Latest Articles

Tile your roof with solar shingles

If you want to generate some solar energy but don't want to have weird-looking solar panels on your roof, Dow Solar has a solution for you. The company has achieved solar shingularity: Its roof shingles are solar panels! The solar panels are shingles! The discerning homeowner can live out green dreams while still conforming to […]

Too lazy to go green? Hire an eco-concierge

Have you ever been sitting around the Drones Club, throwing rolls around, and thought to yourself, "gosh, going green is very hot right now, but it sounds hard! I wish I could use my gobs of money to pay someone else to do it for me." Well, if you have, you're probably not reading this […]

Solyndra, schmolyndra: The Obama administration’s hit rate is better than the private market’s

Making loans is a tricky business — sometimes you bet on the wrong horse. For example, there's the Obama administration, which doled out 1.4 percent of its Recovery Act cleantech investments to failed solar company Solyndra, in a move that everyone and their uncle is now calling a giant embarrassment. And then there's private venture […]

Dangerous levels of warming could happen in your lifetime

It's easy for a lot of people to ignore climate change, because it's not going to affect them, it'll only affect their children. If they don't have children, all the better! Who cares! Well, two new research papers in the latest Nature warn that most of the world could be seeing dangerous levels of global warming […]

Climate deniers refuse to accept skeptical scientists’ results

So you know how we kind of use "climate change deniers" and "climate change skeptics" interchangeably, because news stories get super boring if you don't mix it up? We're not wild about doing that, because skepticism is in fact a great scientific value that people should embrace, whereas denialism is just sticking your fingers in […]

Universities try to out-green each other in bid for NYC science campus

New York City is fielding proposals from universities to build a new science and technology campus on Roosevelt Island, and the competition is showing how desirable green buildings are becoming. The two front-runners, Cornell and Stanford, are falling over themselves to offer all manner of green features in their plans: acres of solar panels, geothermal […]

Critical List: Earthquake strikes Turkey; ‘Environmental concierge’ exists

More than 200 people died in a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Turkey.

California finished its cap-and-trade plan with minimal drama. Here's how they did it.

If you are rich and worried about your environmental footprint, you can hire a whole other human being to screw in LED lightbulbs for you, run your errands on a bike, and buy cleaning products with fewer chemicals in them.

Quick and dirty: Congress may rewrite the Farm Bill in two weeks

Brace yourselves, food advocates: The congressional supercommittee charged with reducing the national debt considers making cuts to the nation's most important food and farming legislation.

Harvesting change: Dispatches from a TEDx gathering on farmworkers [VIDEO]

Last week's TEDx conference brought together some of the sharpest, most creative minds to address the problem of farm labor. See the highlights here.

Ask Umbra: Should I wash out my zip-lock bags?

Don't lose sleep over plastics and food. Instead of worrying about how to handle your baggies and bins, purge plastic from your kitchen.