Latest Articles
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Give Solar Panels a Break
When I helped Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger create the Million Solar Roofs Initiative in California a few years ago, we designed it to stimulate mass production of solar panels to bring down cost. What we didn’t anticipate was that the building industry would crater around the same time and that unemployed roofers and electricians would find […]
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Urgent: Tell Your Senators to Protect Public Health – Don’t Roll Back EPA’s Mercury Standards
A big Senate vote this week will determine the fate of mercury safeguards that continue to garner overwhelming support from Americans nationwide. This past weekend the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution (PDF) supporting the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) mercury pollution standards. This comes on the heels of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s letter […]
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Coal vs. The Climate
There’s some good news in BP’s most recent Statistical Review of World Energy: in the US, total greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels fell 1.8% from 2010 to 2011. And in even better news, total US emissions have fallen by more than 7 percent from their 2005 peak. (Note that Barry Saxifrage recently spotted the same trends in […]
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Which is scarier: A drone overhead or an unregulated dump next door?
If you chose (b), You might want to move more than 100 miles from the U.S. border.
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Paternalism in the age of climate change
The outcry over New York's soda ban reveals the murky line between individual and collective spheres -- and the line only gets murkier when it comes to climate change.
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Amazing illuminated art installations call attention to urban blight
Madrid’s Luzinterruptus collective’s large-scale light installations aren’t just haunting and beautiful — they’re also activist. Each piece is designed to call attention to some social or urban ill, from light pollution to nuclear radiation. Sometimes the targets are almost impossibly silly (sanitary napkins?), and sometimes the justification seems to have been reverse-engineered (are Madrid’s public […]
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Did 350.org’s Twitterstorm to end fossil fuel subsidies work? Kinda
A storm of tweets cut through the Earth Summit cacophony for a brief moment Monday, but it also reignited old fights between rich countries and poor, and offered a reminder of just how far we still have to go.
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Here’s a fuel cell that runs on brain juice
Whatever, Google Glasses; I’m holding out for the Google brain implant. And that just got a little more plausible, thanks to new technology for fuel cells that run off of blood sugar. In theory, if you popped one of these babies in your brain, it could get all its power from your own cerebrospinal fluid (the […]
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Mayors in Rio, where they’re doing what they can
The C40 cities bring big news to the Earth summit in Rio: initiatives that could significantly reduce carbon and methane emissions.
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Miner fired for whistleblowing gets his job back
A court found that Arch Coal had discriminated against Charles Scott Howard for his work exposing the company's safety issues.
