Latest Articles

Mitt Romney ‘sings’ ‘America the Beautiful,’ ironically

Mitt Romney really likes “America the Beautiful,” as he says in this video compiled by ThinkProgress, but it’s not clear what he likes about it. It’s not the music, since he obviously has no fidelity to that. It’s not the message, which is all about purple mountains and fruited plains, which Romney’s oil-greedy policies would […]

Government will develop wind energy off the Atlantic coast

The federal government has opted to move forward with wind energy development off the coast of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia, and Virginia’s Republican governor for one could not be happier. Sure, the party line might be that alternative energy is stupid — but when you have the federal government actively hunting down corporate […]

Brad Pitt on why cars are stupid

Brad Pitt explained the premise of his film Moneyball to Jon Stewart by way of analogy to gas-guzzling cars. Most of the interview wasn’t about green stuff at all (his Celebrity Cause is building houses in New Orleans, which is sort of related but not totally related), but Comedy Central did get a pretty good […]

Why Apple should pour money into clean energy

Google's success at making real money on its green investments suggests to Marc Gunther of Greenbiz that every tech company with gigantic cash holdings -- i.e. Apple and Microsoft -- should be parking at least some of them in targeted clean energy investments.

Austin gets a super swank zero-energy suburb

How do you build a (nearly) net-zero-energy suburb in 2008, at the nadir of the economic crash, when no bank in the country is convinced you’ll be able to sell your more energy-efficient but pricier homes?

Why we should all be drinking toilet water

If you live downstream from another city, you're probably already drinking treated wastewater -- and engineers want you to drink even more of it.

This guy doesn’t get off his bike for ANYTHING

Anyone can commute on a bike. Only filmmaker Guillaume Blanchet also sleeps, showers, cooks, eats, shops, and dates without getting off his favorite two-wheeled conveyance.

Man arrested for stealing glaciers

The Jorge Montt Glacier, in the Patagonia region of Chile, is receding faster than any other glacier in the country. This is probably largely because of climate change, but also maybe a little bit because some dude’s been stealing it piecemeal. 

Compost gets you high

“I’m holding a bowl of dirt up to my nose, in hopes of getting high on the fumes of my backyard compost pile.” That’s Pagan Kennedy’s lede for an Atlantic story on the mind-bending properties of M. vaccae, a compost-dwelling bacteria. We couldn’t really improve on it. But we can condense the dirty details of […]

New Agtivist: Adam Berman, faith-based urban farmer

Meet the founder of Urban Adamah, a one-acre urban farm in Berkeley and a fellowship for young people that integrates organic farming, social justice, and progressive Jewish spiritual practice.