If you have a cable box and a DVR, their combined power draw is a stunning 446 kWh per year -- more than a new refrigerator. And two-thirds of that energy gets sucked down when the boxes aren’t even in use. In fact, they draw almost as much power when the TV is off as they do when they're playing content. Eighty percent of U.S. households pay for TV, and cumulatively, we spend $2 billion a year on electricity for our set-top devices. Just eliminating the power they draw when not in use would reduce electricity consumption by the equivalent …

Al Gore is doing his best to ensure Barack Obama gets reelected. Yesterday, he endorsed Mitt Romney's climate stance. The Arizona wildfire is the largest in the state's history. A fifth anti-logging activist in Brazil was killed. Your HD cable box uses more electricity than your refrigerator. Only 30 percent of Pennsylvanians say that hydrofracking's environmental impacts outweigh its economic benefits. But 69 percent do support taxing gas companies, so at least they’re planning to get as much economic benefit out of it as they can. The next climate-change treaty could cover water issues, because with the droughts and floods …

If you live west of D.C. and east of Omaha, there's a good chance you're pretty close to one of the 25 dirtiest coal plants in the U.S. Twenty of them are 50 to 100 miles away from major urban areas, according to Climate Progress. What does "dirtiest" mean? Well, these 25 plants represent 4 percent of the country's coal plants, and provide about 8 percent of the country's electricity generation, but account for 30 percent of mercury emissions from the U.S. electricity sector.  Here's Climate Progress' list of the worst offenders in terms of overall mercury emissions:

Bourbon's birthday was yesterday, but if you're anything like me, you're still celebrating. So you'll be glad to know that whisky -- we'll go with the Scottish spelling, because this is happening in Scotland -- is the newest addition to the Unlikely Biofuels Club. Helius Energy is building a 7.2-megawatt plant in Scotland that will run off of waste from whisky distilling. Isn't that so much classier than powering your car with Four Loko? There's more to the story that's not quite as delightful: The plant will get a lot of its energy from burning the whisky byproducts with wood …

The challenge with putting solar on your roof is that even if it saves you money over the long run, you're essentially pre-paying your utility bill for the next ten to 20 years -- and who has that kind of scratch? That's why SolarCity exists: to pay for and install those solar panels, and then lease them to you or sell you the power they produce, for less than your current utility bill. Google just dropped $280 million on the company because they think this is such a fantastic and, in their words, "safe" investment. The Goog’s investment is enough …

In a scheme straight out of the playbook of a Bond villain, Russia is building eight floating nuclear reactors -- the first of their kind in the world -- in order to dominate oil and gas exploration in the Arctic ocean. (Now that it’s increasingly ice-free, the Arctic is way easier to float things around in -- thanks, global warming!) Russia also plans to sell the reactors abroad, and has seen interest from China, Algeria and Indonesia. Each will cost $335 million, and has the additional ability to purify seawater into fresh water. The litany of disasters that could befall …

Back when Italy was trying out nuclear power for the first time, Cesare Silvi was one of the guys who had to figure out how to make it safe. Sometimes crazy things would happen -- once, an oil pipe burst, fouling the cooling water intake of a nuclear power plant miles away, shutting it down. Soon Silvi discovered there were many other pipes even closer to that plant; his attempt to study them was stymied by the moneyed interests who own them. The longer he looked, the more small, improbable, but potentially disastrous scenarios piled up -- war, terrorism, plane …

Spanish design firm Play Studios asked kids to describe what they thought cities would look like in the future, then animated the kid-rendered cities in pop-up book form. There's plenty of fantasy here, but these budding urbanists also have an eye for connected, sustainable, eco-friendly living. Check out the monorails running between buildings in Boscopolis, or the cars in Bright City that run on fallen leaves. In the making-of video, one girl says of her city, "I just wanted Alicante to have in the future more electric cars, as well as more solar panels to decrease pollution." Hey, the kids really …

Here's an old clean energy maxim: If life gives you volcanoes, make geothermal power. That's Indonesia's strategy, anyway, and it's working for them. By 2025, the country could get a third of its electricity from geothermal sources, and Al Gore has said it could be the first "geothermal superpower." For the past couple of decades, Chevron has dominated the industry here, but since President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is promising clean energy subsidies, more companies are moving in. The goal is to have 9.5 gigawatts of geothermal capacity by 2025, which is triple the amount of geothermal that the U.S. produces. …

The Northwest coast right now has a problem most places in the country could only wish for: too much renewable energy. And while hippies would like us to believe that clean energy sources will work flawlessly in harmony to edge out coal and oil, this abundance is pitting wind producers and hydroelectric producers against each other. Alongside the Columbia River, in Oregon, wind power is becoming a big player, working in concert with dams on the river to produce renewable energy. But right now the Bonneville Power Authority, which controls the dams, is ordering wind farms to generate less power, …