Latest Articles

Polling reveals that being anti-clean energy is bad politics

Perry wants to end all energy subsidies. Photo: Gage SkidmoreCross-posted from Climate Progress. Anyone who cares about addressing climate change and strengthening America’s economic competitiveness knows that being anti-renewable energy is terrible policy. Turns out, it’s bad politics too. A new poll conducted by ORC International for the nonpartisan Civil Society Institute finds that 77 […]

Fact Check: Keystone XL will not reduce oil imports from Middle East

Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green. The Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline will not reduce dependence on imports from the Middle East, an analysis conducted for the Department of Energy revealed a year ago. The hope of getting away from oil from the volatile region is a favored talking point by proponents. “The Keystone project has the potential […]

California pushes back against energy imports

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Western grid operators have been making plans for large-scale renewable energy imports into the California electricity market, prompting the governor’s senior advisor for renewable energy facilities to write a “self-reliance” response. Here are a few highlights […]

Friday music blogging: Dolorean, again

One of the very first Friday Music Bloggings I ever did, way back in 2007, was for a band called Dolorean. (I still love that song.) Earlier this year, they came out with their latest album, The Unfazed, which is about the process of shedding old skins and old loves in order to make way […]

Dr. Dirt: Street artist scrubs images into the urban landscape

Photo: c/o MooseStreet artist Moose Benjamin Curtis was having some difficulty with the police. The officers had just arrested him for creating designs on a wall in South London. But it was complicated — as things often are when Moose is involved. You see, Moose doesn’t use spray paint or wallpaper paste — the usual […]

Small fish, big ocean: Saving Pacific forage fish

Photo: Eric Ch A few weeks ago, we told you about the contentious debate over the fate of a tiny fish known as menhaden. Meanwhile, a similar concern is quietly surfacing over several other varieties of small “forage fish” that live along the West Coast. And by forage fish we don’t mean you’ll find them […]

A declaration of independence from Wall Street

Photo: Helga Tawil Souri This piece originally appeared in Salon. After three years of political nonsense, we can hold one truth to be self-evident about our government: It is broken. A financial crisis that should have inspired a grand new set of rules for Wall Street instead delivered a hopelessly compromised reform package — and […]

Solyndra birtherism: GOP demands Obama’s BlackBerry, gives Big Oil CEOs a pass

Watch out — they’re coming for your BlackBerry.Photo: White HouseFor two months, Republicans have been searching for some evidence that political favoritism played a role in the Obama administration’s loan guarantee to Solyndra. They have failed. After a half-dozen hearings, testimony from virtually everyone involved, and the release of thousands of pages of emails and […]

China bulb ban will eliminate 1 billion incandescents annually

Joining the U.S. and just about every other country with an economy, China will ban import and sale of incandescent bulbs beginning in 2014, reports the AP. State-run Xinhua News Agency quoted Xie Ji, deputy director of the NDRC's environmental protection department, as saying China is the world's largest producer of both energy-saving and incandescent […]

Evil mad scientists are clearly behind all energy innovations

Internet hilarity repository Cracked has a roundup of energy solutions that sound more like mad scientist plots. They go from "human body heat" all the way up to "giant invisible energy death ray," and they're pretty awesome. Here, for example, is an electric eel powering a Christmas tree! In perhaps the most uncreative vision of […]