largest shark sanctuary in the world. There will be no more harvesting of sharks or sales of shark parts. If the prospect …

Is Fox News getting bored now that Obama's produced his birth certificate and the Casey Anthony trial is over? Apparently, since their new barely-tethered-to-reality flogging point is that SpongeBob SquarePants is indoctrinating kids with a sort of extremist environmental zealotry. The Department of Education hosted an event where kids got to pick out free SpongeBob books, and the Fox hosts' heads promptly exploded. Why? Because in one of the books on offer, SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs try to use car exhaust to cause global warming, in order to sell pool admission tickets. Media Matters has put together an exciting mix tape of …

In 110 meetings over less than two years, the Canadian government tried to convince Europe to delay or derail legislative changes that could affect the imports of tar-sands oil. Basically, Canada doesn’t want Europe to know how carbon-heavy the oil is, because that could affect U.S. and European imports. So they’re pushing it as environmentally friendly. Because hey, if you don’t know how dirty something is, maybe it’s clean! We often talk about cutting carbon, but here's a reminder that cutting gases like methane and nitrous oxide can also slow climate change. The EPA found that, left to their own …

One step up from "save the whales" on the environmentalism ladder is "do nice things for whales, they've had a hard time." You know, fruit baskets, flipper rubs, playing music outside their tanks because they don't have Spotify. This beluga is LOVING. IT. He's like "Christ, finally, after 30 years of people singing me that Raffi song 24/7 I was really ready for something new."

Bee populations are struggling everywhere, but ironically they may be better off in cities than in the countryside. Why? Because rural areas have larger swathes of flowering plants when they're in season, but cities have them year-round in the form of urban parks and gardens. Prof Jane Memmott, an ecologist, believes bees in the city have a more diverse diet of pollen and nectar from all the different green spaces around homes and offices, that gardeners keep blooming all year round. By contrast bees in the countryside can be surrounded by one type of crop that is only in flower …

What if you could buy power at night, when it's cheap, and run your house off it by day, when it's expensive (and, in Japan at least, in short supply)? Nissan wants to give customers who buy its Nissan Leaf just this ability, by selling them special chargers for their electric cars that can be reversed to feed power back into a home. The lithium ion batteries in a Leaf can store up to 24kWh (kilowatt hours) of electricity, which Nissan estimates is sufficient to power an average Japanese home for about two days. That means if the system was …

China is going to increase its solar capacity 10-fold in the next five years. Driving this solar great leap forward will be the "feed-in tariff" -- Chinese citizens who install solar panels will be paid 15 cents for every kilowatt-hour they produce. Germany uses the same strategy, and as a result it has more solar power than any other country in the world. At the headquarters of Yingli in Baoding, outside Beijing, developers are busy designing products to suit the Chinese market -- including solar tents for the Chinese military, and solar panels that fit on yaks’ backs for Tibetan herders. …

The town of Kiruna, Sweden, is very cold, very close to that awesome ice hotel, and very much on top of a valuable lode of iron ore. The Swedish state-owned mining company, LKAB, wants to get at the ore by fracturing that portion of the ground, which wouldn't be so great for the people who live on it. Solution: Make the people live somewhere else. A large portion of the city is being entirely relocated so that mining companies can get in underneath. Because this is Sweden, the company has to pay for relocating the 3,000 or so people who …

Designer Renee Walker's food labels, which just won the Rethink the Food Label contest, are elegantly simple. They're dominated by a color-coded box that shows the breakdown of ingredients, including unappetizing shades of gray for additives and preservatives. So in one glance you can tell, say, which of these peanut butters has added filler and which one is mostly ground-up nuts.  Unlike most of the proposed labels, Walker's design doesn't moralize with a big red X on foods the designer thinks are bad, or a picture of what the designer guesses you'll look like if you eat them. You want …

If you're under 35 and you think you've lived through a cold year, you're wrong. Think Progress notes that the last year mean global temperatures were below normal was 1976. That means more than a quarter of the population (and statistically more people reading this, since it’s on the internet) really has no idea what the global climate would feel like if humanity hadn't been messing with it for more than a century.