Latest Articles

Hungary destroys 1,000 acres of Monsanto maize

Genetically modified seeds are banned in Hungary. So when government regulators found that 1,000 acres of maize had been planted with genetically modified seeds, they just plowed the suckers under. You stick it to the Monsanto, Hungary! Leaving aside the fact that this sort of sweep-the-checkers-off-the-board move is always kind of badass, this is also […]

Durban dispatch: Practical progress and water woes

Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green. “The Nepalese government has exhausted funds to drain the Tsho Rolpa (Nepal’s biggest glacial lake), which poses an immediate threat to at least 10,000 people,” said Samjwal Bajracharya, the lead author of a new report on the status of glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, also known as the Third […]

Bad guys bicker over Gulf oil spill

Apparently today is the day we talk about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? The White House released its year-in-the-making report about what needs to be done for cleanup ("more better things"), and now it looks like BP is still trying to palm off blame. They're claiming that Halliburton, which produced the cement used to […]

Prius is the only survivor of $3 million car crash

A car crash in Japan that's being hailed as the most expensive ever, even though it totally wasn't, totaled eight Ferraris, a Lamborghini, and three Mercedes…es. (Ugh, I just looked it up and Mercedes looks like a fifth-declension noun with the nominative plural "Mercedes," so I can't even make up a cutesy Latinate plural, WHATEVER […]

White House goals for cleaning the Gulf: Fix stuff

After the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, the Obama administration decided to dig deep into the environmental problems that faced the Gulf Coast and, in the way of governments everywhere, set up a task force to study the issues. This week, that task force released its report. According to the report’s introduction, the president's directive to […]

Solar-powered tanning salon. Really.

This is real. Comedian Kyle Kinane spotted it while driving through the wasteland of unconquerable vacuity known as Southern California. The place is called Sunlounge, and it has a website and a Yelp page full of catty reviews from people who love to tan. Sunlounge says it gets 15 to 30 percent of the power […]

Poor nations demand stringent emissions deal, unicorns

At the ongoing climate talks in Durban, South Africa, 48 of the world's "Least Developed Countries" demanded that world governments sign an ambitious climate deal. By “ambitious” we mean it commits them to a level of atmospheric greenhouse gases lower than what's currently in the atmosphere. There’s a rider requiring free Pegasuses (Pegasi?) for all […]

Amazon deforestation decreasing … but not for long

Despite reports of localized deforestation and violence against rainforest activists, a study on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon found that the number of square kilometers disappearing each year has hit a record low. But politics has a way of screwing up progress like this, and Brazilian politicians are voting today to weaken the forest code […]

Critical List: Scientists find Earth 2.0; rootworms defeat Monsanto corn

Scientists found a planet that looks an awful lot like Earth. One U.N. leader says that even an international treaty won't ensure the world avoids dangerous climate change. And we don't even have that! Rootworms are developing a resistance to Monsanto's Bt corn, and scientists get to say "I told you so." The Carbon War […]

Small farmers crave horse power

Photo: Donn HewesAsk any 5-year-old: Few tools symbolize the farm like a trundling tractor. In fact, you’d have to reach further back in time to find an equally enduring symbol: the horse. And while there’s little doubt that tractors have revolutionized farm labor and made farms much more efficient than they were in past centuries, […]