Latest Articles
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Methane in the Arctic: The end of the world, or what?
Russian scientists have discovered that the Arctic is releasing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enormous plumes of methane from the seafloor directly into earth's atmosphere. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern […]
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Crazy Taiwanese animation explains Canada’s Kyoto withdrawal
Canada's craven withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol just got the Taiwanese animation it deserves. For those of you who aren't up on your international climate treaties, it's hard to put it more succinctly than New Media Animation itself has: Canada is withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Environment Minister Peter Kent said Monday, […]
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New species from Asia include noseless monkey named ‘Snubby’
There are still way more kinds of creatures out there than science knows about — we're discovering new species all the time, and it always seems like the new ones are the weirdest yet. The World Wildlife Fund just released info about their 2010 discoveries in Asia's Mekong River region, which traverses Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, […]
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Why is Canada withdrawing from Kyoto? Two words: Tar sands
Canada is pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, ostensibly because it's so far from meeting its goals it'll have to pay high penalties. Also it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault. In reality, though, this is all about tar-sands oil. For starters, it’s not exactly true that fines would be inevitable if Canada can’t meet its goals […]
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Awesome vintage bike map shows cycling’s golden age
Big Map Blog has turned up a fantastically detailed map of California's bike routes in the 1890s. It was published by George W. Blum and endorsed by H.F. Wynne, the president of the California Cycling Club in 1895. Mr. Blum was based, it seems, in San Francisco, and that's where the map is centered. It […]
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The best sustainable Christmas tree ever
Book lovers can sidestep the eternal question of farmed versus PVC (they both suck) and opt for a holiday display that's a monument to reading … or bibliophilia, anyway, since trying to actually read any of the books in this display would be a holiday Jenga nightmare. You don't even have to celebrate Christmas to […]
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Critical List: Canada out of Kyoto; the Napsack should be on your Christmas list
Canada is officially out of Kyoto, because it has no chance of meeting its targets and doesn't want to pay the fines. A Russian research team has found plumes of methane bubbling out of the Arctic Ocean. But maybe we should chill out about it, because methane's not as horrible as carbon dioxide? The EPA […]
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2011: Sustainable food trends
A good year-end trend list should do two things simultaneously: confirm the conscientious reader’s suspicions while providing a few surprise nuggets. Sustainable food is a vast category with many opportunities for interpretation, so what I offer up here is an entirely subjective list of favorites. In other words: These are just a few of the […]
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Climate change for sale: How climate activists can wake up the American public
Over the last few years, three Columbia University professors learned how important language is when it comes to combating climate change. They queried 275 randomly selected U.S. citizens for their opinions on raising money to fund alternative energy projects and the like by adding fees to earth-warming activities such as driving cars and flying in […]
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Here comes the sun – the chart Paul Krugman left out
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Nobel economist Paul Krugman made waves last month when his column “Here Comes the Sun” noted that the rapidly falling cost of solar electricity – “prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year” – […]
