Latest Articles

Raising chickens is totally rock and roll

Jenifer Jourdanne has expensive tastes, expensive shoes, and "designer chickens." In an essay in xoJane, she talks about how her long-standing backyard coop didn't dent her rocker cred:

I will have you know I was a maverick. I was the girl in the early 90s at Viper Room where people would say things like “Slash, come over here, no really, this chick has pet chickens!" I mean I am sure they probably thought I used them in an adult act but sorry to bore you, they just walk around my herb gardens looking for snails.

Cheap alloy could produce zero-carbon hydrogen from sunlight

An inexpensive combination of two metals common in the manufacture of computer chips can generate hydrogen from water, using only sunlight as an energy source. If the process can be made commercially viable -- and the simplicity and cost suggests it might -- it would mean yet another way to produce energy directly from sunlight, and a potential source of hydrogen for the kind of fuel cells that power both buildings and vehicles.

Do climate shifts spark wars?

A study published a little while back in Nature found an association between shifts in climate (in this case, shifts associated with El Niño) and international conflict. The researchers' hypothesis was that El Niño was messing with people's psyches and also creating economic shocks by tweaking food prices, dredging up storms, and fostering disease. These effects tend to make people a little testy and, boom!, conflict. 

But, as Sarah Zielinski writes at Smithsonian, it's too simple to say that climate change will cause war:

Critical List: Rick Perry loves nuclear waste; oil spills in Alabama

Rick Perry wanted to expand a nuclear waste site, owned by one of his donors, but a state commissioner objected. Guess what happened to the state commissioner. No, he wasn’t killed, Jesus! But Perry did offer him another job, in order to bribe him away from the waste commission so he could be replaced.

Beijing's going to put congestion fees in place, a policy that New York City has failed to get past suburban commuters. Ah, democracy.

Will you be living under high water stress?

Some businesses, like the insurance industry, believe in climate change. But that doesn't mean they're prepared for it.

Conservatives just as wrong on climate economics as they are on climate science

The media have been taking note of Republicans' denial of climate science, but so far they're ignoring Republicans' denial of climate economics.

Will the Camry Hybrid help Toyota get its groove back?

After suffering recalls, an earthquake, and a tsunami, the maker of the ever-popular Prius pins its hopes for rebirth on a new green model: the Camry Hybrid.

Peebottle Farms: Cooped up in the city

As soon as it got warm enough, Tei and I started bickering about the chicken coop. The plan was that "we" would build it, but we both knew that meant Tei would grumble about it first, and then reluctantly figure out how and do the heavy lifting.

The 'radical' faces of climate change

Another tactic for dealing with climate skeptics is to point out the many well-respected, decidedly non-radical institutions that take science seriously.

The Economics of Distributed Renewable Power

A serialized version of ILSR‘s new report, Democratizing the Electricity System, Part 2 of 5. Click for Part 1. The Economics of Distributed Generation The falling cost of distributed renewable generation has been one of the key drivers of the transformation of the U.S. electric grid. The following chart illustrates the cost of power generation […]

Tar-sands protests go global

Protests against a proposed tar-sands pipeline broke out across the globe today.