Even if you don't live next to one of the country's dirtiest coal plants, coal pollution is still likely finding its way into your body. Answer three questions, and the Sierra Club will tell you how at risk you are: very, extremely, or MY GOD GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. All you do is input where you live, how much fish you eat, and whether you belong to any groups known to be sensitive to air quality issues. (Oh, and they also want your email address, but there's a tiny "skip this" button in the right bottom corner of that …

Oil prices went down -- for about a minute, before they started climbing again -- after the International Energy Agency announced the release of emergency supplies. The Department of Energy is backing the $2.6 billion Project Amp, which will install 733 megawatts of solar -- as much as was installed in all of 2010 -- in 28 states over four years. To make it even clearer that the the vast liberal conspiracy has it in for dirty energy: The right wing’s favorite bogeyman George Soros joined forces with Google to invest $25 million in an energy efficiency company called Transphorm. …

Canada has unveiled new polymer bills, which will replace paper $100 bills and, by 2012, paper 50s and 20s. They're super slick and futurey-looking (even though they still feature pictures of the prime minister from 1911). More importantly, they're designed to prevent fraud and will be better for the environment than paper money. From an environmental standpoint, the polymer bills have two advantages over the paper ones: They're more durable, and they can be recycled. The bills last two and a half to four times longer than regular bills, meaning that the Bank of Canada will have to fire up …

As you already know if you’ve tried to chug your car up a hill on a really hot day, cranking the AC reduces fuel efficiency. In an electric car with a limited range to begin with, that's a big deal, and can mean shaving dozens of miles off the distance a vehicle can travel on a single charge. One solution could be as simple as installing better windows -- laminated glass topped off with an infrared-reflective coating, the same stuff you might install in your home to keep your heating and cooling bills down. Tests show the stuff can lower …

The Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant near Omaha is basically sitting in a puddle of water after recent floods. That ... that can't be good, right? I mean, granted, nuclear fuel sort of sits in a puddle of water at the best of times -- that's how you keep it cool -- and a lot of the rumors floating around about the plant have turned out to be a bunch of bullroar. But even if there's no immediate danger from this plant -- which, as Rachel Maddow points out in the above clip, may or may not be true -- the …

Kids! Are you worried about natural gas companies pumping mysterious chemicals into the rocks near your house, leaking methane gas, poisoning cattle, and making your water flammable? Well, don't be! A coloring book from Talisman Energy says everything will be fine, and afterwards there will be deer and rainbows.  The book is written in Comic Sans and narrated by Terry the Fracosaurus, a hard-hat-wearing dinosaur/Fraggle hybrid who wants you to know that natural gas is "one of the cleanest, safest, and most useful of all energy sources." Terry mentions that fossil fuels are made from "organic materials," and kids can color in an …

The world's largest dye-sensitized solar cell has just made an appearance. These cells have a couple of major advantages over traditional solar cells: one, they're incredibly cheap, and two, they can be printed right onto the materials used to make a building. Right now they’re being incorporated into girders manufactured by Tata steel. DSC modules use titanium dioxide -- the same stuff in old-school sunscreen -- to receive electrons from a dye when it's struck by sunlight. They're not terribly efficient, but they're so inexpensive that as the technology matures it's anticipated that they will approach the cost of fossil …

Do you hate sh*tty drivers? Well, in Soviet Russia, sh*tty driver hates YOU! Moscow's road rage problem is epic, perhaps due to the fact that their traffic solution involves giving special police-style sirens to "VIP" drivers (read: 900-plus important people, government officials and so forth, and the 900-plus folks who can get a hold of them in some other way). However poorly the U.S. is doing at managing traffic, Russian solutions make our roads look like a buggy path in Amish country. The VIP sirens, known as migalki, allow drivers to ignore all traffic laws, as if they were an …

When it comes to oil, this is what the U.S. looks like to the rest of the world   The Obama administration has decided over the next two months to release 60 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This is kind of like giving Bubbles from the Wire $5 when he's in the middle of one of his smack binges -- it's not really going to affect consumption, and it sure as hell doesn't address the root problem, which is our seemingly insuperable addiction to oil. The general idea is that this release will drive down prices, …

Have we mentioned that our leaders in Congress are working their butts off to undermine the country's foundational environmental laws? It's not just Republicans, either! Yesterday, a bipartisan bill that would weaken the federal government's ability to keep water clean passed out of committee. The bill would amend the Clean Water Act to give "primary responsibilities for water pollution control" to the states. Pretty much any time states get to muck around with environmental issues, at least some of them decide to let corporations run hog wild and dump whatever they want, wherever they want. So we're not optimistic that …