Latest Articles

Coal exports are a bigger threat than the tar-sands pipeline

This post originally appeared on Sightline Daily. The planned Keystone XL oil pipeline has earned major national attention for the damage it would do to the climate. At the same time, another climate drama is playing out with much less attention as coal companies make plans to export huge quantities to Asia by way of […]

Go, fight … green? Can sports teams save the planet?

Photo: IscanWhen the 2011 Major League Baseball season got underway last April, teams rolled out the usual promotions for fanatical fans: giant foam fingers, T-shirt giveaways, beer in unbreakable, aluminum bottles. The Seattle Mariners took a slightly different tack. At two separate Monday night home games, 5,000 fans were given bags of gardening soil, composted […]

Will Congress keep paying the Koch brothers and others?

As the congressional supercommittee continues to struggle towards an agreement on cutting $1.5 trillion over a decade from the national budget, cutting government handouts to the oil industry is an obvious and oft repeated target for the chopping block. Public support for removing subsidies to the oil industry remains overwhelmingly positive.  Even John Boehner and […]

Icelandic moonbow plus Northern Lights is methadone for your nature-starved eyeballs

Iceland sits just below the Arctic circle, at the confluence of multiple ocean currents, which means it a) has the Northern Lights and b) gets tons of rain so is covered with waterfalls. No doubt the descendants of Norsemen chant heartily whenever they behold this rare confluence of events:

Las Vegas’ new water park is literally the dumbest thing ever

Scene: Las Vegas Valley, Nevada. A desert. Las Vegas developer: We need more family entertainment! Therefore it is imperative that we BUILD AN $18 MILLION WATER PARK! There is literally no other possible solution. Citizens of Vegas: But the latest assessment of the declining water level in Lake Mead, from which Vegas gets its drinking […]

Theft in progress: Big Ag raids the treasury — with help from Congress

If the straight-up taxpayer swindle taking place in the supercommittee isn’t making you angry, you’re probably not paying attention. I’m talking about the attempt by agribusiness and a group of willing farm-state representatives to put billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of industrial farmers during the ongoing super committee Farm Bill negotiations. According to […]

Cap-and-trade program fuels economic growth in Northeast

Cross-posted from Climate Progress. A new report finds that America’s first mandatory, market-based carbon cap-and-trade system added $1.6 billion in value to the economies of participating states, set the stage for $1.1 billion in ratepayer savings, and created 16,000 jobs in its first three years of implementation. Says Susan Tierney, managing principal at the Analysis […]

DIY role model: Delilah Snell

Photo: Aida Mollenkamp A version of this interview first appeared on Aida Mollenkamp’s website. Meet food wonder woman (or funderwoman, as I call her), Delilah Snell. She may be the most prolific person I know, with her hands in numerous activities at once. She’s also a Master Food Preserver (there are only a handful of in the […]

Is global warming an election issue after all?

Climate change as a campaign issue could be a surprise winner for Obama.Photo: The White HouseThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he […]

U.S. roads are built to break

Why do we have to pour so much of our transportation money into highway infrastructure? Well, because 50 years ago, the U.S. decided to structure roads in a way that was cheap to build but expensive and difficult to maintain. It's the infrastructure equivalent of buying a cheap crappy blender and then having to replace […]