Latest Articles

Finally: New air toxics rules for power plants

Cross-posted from the World Resources Institute. The post was written by Nicholas Bianco, senior associate for WRI’s climate and energy program. As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prepares to release new mercury and air toxics standards, some people may be wondering about the history and timeline for these standards. One senator recently claimed that […]

Infographic: Fracking violations in Pennsylvania

The orange dots here are natural gas extraction operations with one or more environmental violations. But, you know, deer and rainbows! Click through to NPR's interactive graphic to find out more about each operation and how many laws they're flouting. (You can also get more detailed maps and information by county.)

Solar power can fit on existing land use

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. While large-scale solar creates contention between environmental advocates and renewable energy proponents, the truth is that there are thousands of acres in already developed land where solar can easily fit.  This infographic explains a few of […]

Congress passes the wrong pipeline bill

It turns out Republicans and Democrats truly can work together to craft a bipartisan pipeline safety bill that satisfies both parties! And then they can accidentally pass the old version instead. The bill, which laid out new penalties for pipeline safety violations following a deadly explosion last year, was laboriously hashed out in a bipartisan […]

Police seize computers in connection with Climategate hacking

When the University of East Anglia's servers were hacked and emails stolen, the victims — the climate scientists whose largely innocuous messages got misrepresented all over the blogosphere — were subjected to multiple independent investigations (and cleared). The hackers? Not so much. Nobody really knew who did it or apparently cared. But evidently they're cracking […]

Facebook and coal are no longer in a relationship

Until recently, Facebook had an "it's complicated" relationship with coal; an April 2011 Greenpeace report found that 53.2 percent of the company's electricity use was coal-generated. Now, the company is pledging to move away from dirty fuel and work towards powering its operations, including energy-suck data centers, using renewable energy. And they're helping to spread […]

Radioactive monkeys will patrol Fukushima

Scientists have a new approach to monitoring radiation levels around Fukushima: They're outfitting local monkeys with radiation-measuring collars, then releasing them back into the wild. The monkeys will spend a month frolicking around the (potentially) nuclear forest, collecting data about radiation levels on the ground. The experimental device, which will also include GPS tracking and […]

Sucking carbon out of the air: Probably not an option

With all this talk of the impossibility of averting catastrophic levels of future climate change, it's tempting to daydream of using technology to clean up the bed we just shat. Economists, especially, love this kind of thinking — if we just hoard enough precious gold today, maybe we can transmute it into a livable planet […]

Arctic methane turns out to be a huge problem after all

While the nerd herd was busy declaring the threat posed by gigantic new plumes of methane from the Arctic Ocean to be a non-starter, we all managed to miss the real methane menace, highlighted by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe: surprise. Surprise and fear. The two real methane menaces are fear and surprise. The bottom line: […]

I can haz climate change?

According to Australia's News.com, climate change is leading to "too many unwanted moggies." What are moggies, you ask? It’s British for “kitty cats.” Climate change has lengthened the moggie breeding season in Australia, from October through May (that's summer down under), leading to "record numbers" of cats being born. On the one hand, this means […]