The Environmental Working Group has released an updated list of the Dirty Dozen, the fruits and vegetables with the worst pesticide levels. Drumroll please: Apples Celery Strawberries Peaches Spinach Nectarines (imported) Grapes (imported) Sweet bell peppers Potatoes Blueberries (domestic) Lettuce Kale/collard greens If you can, it's worth shelling out a little extra for the organic versions of these. You can offset it by pinching your pennies on the Clean Fifteen, the produce with the lowest pesticide levels: Onions Sweet Corn Pineapples Avocado Asparagus Sweet peas Mangoes Eggplant Cantaloupe (domestic) Kiwi Cabbage Watermelon Sweet potatoes Grapefruit Mushrooms

Need at-a-glance visual evidence of that "scientific consensus on climate change" we keep talking about? Skeptical Science has put together an interactive visualization of 4,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers. You can drag the year slider around to see how research changes over time. And it gets even more interactive! The site also lets you see information about the papers, or in some cases the papers themselves -- here's the first one indexed, from 1836. Plus, you can contribute to making the crowd-sourced project more comprehensive by adding links to papers you encounter. (The whole thing is still in development, and …

I honestly didn't believe this one was for real at first. No way even KFC, purveyors of a sandwich that uses fried meat as a delivery mechanism for fried meat, would seriously market a soda size called the "mega jug." And even if they did, they'd never have the chutzpah to donate "mega jug" dollars to juvenile diabetes research. Sadly, I had totally underestimated KFC's capacity for irony. The mega jug is a half gallon of soda, and this is a real local promotion. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation defends it thus: "JDRF supports research for type 1 diabetes, an …

Bill Gates' latest clean energy investment gives a whole new meaning to the term "natural gas." The Gates Foundation is putting $1.5 million towards developing a "Next-Generation Urban Sanitation Facility" in Accra, Ghana. The facility takes human poop and turns it into biodiesel and methane, the same stuff natural gas companies are so eagerly pumping out of the ground lately. Besides the "wow" (or "ick") factor here, there's the unabashedly good-for-the-world part: even aside from providing frack-free natural gas power, facilities like these could keep human waste from contaminating water sources and spreading disease.

In Louisville, Ky., projects that might normally pitched as good for the planet are being funded because they're good for people, too. Money from private and public investors is going towards building bike lanes, funding community gardens, and increasingly walkability in low income neighborhoods. The motivation behind the investments is not to reduce carbon emissions, but to increase community health. In the Louisville area, more than six in ten people are overweight, and Kentucky, which has the 7th highest obesity rate in the nation, recently had to fend back lobbyists who wanted the state to allow food stamps to be …

The EPA is delaying until September rules that would regulate power plants' greenhouse gas emissions. Michele Bachmann has a great plan for the agency, should she become president: Rename it "the job-killing organization of America." That will solve everything! Fukushima clean-up has been a comedy of errors when it comes to safety protections. Many aren’t getting training to use their protective gear, and others aren’t getting enough gear at all. Some people say that when they were recruited, they weren’t even told that they’d be cleaning up radiation at the plant. The mom of this earless bunny, born near the …

One of the great ironies of the transition to renewable energy is that it's going to require a great deal of fossil fuels to build all those wind turbines, solar panels, and smart grids -- because we simply don't have enough renewables already in the mix to bootstrap them up to the level we need to continue even a semblance of our 21st century civilization. So why not make that transition with the "cleanest" fossil fuel available, goes the argument -- namely, natural gas. So far so good. But lately, in op-eds in places like The New York Times and …

As exciting as alternative energy is, all the wind turbines in the world are not going to replace dirty energy unless the power they generate can get to consumers. That requires a better, smarter power grid than the U.S. has now. The Obama administration has been reasonably supportive of that goal, packing $4.5 billion for improving the grid into the stimulus bill back in 2009. And this morning, John Holdren, the White House's top science and technology advisor, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, along with a few other high level officials, are trotting out a new report [PDF] on how …

Cleantech generates 17 jobs for every $1 million spent on it, compared to just 5 for every $1 million we throw at an oil and gas industry that doesn't need it but will fight to its dying breath to preserve the government largesse shoring up its bottom line. Cleantech even generates more jobs than that other favored son of Congressional earmarks, military spending, which yields only 11 jobs for every $1 million in subsidies. Robert Pollin, an economist who studied the impact of green stimulus dollars for the Commerce Department, said clean energy gets a better payoff because kick-starting a …

.bbpBox80268799235993601 {background:url(http://a0.twimg.com/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #C0DEED;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block} AEP really is coordinating their PR today. WV, OK and IN media all have stories about costs of EPA compliance. http://t.co/Zgvsgkrless than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplySean Casten SeanCasten This morning American Electric Power is waging a not-so-secret -- and not terribly subtle -- campaign to build sentiment against EPA regulations that would force it to shut down or clean up its oldest, filthiest coal-fired power plants. One of the …