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Jay Inslee, candidate for WA governor, chats with Grist about clean energy and coal ports

  Last Friday, I visited Washington state’s first certified solar PV manufacturing plant with Rep. Jay Inslee (D), who in June declared that he’s running for governor in 2012. Inslee, who has represented Washington’s 1st District for 12 years, is one of Congress’s few true clean energy enthusiasts; he even co-wrote a book on the […]

Romney attacks green jobs, ignoring the 64,000 created in his state

Mitt Romney’s facts are illusory — not green jobs.Photo: World Affairs Council of PhiladelphiaCross-posted from Climate Progress. Former Massachusetts governor and presidential front-runner Mitt Romney — once a candidate who stood up to coal and supported clean energy — is now calling green jobs fake. In an op-ed in the Orange County Register published Monday, […]

Top Obama official warns of consequences of Arctic drilling

Photo: NASACross-posted from ThinkProgress Green. Jane Lubchenco, a top marine ecologist and senior Obama administration official, is concerned that opening the Arctic to oil and gas development brings unknown risks to human civilization. In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress Green, Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), discussed the vicious circle […]

Chow-to: Quench your thirst with a shrub

Photo: holytoastr“Drinking vinegar” does not, at its core, sound like the most tempting libation. But that’s what a shrub is: a series of ingredients cooked down and preserved in vinegar, then strained into a syrup, and used for a multitude of purposes. Conceived in several parts of the world (derived from the same notion as […]

High BPA levels in pregnant moms may change their daughters’ behavior

It's not just hippie paranoia that should keep pregnant women from eating too much BPA-laced canned food. A new study found that 3-year-old girls were more likely to show symptoms of depression and anxiety if their mothers had tested higher for BPA levels during pregnancy. (There didn’t seem to be a correlation for boys.) The […]

Energy-saving LED light bulbs fuel this insane light display

Okay, it's no Dancing Dror, but this is a pretty amazing Halloween light display done primarily with LED bulbs. Switching to LEDs can cut your holiday lighting energy expenditure by 90 percent, according to DOE (though they're just talking about a Christmas tree, not a full-front singing house display), and widespread use of LEDs for everyday […]

Investors representing $20 trillion get behind climate change prevention

It's sort of a no-brainer to realize that we need to invest in clean energy technology and get governments to institute policies that support those investments. Greens have been saying that for ages. But greens, for the most part, do not represent $20 trillion in assets. So when people who do wield that amount of […]

Stop the ‘man swarm,’ save the wild world

Let’s leave some room for everybody else. Photo: Robin PittmanMore of our kind means fewer wild things. A stabilized human population means hope for wild things. A shrinking human population means a better world for wild things — and for men and women and children. It’s that straightforward. The human population grew more in the […]

Wind turbine with Inspector Gadget arms makes twice the power

A simple new idea in wind turbines could increase their power production by 100 percent over the course of a year, and even make it possible to put turbines in places where they were uneconomical before. By giving turbines blades that extend — longer for lower speed winds, shorter for faster winds —  researcher Rajnish […]

iPod inventor’s next trick: a smart thermostat

I've said before that the next Steve Jobs would be in energy, not in information technology, but I had no idea that day would arrive quite so soon. As filmmaker and design critic John Pavlus reports at Fast Company, Tony Fadell, who invented the iPod, is working on a thermostat as intuitive and potentially revolutionary as … […]