Latest Articles

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 […]

High-speed rail that never was: 1910 proposal for S.F. to L.A. in four hours

If you think high-speed rail is some kind of newfangled obsession of liberal elites who would rather not sit in traffic behind SUVs covered in bumper stickers announcing loyalty to their ideological foes, you're only partly right. As early as 1910, inventor Fletcher E. Felts proposed an elevated, high speed railway system to connect Oakland […]

Tidal power is now a legit source of renewable energy

Tidal power, produced from the force of our planet's oceans sloshing to and fro, has always seemed like a neat idea. But the challenges of making it work — imagine giant underwater propellers having to withstand strong currents and the unending assault of the sea — made it seem less than realistic. But now manufacturing […]

‘Waterless fracking’ is a new way to make fracking less nasty

The "natural gas revolution" has been kind of a disappointment. Yes, natural gas could help get us off of coal, and fast. But it has its own substantial environmental impacts, most of them stemming from the process of extracting it from the ground. Now, though, a new "waterless" fracking method holds out the promise of […]

Bill McKibben talks Keystone XL on Colbert

Stephen Colbert can't decide what Bill McKibben's car runs on — broken dreams or hypocrisy — but he's trying hard to get McKibben to abandon it in favor of the Keystone XL bandwagon. No such luck — McKibben sets him straight on how many net jobs the project would create, and how much damage it […]

Thailand’s DIY climate adaptation solutions

It's more likely than not at this point that climate change will substantially alter the world we live in, and humans will have to adapt. Climate adaption plans usually invoke big ideas, like sea walls and dykes and drought-resistant crops. But the response to the floods (likely due to climate change) that have devastated Thailand […]

This is the funniest video about repurposing you’ll ever see

What if you have metal can, and you don't want to make a throw away of it and then everyone is sad because you make a litterbug? Flula has ideas! He also has ideas for repurposing shirts, pants, monkeys, milk jugs, and branches. (You cannot make a car from branches, but you can make a […]

Tattoos are decidedly NOT vegan

There are two important principles of veganism that most people don't understand. More food is vegan than is immediately obvious. But more seemingly innocuous products have animals parts in them than the average meat-eater imagines. Case in point: tattoos. As Tim Donnelly writes at The Atlantic, "The ink and processes at your average shop contain […]