Latest Articles
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Global warming hates the Ohio State Buckeyes
Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green. This Saturday’s Crankshaft cartoon took on global warming, noting that climate change is threatening Ohio’s iconic buckeye trees, the namesake of the Ohio State Buckeyes. “Once it starts to affect football, they’ll get moving on climate change,” one character says: As greenhouse pollution from oil and coal continues to build, the […]
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Can you say ‘sprawl’? Walmart’s biggest climate impact goes ignored
My, that’s a big abandoned parking lot you have.Photo: Rob StinnettEarlier this year, the New Jersey Sierra Club and the Pinelands Preservation Alliance tried but failed to block a permit for a new Walmart supercenter in the small coastal town of Toms River. The development, now moving forward, will destroy habitat for the threatened northern […]
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Talking vertical farms: An interview with Dickson Despommier
Your classic vertical farm rendering. Rendering: Blake KurasekIf you haven’t seen the slickly rendered architectural models of farms growing in skyscapers, you probably live under a rock. When I first I saw one — this was a few years back, they’ve been making their way around the internet for years — I got a little […]
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Wasting energy = blue balls, apparently
It seems to be a pretty time-honored advertising strategy that when you want your message to really hit, you need to connect it to things men want/don't want to happen to their penises. In this example, found on Tumblr, wasting energy is … blue balls, or maybe priapism? And turning off the light is an […]
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Interactive map shows hybrid and electric car sales in your area
See the map This interactive map from NPR, which shows hybrid and electric car sales figures across the U.S., is a handy way of calculating the hippie concentration of your area at a single glance. But it also might help predict which areas will get EV infrastructure soonest, because of high demand. Also, it's kind […]
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Hey, other tar-sands pipelines also suck!
Lest you get too caught up in Keystone XL and forget that tar-sands oil is super-destructive in general, NRDC has a new report about how a completely different pipeline will also lead to ecological disaster. The Northern Gateway pipeline, which would run from Alberta to British Columbia, has the potential to be just as destructive […]
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The next small thing: How sustainable neighborhoods could reshape cities
Lower Downtown Denver has become the city’s night life hub — and a laboratory for community-level sustainability.Photo: Wally GobetzI once worked for a New Yorker who loved to wisecrack that the only difference between Denver and yogurt was that “yogurt’s got culture.” Looking at the Mile High City’s endless sprawl of lookalike, Anywhere, U.S.A. subdivisions, […]
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Documentary on end of world as we know it is surprisingly uplifting
The new documentary The Crisis of Civilization is the most user-friendly exploration of imminent doom you’ll ever see. Through interviews, found footage, and animation, the film actually manages to make the unwinding of our conventional, fossil-fueled, more-is-more industrial civilization accessible. And importantly, it pays just as much attention to solutions as to problems. Nafeez Ahmed, […]
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Chicago losing disgusting distinction as sole U.S. city that doesn’t treat sewage
Now that condos and a Trump Tower line the banks of the Chicago River, the Windy City is finally thinking about making it less gross. It's one of America's most exploited waterways — in 1900, the city literally reversed the river’s flow to keep all the sewage it channeled from entering Lake Michigan — and […]
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How Baby Boomers doomed the exurbs
Homes and strip malls in America's outer-ring suburbs, which contained most of the country's most expensive homes in the 1990s, are now worth less than what it cost to build them. And the land beneath them is worth effectively zero, says Brookings Institution senior fellow Christopher B. Leinberger, in a powerful op-ed arguing that the […]
