Latest Articles

Paper wine bottle is classier than a box and just as compostable

Typically, drinking wine from paper vessels doesn't exactly scream "classy." Think about wine from a box … or a Dixie cup … or a paper bag. But the makers of GreenBottle are trying to break that trend with the world's first paper wine bottle. The bottle has a thin layer of plastic on the inside, […]

Mongolia plans to combat warming with giant ice cube

Scientists in Ulan Bator, Mongolia are planning to save energy in summer by cryogenically preserving winter. They want to encourage extremely thick ice to form on the local river, thus storing up cold temperatures that can later be used to cool the city. The scientists are artificially creating "naleds," which are slabs of ice up […]

U.S. release of British nature doc skips the part about climate change

Global warming is too hot for TV in the U.S., even when the TV is really cold. Frozen Planet, the BBC miniseries about the Arctic and Antarctic, has an episode about climate change impacts — but that episode's not being aired in the United States.  The BBC made seven episodes of Frozen Planet. Six feature […]

The push is on to discredit clean energy investment

When it rains it pours.There’s always been a tension in U.S. culture between two competing narratives. On one hand, Americans like to think of themselves as pioneers, innovators, forward thinkers — the country that invests blood, sweat, and treasure today to create a better future for the next generation. We tell ourselves stories about building […]

Critical List: Texas’ neverending wildfire season; clean energy investments could double

Texas' wildfire "season" has lasted for more than a year and won't end anytime soon. Obama: "Over the long term, [reducing carbon emissions] is good for our economies." By 2020, investors could be pouring $395 billion a year, double the current total, into clean energy. Only about half of the Department of Energy's spending for […]

Experts debunk polls claiming fewer Americans believe in climate change

Cross-posted from Climate Progress. Politicians, pundits, and the public have all been told by the media and others that public belief in global warming has dropped sharply. Except that it hasn’t, as polling by Stanford, Ipsos, and Reuters make clear. National survey of American public opinion on global warming via Jon Krosnick, Stanford University. Yes, […]

Jane Jacobs and the book that inspired a revolution

If cities are the greenest form of human settlement that we could possibly aspire to, Jane Jacobs left us the owner’s manual for how to build them. Fifty years ago this month, Random House published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, an extraordinary book in which Jacobs laid out the principles for creating […]

NY Times needs a time out

I recently turned 401.  But I didn’t start feeling old until this weekend — because that’s when I started yelling at newspapers2. On Saturday, the New York Times published a lurid, sneering, over-the-top piece on renewable energy that was riddled with errors and really missed the forest for the trees.  We’ve prepared a document rebutting […]

Locked out: Where is Occupy Wall Street without Zuccotti Park?

Protesters gathered this afternoon at 6th Avenue and Canal Street.Photo: Sarah GoodyearI woke up this morning to the news that the occupation of Zuccotti Park had been ended, and my first question was, “Where will all the people go?” The strange legalities surrounding Zuccotti Park have been a critical factor in the development of the […]

A local food blueprint

Photo: Matthew BurpeeThe most exciting aspect of the new USDA report on the local food and farm economy [PDF] isn’t the sizable $4.8 billion in annual sales of local food it says occurred in 2008. It’s the fact that, as the AP noted, the local food economy is poised to grow as fast as even […]