A new report from the Energy Information Administration shows that in 2011, renewable power in the U.S. surpassed nuclear for the first time. In the first three months of the year, renewable energy plants -- including geothermal, biomass, wind, water, and solar -- were responsible for about 12 percent of the country's energy production, while nuclear produced only 2 percent. Renewable energy -- especially biomass, which accounts for almost half of the country's renewable plants -- has been surging in the U.S., showing a 25 percent increase since 2009. Solar production alone, though it represents a small part of the …

Here's the big innovation that will be accompanying the space shuttle on its final launch this Friday: A zero-energy still that converts urine into a sweet, drinkable liquid. Still want to be an astronaut when you grow up? The shuttle already carries urine-recycling equipment, but it's heavy and a big drain on the craft's limited electricity. The new filtration kit is the size of a large book and relies on a process called forward osmosis, which doesn't require outside power. Instead, electrolytes pull fluid through a semi-permeable boundary, leaving contaminants behind. The resulting liquid supposedly tastes like Capri Sun, which …

An LA-based design think tank called APHIDoIDEA has an idea about how to build an environmental education center that practices what it preaches. They imagined an Environmental Center of Regenerative Research & Education -- or eCORRE -- Complex that would teach visitors about green ideas like solar energy and passive cooling techniques. It would have classrooms, offices, an exhibition hall and a public plaza. Here's the cool part: the building would be made of 65 shipping containers. The idea is to begin with containers stacked in a rectangle. Next, the designers propose elevating some containers, leaving others down low, and …

ExxonMobil told federal officials and Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer that they had sealed the pipeline leaking oil into the Yellowstone River within 30 minutes. But federal documents show that sealing the pipe took 56 minutes -- almost twice as long as the company originally said. The company told the AP that the error came about because the Exxon representative who briefed officials was providing information without the benefit of notes. In other words, not really intended to be a factual statement. About 150 people, worried about health risks from the spill, came to an EPA meeting on the spill last …

India has a massive and worsening overpopulation problem -- the country has added 181 million people in the last 10 years. So health officials in the state of Rajasthan are trying to lure people into voluntary sterilization by taking advantage of one of humankind's biggest weaknesses: expensive sh*t. In a three-month program that they hope will attract 30,000 eager non-breeders, officials are offering cars, motorcycles, televisions, cash, and other incentives for people to put their junk under the knife. This is not the first time India has instituted payoffs for getting sterilized -- before this it was bikes and transistor …

House Republicans want to defund all kinds of environmental activity -- the EPA, the Department of the Interior, the Forest Service. You know, just anything having to do with the outside. And the USDA thinks that bioengineered bluegrass doesn't fall within its regulatory sphere, which means companies could grow the stuff without any regulation. Exposing mice to air pollution makes them dumber and more depressed. So it's probably good for everyone that the EPA is putting new regulations on coal-fired power plants that should reduced emissions of sulfur dioxide by 73 percent and nitrogen oxides by 54 percent from 2005 …

In the Guardian, George Monbiot argues that nuclear power was the least of Fukushima's problems. Sure, the nuclear industry is corrupt and regulation-resistant -- but name a power industry that isn't. When it comes to health threats, says Monbiot, the conscienceless scumbags in the nuclear industry are miles ahead of all the other conscienceless scumbags. For starters, nuclear plants aren't fundamentally unsafe, says Monbiot -- they're just old sometimes. The Fukushima Daini plant, right next door to Daiichi, is ten years younger and weathered the tsunami just fine, and newer plants are even safer. The problem isn't the plants, but …

While the drill-baby-drill contingent was bitching about reliance on foreign oil, that hacky-sack full of smelly Nancy-Pelosi-electing hippies known as California quietly installed more solar in 2010 than any other state, ever. The numbers: Californians installed 194 megawatts of solar in 2010, 47 percent more than they installed in 2009. Granted, 2009 was kind of a crap year, economically. But so was 2010! This power is distributed: California now has nearly 1 gigawatt of solar spread across almost 10,000 sites. The cost of distributed, small-scale solar in California has fallen 18 percent since 2007, and almost 30 percent for large …

The massive blackout of 2003, which affected 45 million people in the northeast United States and 10 million more in Ontario, could have been prevented by just 500 megawatts of distributed solar, says John Farrell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance. For reference, California installed almost 200 megawatts of distributed solar in 2010 alone. That blackout cost us $6 billion in repairs and lost productivity. At a current cost of about $8.55 per megawatt for small scale (i.e. home) solar, 500 megawatts would cost about $4.27 billion to install. Wouldn't it be nice to have all those solar panels …

The seabed of the Pacific ocean contains 1,000 times as much tonnage of rare earth elements as all the deposits on land, says a new paper published in Nature Geoscience. The elements, which are key to cleantech innovations like solar panels, batteries and electric motors, have been in short supply lately as China, pretty much the world's sole supplier, clamps down on exports. The bad news is that getting at these deposits could involve destroying delicate ecosystems that until now have been protected from our depredations by 2-3 miles of water. It's also not clear that we're desperate enough (yet) …