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Critical List: Carbon regulation starting; Chu to testify on Solyndra

A plant in Texas has qualified for the first greenhouse-gas permit in the United States. Any new project that affects greenhouse-gas concentrations will need to have one in the future — though, unlike this one, the permits won’t usually come from the EPA. Texas has just refused to issue its own greenhouse permits. Because we […]

Peebottle Farms: Talking to plants

A friend sent Nina an urgent text message that said: “Alert! Today is a good day for planting garlic!” KK Haspel talks to the plants on her farm. She also grows astoundingly delicious vegetables and bonkers-gorgeous flowers. The connection between these facts is not something I can confirm, but I’m happy to believe there is […]

Sharing time: Tracking the ‘sharrow’ on city streets

A sharrow in Baltimore. Photo: Elly BlueVisiting Seattle last weekend, it was impossible not to notice that its streets are absolutely covered in sharrows. “It’s almost like they polluted the streets with them,” said Tom Fucoloro, proprietor of the Seattle Bike Blog, who took me on a walk through the city’s Central District, pointing out […]

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 […]