Latest Articles
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Critical List: Emissions jumped in 2010; Japan has created the world’s most efficient solar cell
In 2010, greenhouse-gas emissions increased more than they ever had before in one year. Blame the tepid economic recovery. The EPA's going to release initial results from its fracking investigation next year, but the final report won't come out until 2014. Dig into the dysfunction of the Keystone XL approval process and the fighting between […]
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Lobstermen pinch and save [VIDEO]
We see lobster served in fancy restaurants so often that it’s easy to forget there are places where it is caught and sold for under $3 a pound. We recently spent time in Maine — home of some of the world’s best lobsters — and familiarized ourselves with the process of catching these amazing shellfish. […]
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‘Going Boulder’ means voting for local energy self-reliance
Photo: Zane Selvans This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. By a razor-thin margin, Boulder, Colo., citizens gave the city a victory for energy self-reliance on Tuesday, approving two ballot measures to let the city form a municipal utility. If the city moves […]
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Can the arts save struggling cities?
Something is stirring in Detroit. Here, in a city that in the past decade alone lost a quarter of its already dwindling population, plans are in the works to revive the manufacturing economy — at least on a small scale. The Detroit FAB Lab taps into the vibe of “maker” labs and hackerspaces around the […]
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End the Coal for Carbon Credits Scandal
The Sierra Club and CDM-Watch first broke the coal for carbon credits scandal occurring at the United Nations offsetting mechanism (the Clean Development Mechanism CDM) associated with the Kyoto Protocol back in July. If you’re unfamiliar with CDM – here’s a definition from the UN: The CDM allows emission-reduction projects in developing countries to earn […]
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The GOP brain explained: Why Cliff Stearns wants to subsidize successful companies
Your brain on conservatism.Yesterday I sketched the sort of personality type most likely to identify as conservative: those who prefer stability to change, order to complexity, familiarity to novelty, and conformity to creativity. This sort of personality type is drawn to clear lines separating in-groups from out-groups, highly aware of social hierarchies, suspicious of change, […]
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The peaceful side of Oakland’s port shutdown march
See related slideshowI arrived at Occupy Oakland Wednesday a few hours before the planned march to the Port for what was supposed to be a teach-in about food justice. But by 3:30 p.m. the speakers had stopped trying to compete with the warring musical factions on either side of Frank Ogawa Plaza — hip hop […]
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Some Oakland occupiers have a beef with Whole Foods
Representatives of the less-peaceful element at Occupy Oakland got wind that Whole Foods was threatening to fire employees who participated in Occupy's general strike, so they vandalized a local store. It turns out those rumors were false, but who could turn down the chance to wreck a Whole Foods? The troublemakers spray-painted the front of […]
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Consumers losing faith in Big Food
Photo: Christopher Cotrell Four years ago, a coalition of agribusiness companies and industry groups, including Monsanto, the American Farm Bureau, the Midwest Dairy Council, and the National Pork Producers Council, got together to start the Center for Food Integrity (CFI), a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to build consumer trust and confidence in today’s food […]
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Franzen on love, sex, population, birds, and making the world less toxic
If you’ve read the bestseller Freedom, you won’t be surprised to hear that novelist Jonathan Franzen describes himself as “a long-time green.” One of the book’s main characters, Walter Berglund, is “greener than Greenpeace,” Franzen tells us on the first page. Walter throws himself into campaigns to fight population growth and save birds, ultimately leading […]
